Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach 9781789205732

Citation preview

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page i

RELIGION IN ENGLISH EVERYDAY LIFE

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page ii

Methodology and History in Anthropology General Editor: David Parkin, Director of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford Volume 1 Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute. Edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen Volume 2 Franz Baerman Steiner. Selected Writings. Volume I: Taboo, Truth, and Religion. Franz B. Steiner. Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 3 Franz Baerman Steiner. Selected Writings. Volume II: Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilisation. Franz B. Steiner. Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 4 The Problem of Context. Edited by Roy Dilley Volume 5 Religion in English Everyday Life. An Ethnographic Approach. By Timothy Jenkins

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page iii

RELIGION IN ENGLISH EVERYDAY LIFE AN ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH

by Timothy Jenkins

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page iv

First published in 1999 by Berghahn Books Editorial Offices: 55 John Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10038, USA 3 NewTec Place, Magdalen Road, Oxford OX4 1RE, UK © 1999 Timothy Jenkins All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berghahn Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jenkins, Timothy, 1952– Religion in English everyday life: an ethographic approach / by Timothy Jenkins. p. cm. – (Methodology and history in anthropology ; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-1-57181-726-3 (hardback) ISBN-1-57181-769-7 (paperback) 1. England – Religious life and customs. 2. Religion and sociology – England. I. Title. II. Series. BL980.G7J46 1999 99-34660 306.6’0942 – dc21 CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page v

CONTENTS

Maps and Tables

vii

Preface

ix

Foreword, by David Parkin

xi

Introduction: Religious Elements in an Ethnography of Everyday Life

1

I.

Two Sociological Approaches to Religion in Modern Britain

23

II.

The Country Church – The Case of St. Mary’s, Comberton

41

III.

The Kingswood Whit Walk

75

1.

Introductory

77

2.

The Whit Walk

95

3.

Family and Locality

4.

‘Fiends Transformed’: A Discussion of Local History

141

5.

Respectability, Reputation and Restraint

159

6.

Anxiety, Conflict and Gossip

191

7.

In Conclusion

215

Secrets of the Spirit World

221

IV.

109

Bibliography

239

Index

250

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page vi

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page vii

MAPS AND TABLES

Map 2.1 Map 2.2 Map 2.3 Map 3.1 Map 3.2 Map 3.3 Map 3.4 Map 3.5

Comberton and the surrounding district The Parish of Comberton Plan of Comberton Kingswood forest as disafforested in May 1228 The extent of Kingswood Chase in 1610, mapped onto contemporary East Bristol Kingswood The route of the Walk Churches and chapels along the Soundwell Road

Table 3.1 Kingswood: Population

46 46 48 85 86 87 103 177

89

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page viii

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page ix

PREFACE

This book has been composed over a long period, under the pressure of other demands, and during both the research and the writing I have contracted too many debts, both of an intellectual and a personal kind, to be able to acknowledge them all. I owe a good deal to my first teacher in social anthropology, Edwin Ardener, who sadly died in 1987. Philip Kreager, Martin Thom, Kirsten Hastrup, Paul Dresch, Graham Howes and Keith Wrightson kindly read much of the material presented here in earlier drafts, and I am most grateful to them, for that and for their friendship. The research would have been impossible without the help of John Ware, Vicar of Kingswood, under whom I served my curacy, and Robert Stephenson, Vicar of Comberton, both of whom with great generosity introduced me to their parishes. I am also beholden to all the people in those places who received me so kindly, and taught me much of what I know about the construction and living of ordered, decent lives. And no formulation could do justice to the help, affection and companionship of my family, and especially my wife, Diane Palmer, who has accompanied me throughout. In the course of the production of the book, I have been helped in particular by David Parkin, who has kindly contributed the Foreword, and by John Welch. The maps were drawn by Owen Turner, of the Geography Department, University of Cambridge. Part I was previously published as ‘Two sociological approaches to religion in modern Britain’ in Religion, Vol.26, 1996: 331-42, and is reprinted by permission of the publishers, Academic Press Limited, London. Part IV is a slightly edited and reframed version of ‘Epistemological considerations in occult knowledge’, which appeared in International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, Vol.7, no.1, 1992: 43-56; it is reprinted by permission of Journals Limited, London. I

0-Prelims

1/21/09

x

4:26 PM

Page x

Preface

acknowledge the following permissions: from Faber and Faber Ltd., an excerpt from ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets, Collected Poems 19091962 by T.S. Eliot (English language rights throughout the world excluding the United States), and an excerpt from ‘Heavy Date’, Collected Poems by W.H. Auden (English language rights throughout the British Commonwealth); the excerpt from ‘The Dry Salvages’ in Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, copyright 1941 by T.S. Eliot and renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company (English language rights in the United States); the excerpt from W.H. Auden: Collected Poems by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, copyright ©1945 by W.H. Auden, reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. (English language rights in the United States); and the same, copyright ©1940 by W.H. Auden, first appeared in Another Time, published by Random House, reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. (world English language rights excluding United States and United Kingdom territories). Finally, I am most grateful to the artist and to Ed and Ursula Hoskins for permission to use Jon Harris’s ‘View from the rear of 11 Brunswick Walk, Cambridge, 1974’, as the cover illustration, and to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for providing a photograph of it. Jesus College, Cambridge April 1999

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page xi

FOREWORD

How do you study the religion of a society whose members often say that there is none? While this is not quite the question that Jenkins poses, it might well have been. His study of segments of English local life at first suggests that it is only his ingenious powers of sociological excavation that enable him to come up with examples of Christian ‘religion’. But that problem, as he points out, only arises if we essentialise religion and regard it as separably existing as one of many components of society. His alternative approach is to resist the attempt to be ‘objective’ and to see religion not as an isolable institution with discernible boundaries and rule-governed behaviour, as might the traditional view, but as inscribed in and constitutive of what he calls local particularity – a district or village’s history, its families and how people define and evaluate their selfhoods. Self, family and local history reveal and hide at the same time, evoking now that memory or disposition but then replacing them with others. These features of local particularity elide with each other in new combinatorial forms, defy set labels and yet are continuous with phenomena which at certain times and places are identified as, or in due course become, ‘religious’. Just as social scientists may sometimes claim that certain kinds of institutions or communities have disappeared, so outsiders and local people themselves may speak of their own customs as forgotten or antiquated, perhaps not recognising the continuity of underlying assumptions and re-contextualised practices. It is not that the claims of religious disappearance are never correct, it is rather that they are incomplete understandings of epistemological and behavioural transformations which are never settled long enough to be explained as either fully present or absent and which always carry something of the past with them.

0-Prelims

1/21/09

xii

4:26 PM

Page xii

Foreword

When we consider the two case studies presented, one about a country church and the other about a Whit procession, it is clear that their long histories and the amount of energy and activity that still goes on in and around them cannot be dismissed as either trivial or a minority interest. There is, as Jenkins stresses, here a powerful human aspiration to flourish and to resist the possibility of decay. The ultimate appeal expressing this aspiration to grow and thrive, and to be vital, whether in organising the procession or managing the church’s destiny, and watching or arguing over them, is belief or faith in self, community and wider cosmology. Measuring this appeal in terms of person-hours devoted to worship would render it as occupying only a small part of the proceedings. It is for the most part recondite, buried in assumptions about the worthwhileness of pursuits that to other people and other times might seem peripheral. But the measurably large is not here what matters, for it is only one dispensable facet of a more comprehensive commitment. The country church paradoxically becomes important as a counterpoint to claims that it is dying, and so draws in a series of concentrically related participants in its continuity, from the few who worship in the conventional manner to the many, at various family, professional and geographical removes, who merely prefer to believe rather than not believe in God. Unlike some of their urban counterparts, rural churches are rarely sold or rased to the ground. Their iconic continuity is as deeply embedded in other issues and local relationships as was ever the case, even if its traditional, visible centrality has given way to dispersed but interconnected considerations. Such continuity is a variation on the phenomenon referred to by Edwin Ardener, who commented on the fact that although, in Soviet Russia, observers might claim that the church was attended only by old people, they had been saying this for generations: the continuity seems sustained by claimed evidence of its rupture. The paradox, played out, is at the origin of the whole activity. We are entitled to call this mysterious paradox cosmological and thence religious, for at stake is a reference point which is never or rarely cited as justification, and perhaps cannot be, but which nevertheless gives sense to the efforts of people who are neighbours, householders and personalities seeking respectability, avoiding shame and supporting moral values which have no immediately obvious utility. The paradox is even strengthened through social difference: traditional villagers, more workers than professionals, say that the church in rural Comberton should provide facilities which need not be reciprocated, for that is what it is there for, and of course everyone knows that the church nationwide has ample resources. The more professional or skilled incomers take the opposite view and expect everyone to help the church in its building and other needs. Both agree that the

0-Prelims

1/21/09

Foreword

4:26 PM

Page xiii

xiii

church has a role and, in their variously alternating responses to whether or not it is regarded as surviving, thriving or degenerate, they ensure its and their continuing involvement in village talk and action. The case of the Whit Walk in Kingswood, a district of East Bristol, is like a number of comparable local community events in England and indeed Britain as being not overtly based on commercial, civic or evident political interests, though some may well be caught up in them in due course, as presumably happened in the case of the Northern Ireland Orange Order parades, and to some extent the Notting Hill Carnival in London. The process by which such events become politicised has been much studied, and it may be that we have not studied sufficiently the conditions under which they may thrive instead as cosmological or spiritual invocations, against and despite pressures to politicise. Again, as with the Comberton country church, there are long-established historical traditions associated with the Whit Walk which, dating from the late eighteenth century, refer to John Wesley and George Whitefield, who earlier had set up opposed chapels, which are themselves part of a current heterogeneity of over twenty churches and chapels drawn from some ten sects or orders marking the route taken by the participants. Sharing different fragments of this landscaped history as they pass by each church or chapel, some three thousand people are in the march, with at least an equal number watching (often from the same families as the marchers). Local businessmen, doctors and other professionals also contribute in one way or another. Such an event, as Jenkins puts it, both generates and denies social division. What is interesting is that the many people involved do not regard themselves as especially ‘religious’ people; but they are linked through chains of relationships and bits of local history to the core few who are regularly active in the churches and to whom they are connected by family or other local association. The event itself is placed within wider social divisions, between for example those who live within the longer established close-knit networks making up street behaviour and those who live on the newly built housing estates, whose behaviour and lives are viewed as more disconnected from each other. Yet the latter, too, become at least integrated within the region encompassing the district through the preparations and activities surrounding the Whit Walk. Alongside the polarised group stereotypes are the inter-personal shadings of reputation, from feckless to respectable. These may characterise everyone some time or another from someone or other’s viewpoint. They are illustrated negatively through local cases of violence and excess and positively through moderation and civility, the contrast sometimes being further reinforced through gender and other social distinctions and then sometimes denied in particular cases.

0-Prelims

1/21/09

xiv

4:26 PM

Page xiv

Foreword

The overlapping nature of such different local particularities thus provides a methodological insight into the study of local English society, which had previously been analysed by an earlier generation of social scientists as separable communities, giving rise in due course to the inevitable ‘discovery’ by later social scientists that social complexity had now removed such communities or that they never existed as such in the first place. It is against this kind of essentialist thinking in terms of whole institutions and communities being either present or absent that Jenkins proposes his own approach. He shows that local particularities alternate between manifest and latent or constantly permeate different social forms, and so often change less radically than is sometimes suggested, and indeed constitute social vitality through such alternation. But Jenkins does more than develop a methodological alternative for the study of society. He also allows the importance of the cosmological and religious to be re-cast as the values that arise among people when they marry, have children, live near each other, identify themselves with places and use their understanding of local history to inform and justify their self-regard and respect, or withholding of respect, for others. Such values, which inform personal moralities, are not the sole preserve of demographically stable localities but also pervade the dispersed networks of people who in some way, however fleetingly, belong to and, through cross-cutting ties, give villages and districts their cosmological density: the Methodist who is also socialist, or the trade unionist and socialist being also a spiritualist, and so on. Dissolving the duality of matter and spirit, and its modern parallels, Jenkins describes instead a human wish to thrive as a life-force or ‘spirit’, which does not simply enter but materially constitutes one kind of activity after another. A different, more ‘objectivist’ scholarly tradition has been to analyse the religious as autonomously influencing other social institutions or as suffering at their advance: ‘strong’ religion significantly influences values; but values emanating from other, non-religious institutions predominate when religion is ‘weak’. We learn from Jenkins’s study, however, that religion can be thought of instead, not as a discrete institution, but as contained within the human aspiration to grow or flourish against the possibility of decline and decay. It consists of social practices which defy precise formulation and takes the form of people best believing in social and local values defining personhood that can only ever be partially understood. They bring together their fragmentary understandings with those of other people to make wider, if incomplete, sense of their lives, leaving to the realm of mystery those elements that remain unexplained or inconsistent. Full explanation ought to remove the mystery, but in social and local reality, seems unattainable. Imperfect is thus glossed as secret knowledge,

0-Prelims

1/21/09

Foreword

4:26 PM

Page xv

xv

knowable only through privileged access, and thence sometimes religious. But this can change as new imperfections follow confident discoveries. This is not to deny the improvements in peoples’ lives that can be brought about by more openly conveyed information concerning the conditions of their existence, which therefore remains a desirable objective. But de-mystification is only ever partial at any one time and, in revealing some aspects of social and cosmological truth, it closes off, hides, ‘forgets’ and so mystifies others: one person’s total is often another’s incomplete truth. By such externally partible but internally whole understanding, the secret that we sometimes call religion thrives in parts of England. This is not so much a summary as an interpretation of some of the ideas put forward by Jenkins. A challenge for some of us has been to explain the apparently bizarre in other societies in terms that demonstrate their logic. Jenkins posits a complementary challenge, which is to see behind the apparently banal events of everyday life in a society supposedly ‘home’ to the observer, and to open them up to questions concerning the irreducible mystery in human aspiration. Used together, the two methodological perspectives show the mutual transformability of logic and mystery in social explanation among both anthropologists and the peoples they study. David Parkin Oxford July 1999

0-Prelims

1/21/09

4:26 PM

Page xvi

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 1

INTRODUCTION: RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS IN AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and others Show how common culture Shapes the separate lives: Matrilineal races Kill their mothers’ brothers In their dreams and turn their Sisters into wives. W.H. Auden, Heavy Date

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 2

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 3

INTRODUCTION RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS IN AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

I All the essays presented here are concerned with the ethnographic study of religious aspects of English everyday life. What unifying purpose underlies them? There are three interwoven themes or questions. First, what kind of social science is appropriate for studying religious events and forms of life? Then, what kind of understanding of religion emerges from the appropriate approach? And last, what are the implications of this approach and this understanding for the wider study of English society? Together, these themes constitute a claim as to how to comprehend our contemporary situation, broadly conceived: it is a claim as to the value of the ethnographic approach to understanding everyday life and, at the same time, as to the proper understanding of the place of religion both in that approach and in the object being considered. To condense the issue in a phrase, it is to consider the contribution of religious elements to an ethnography of everyday life. My aim throughout in writing these essays has been to be readable, to deal with complex issues at an appropriate level of clarity, and to be honest with respect to my sources. Yet an experienced reader will immediately suspect such an aspiration to transparency, and this distrust points in fact to what is at stake in any account of social being. For no person can detach him- or herself from society, from other people, and yet society is made up of any number of private spaces, secrets and concealments, just as is the individual. This paradox, which is inescapable, is an expression of the human wish for distinction; as Conrad says: ‘a man’s real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love’.1 This wish creates the tensions that order social life, presenting the individual with a variety of conflicts between the claims of egoism, duty and compassion; conflicts which are given their most general form, in the accounts presented here, in the paradoxes of language and the ambiguities of the metaphor of sight.

00-Introduction

4

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 4

Religion in English Everyday Life

Language has long been considered to be a key to understanding the interdependency of the personal and the social:2 it is the inheritance of the group, giving form to our most intimate thoughts, while it is simultaneously the prime means by which we know others, and equally the possibility of our deceiving them. Hence the apparent naïvety of my expressed aim: speech is at once a means for revealing the truth, and also for concealment and deceit, whereby the one may be taken for the other. Whether as actor or reader, observer or author, one is then continually confronted with the problem of deciphering truly, interpreting well, and creating a language of lively thought – as well as with the contrary possibilities of simulacra and deception, both passive and active, of being taken in and of offering poor readings. In the end, these questions come down to a recognition of the social purpose of language, of the need to purify speech and to reject untruth, secrecy and concealments. These conflicts and possibilities are reproduced throughout these essays in the various expressions of the metaphor of sight, which structure the readings of social ordering in many ways: as gaze and distinction, as what is revealed and what is hidden, as construal and interpretation, and as self-interested blindness and the possibility of a disinterested perception – once again, the latter related to the recognition of social obligation. These concerns, which may be rephrased in terms of questions of worth, duty, and acting well, as well as their contraries, hint at why an investigation of religious elements might prove a good way into an ethnography. However, in accordance with our attitude of suspicion, introducing the term ‘religious elements’ immediately raises a second question, as to the status of the category ‘religion’ and how to understand it. In most contemporary accounts, ‘religion’ is perceived as being confronted by its antithesis, ‘modernity’, and as being in a process of intellectual attenuation and institutional decline. At the same time, and in the same perspective, it tends to be ascribed the minor qualities of each and every classificatory opposition: it belongs to the private or personal as opposed to the public sphere, it is voluntary not obligatory, it concerns opinion not fact, it is emotive or affective rather than cognitive, imprecise rather than exact, metaphorical not literal, and so on.3 Moreover, ‘religion’ in this sense may be the subject of social science. Yet this account, with its characteristic division of labour and distribution of tasks between different social institutions, needs to be suspended, in order to understand the hypothesis being advanced here. Classical sociology, indeed, instead of confining religion to a private, voluntary, affective, sphere, took it to be the typical social phenomenon, and the key to understanding the motivations that underwrite all collective life, whether it be expressed in the value of goods, the force of

00-Introduction

1/21/09

Introduction

4:25 PM

Page 5

5

law, the authority of political figures, the obligatory nature of certain classifications, or the verities of science. Questioning the status of the category of ‘religion’ as it has been outlined then raises the question of what kind of social science would best serve the inquiry? We are caught in a triangle between giving an empirical account, problems of theory or method, and the history of the discipline. I shall advocate a particular approach, whilst setting aside another; we may call the one social anthropological, and the other a sociology of religion, recognising that these are ideal types, constructed to advance the argument. Each approach has distinct implications as to the nature of the phenomenon under consideration (in particular, its boundaries), as well as the kind of knowledge aimed at, and the methods employed to gain that understanding. Each approach points to a certain conception of religion, the one we are interested in being concerned less with matters of truth, non-contradiction and the independence of the known from the person who knows, than with a logic of question-andanswer, matters of context, and developments over time.4 It is important, nevertheless, not to anticipate too eagerly that the approach advocated will be fruitful. A part of the point of the social anthropological method is that its argument springs from ethnographic description, so it sheds – or at least defers – the whole business of prior definition and justification of its object. But it does so at first sight at the cost of reducing its ambition, and speaking only of particular events, moments and contexts. In which case, it cannot be clear in advance that the category of ‘religion’ in any form will have a place in an ethnographic account: after all, a whole anthropological literature exists dissolving comparable overarching categories. Yet it may prove possible to save this category of religion, although, rather than anticipate our findings, we shall shift ground and demonstrate the argument on the basis of a description. The approach chosen, then, rejects in principle anticipation of its object (a sociology of religion), turning instead to description (a social anthropology), without imagining this to be a simple or unproblematic move. A good deal hangs upon this choice, which corresponds to the demand that we should begin by paying attention to the orderings made by the objects of our interest, rather than beginning from our own orderings, and leave aside – for the moment – the question of what underlies or prompts our interest. Here, then, is an account of a commonplace event, one that constitutes the central example of the book. The description will be developed into a discussion of the nature of the object at stake, refined in terms of the ‘wish for distinction’, and consideration taken of the kind of knowledge produced. These issues permit a clarification of what is meant by the category ‘religion’, which in turn leads to a review of the

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 6

6

Religion in English Everyday Life

subject matter of the essays, their implications and their potential to contribute to a broader project.

II A procession is held annually in Kingswood, a working-class suburb of East Bristol, on the morning of the Whit bank holiday. It is called locally the Whit Walk. Several thousand people parade, following floats, in groups representing twenty or so local churches, each one led by their ministers, elders and notable citizens, followed in turn by the congregation, swelled on this occasion by family members and numbers of friends, and finally by the youth organisations, the Scouts, Guides and so forth. Each group parades behind a banner, and several are accompanied by brass bands. They assemble, ordered by stewards, at the crossroads by the parish church, and walk along the main street which runs for a mile or so through the heart of the district, which is a mosaic of narrow streets and small houses, with shops, pubs, workshops, factories and chapels distributed apparently at random. They turn at the former boundary of the area and retrace their steps, on the other side of the road, so that along most of the route the column doubles up, with marchers passing each other, who take the opportunity to greet their friends and acquaintances. The Walk involves more than simply those who organise, meet and parade, for it is watched by crowds on the pavements along the length of the route, who considerably outnumber those walking; together, they comprise a sizeable proportion of the district’s population. Among the spectators there are many families, often with children in new clothes, and with their grandparents who, a generation before, had similarly brought their children to watch. There are also local notables – doctors with practices in the area, businessmen with connections to cultivate, and local politicians among them – who find it appropriate to be quietly present among the crowds. In contrast, there are also noisy gangs of youths, weaving in and out, and groups of obstreperous men drinking outside pubs along the way. The event takes about an hour and a half; once it is over, people disperse to lunch with their family or to the pubs, although many return in the afternoon to the fête at the parish church. There are accounts of the Walk from the 1920s that present a very similar picture, and local historians claim that the event has earlier roots. Even a brief account such as this involves a good deal of selection and presentation. What are the criteria at work? Social anthropology at a first approximation is concerned with the construal of the participants’ world of meaning: with the ways in which people create and perpetuate

00-Introduction

1/21/09

Introduction

4:25 PM

Page 7

7

themselves, and so with the establishment of continuities and methods of coping with disorder. It concentrates upon contingent and particular forms of life that the actors by and large take as given. One aspect of the interest of the discipline for an anthropologist lies then in the awareness it creates of both of the compelling nature (for the actors) of the diverse ways people make sense in and of the world, and (to the outside gaze) of their arbitrariness. Social anthropology is engaged, therefore, in recasting the relationship between what is obvious and what is not. This procedure becomes particularly acute, and difficult, when applied to our own society, in part because the strategies used to repair discontinuities and to re-establish the order of common knowledge are already part of the anthropologist’s experience, assumptions and categories. We know what we think about, for example, families and property, work and religion, individual destiny and government, just as we know our way around our locality and through our lives. We do not claim to know everything, but we expect to be able to make our way on the basis of what we know. In order to write an ethnography set in England, it is crucial not only to notice the various strategies of making sense at work, but also to understand how we participate in them ourselves. The Whit Walk offers a contemporary case in point. It is at first sight either unremarkable or archaic: a custom originating in the nineteenth century Sunday school movement that has persisted in a working-class suburb of East Bristol. Neither the setting nor the event immediately draws the attention of an outsider, nor appears remarkable in any way. Yet, upon consideration, this claim cannot be entirely true; for if the event appears ordinary and everyday, the motivations and desires of the participants are by the same token obscure to the observer, and have to be deciphered. The continuity of the event over time, the degree of organisation and work it demands each year, and the numbers of people mobilised as marchers or spectators, are all indicators of an extraordinary social energy at work. This combination of obviousness and opacity points then to a problem of perception: the procession constitutes an unexplained phenomenon, an aspect of which is its superficial unremarkableness, its effective invisibility to an outside gaze. It is a form of social life which is constructed in part in order to reveal itself and, at the same time, to conceal itself; it creates (in this respect paralleling social anthropology) an interplay of display and secrecy. Many valuable accounts of local society do not fully recognise in the objects of study the active power at work to shape and control the perceptions gained of themselves. Once this active power has been identified, it is possible to bring out the ways in which local self-definition seeks to meet any apprehension of itself, including manipulation of the categories of banality and archaism. Thought, action and interpretation together form a complex simultaneity. This example then contains more

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 8

8

Religion in English Everyday Life

than simply an account of a single place and community, for it suggests, first, a positive way that a series of published ethnographies, social histories and community studies might be reread, and second, how a certain suspicion should be directed towards accounts both of religion and of working-class culture that subscribe too readily to a perspective of passivity, modernisation, transition and loss. Such a perspective is a misapprehension and, more importantly, it is a function of the empirical material: not a value-free description, but implicated in the situation under consideration. On both these counts, we may glimpse how an ethnographic study may serve a broader intellectual project. Once the remarkable nature of the phenomenon has been discerned, focusing attention upon the Walk leads to consideration of the various participants and spectators, their statements as to their motivations, and the various models or analogies they employ to explain why they are there. To anticipate the findings of the study, two things emerge from this consideration of motivations and meanings. First, far from its being an exclusively ‘religious’ event in a narrow sense – if ‘religious’ means anything more than a tag to label one of the kinds of misapprehension we have identified – these accounts point to a forceful act of total self-definition, made in terms that are at once territorial, historical and oppositional. We are dealing with an unofficial ‘polity’, the cohesion of a social group that occupies a space, traces a continuous existence in that place, and claims a legitimacy in doing so, either with or – potentially – without the consent of outside authorities. Second, it is also clear from the multiplicity of the accounts that the social group itself is not in any sense simple, but is constituted continually through sets of claims to recognition within the group, through internal negotiations of status, similar to those made to the outside. Groups and persons alike produce and reproduce themselves according to codes of behaving and belonging, which are expressed in terms of family, residence and employment, as well as through membership of voluntary organisations, and the possession of particular personal qualities. The procession is a particularly complete moment in which the procedures of claim and negotiation that make up a whole way of life are made clear: it is a moment of public accounting, both with respect to the outside gaze and with respect to the infinite calculations of internal differences.

III This account is necessarily a compromise between, on the one hand, an attempt at synthesis and concision and, on the other, a presentation of the main significant features. Which of the latter might serve

00-Introduction

1/21/09

Introduction

4:25 PM

Page 9

9

our purposes? The discussion so far suggests some ambiguity as to whether or not an ethnography of religion is possible, the doubts focusing largely around the potential misapprehension implicit in the term, and hence around what is left out and what is included. Indeed, it is not clear whether the term ‘religion’ is either necessary or useful. These arguments, of course, have their parallels in some contemporary theological discussion.5 The parallels are instructive, the story going broadly as follows. In a period prior to the seventeenth century, theology had to do with everything, considered in the light of God’s saving action and purposes, and the word ‘religion’ was a relatively unimportant term, concerning the right ordering of worship. In the seventeenth century, a mutation took place, whereby notions of cause and effect became important. ‘God’ then became the name for the final cause of everything, and ‘religion’ became what concerns God, that is, separated from the spheres of specific causalities in the world – the public sphere, politics, economics and so forth. This constituted a real reduction, since one can in fact do without a universal cause; ‘religion’ in this reduced sense was born to be irrelevant. In the nineteenth century, the nascent social sciences first became fed up with this reduced view of religion, and second, took up the earlier project of theology, to explain why all human facts have a value, and why human projects hang together or cohere. In the twentieth century, there has been a failure of nerve in some quarters; some social scientists have developed an interest in the reduced view of religion, looking at such matters as belief in God and church attendance: this is called the sociology of religion. The task should be rather to pay attention to the original sociological project, inquiring into questions of motivation, value and polity in the world, which parallels the medieval theological project. It raises questions as to the conditions of possibility of being someone in particular, doing something worthwhile, and belonging to some collectivity that counts. These are the kind of topics, moreover, which have emerged in outline from the anthropological description of the Whit Walk and its elaboration, and which may help us to clarify what is at stake in a consideration of an event of this sort. These topics represent different aspects of a single argument or apprehension, which is centred around this problem: what is the nature of ‘the social’, and what is an appropriate method for apprehending it, given that we are ourselves social beings? Because the observer is not only of the same scale6 as the objects of observation, but of the same kind, involved in processes of the same kind, ones that we might call ‘making sense of and in the world’, we are brought to face questions that the natural sciences – and the social sciences which model themselves upon them –

00-Introduction

10

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 10

Religion in English Everyday Life

imagine themselves permitted to lie sleeping. For social anthropology, questions of knowing and acting – questions of procedure – are of the same order as the question of the subject matter. How to proceed, then, is intimately linked to the nature of what is to be investigated. This is the first point to emerge from the description offered above. There is, in the situation of event-plus-observer, a demand that the latter pays attention to what is the case: there is a force in the commonplace. The assertion made above, that description has a certain precedence over argument, in fact smuggles in two matching constraints. The first is an obligation in method, a claim that we should, if we are anthropologists, proceed in this way. The second is a constraint in the subject matter to which this claim corresponds, that, in order to be understood, the empirical poses the demand that we should pay attention, rather than decide in advance what our understanding will be. This is a more curious feature than one might at first think, for this demand also implies an anterior givenness, that – despite our prior assumptions, categories and so forth that we bring to bear – the empirical gives itself to our apprehension, although it may not do so in any simple or transparent fashion. At the least, it has a force to disturb these prior orderings, an ability to surprise and reorder. These disturbances are indeed the primary matter of experience. Apprehension of itself is then allowed by the empirical, or – to put matters another way – it is a feature of the social that it calls attention to itself; it causes us to think. In brief, there is a demand or force in the subject material that is responded to by the method we are obliged to adopt. The empirical – when it is human activity – sets the broad terms in which it should be approached. Each human situation, indeed, is constituted, at least in part, by the processes brought to bear of making sense, of and in that situation, and fieldwork is in this sense characteristic of and congruent with its subject matter. The fieldwork method, as a discipline of attention, is the due paid to human activity by a human actor with anthropological intentions. This way of gaining knowledge has implications both for the procedures undergone and the kind of knowledge gained.7 Two consequences follow that relate to the argument with which we are concerned. The first concerns the distinctive character of the subject matter. What we are principally concerned with is signalled by phenomena of force, constraint and obligation, and also, equally, by phenomena of desire, motivation and worth. This is simply to reiterate the point that Durkheim makes, that obligation, construed broadly, to include desire, is the mark of the social.8 Implicit in such an approach is a question of scale: such phenomena only exist at certain sizes of ordering – notably, above the individual and below the universal. The empirical demand is always experienced in what we can call the ‘force of the particular’:

00-Introduction

1/21/09

Introduction

4:25 PM

Page 11

11

human truths, one might say, are always particular truths, compulsions that order particular constellations of persons. The second is that even if human particularity poses this demand, paying attention is fruitful because there is a humanity common both to the inquirer and to the objects of the inquiry, for both are involved in material, local processes of making sense, and this includes making sense of the other. The universal lies in the capacity of both sides to gain in understanding and capability, to be changed through an event or encounter. ‘The social’ is to be understood not simply in terms of the expressions of force or desire through comprehension and action, but rather in terms of mutual interpretation or construal, as the product of the interactions of desire, whether expressed positively in the gain in insight of the persons involved and in their capacity to act, or negatively in loss, in their blindness and immobility. It is in this sense that we are concerned with what may be called the motivations of the actors, with the distributions of energy, time, effort and money, that are displayed not only in the voluntary activities to which the Walk draws our attention, but also in the less consciously articulated matters of marriage, residence and employment, as well as the largely unconscious business of politics, sovereignty and identity over time, that emerge through consideration of the meaning of the event. These are all products of the complex interplay of potentials and incapacities, claims and concealments, belongings-to and exclusions-from, becomings and annihilations, that constitute the expressions of motivations. This approach has implications for the kind of knowledge attained. A better term would perhaps be ‘understanding’, which on this account should be taken not only as the capacity to act, but also as motivated in the sense of being morally charged or weighted, so that thought, evaluation and action are a simultaneous, embodied event. Abstract knowledge, of the sort sought by the academic mind, might be defined as unmotivated; it is certainly a special case, and an ideal, and possibly illusory, for academic knowledge too intervenes in certain specialised contexts, giving power, disabling, and so forth: it too has its responsibilities. One way of putting the sense of understanding we are considering (which reiterates the question of scale), is to say that it is not an individual possession, for it always asserts an order implicating the actor in a wider world. Social activity may then be considered as a play of understandings, repeated at many levels, from that of personality (how much private space can a person claim, or be allowed?), to that of membership of institutions (who belongs, and who does not, according to what criteria?), to the interactions of institutions, formal and informal, with an outside gaze (be it of the anthropologist, the State, or some other).

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 12

12

Religion in English Everyday Life

The outside gaze imposes an order through its own categories (which have their own history), and makes sense as actively as any other actor or perspective. But this similarity constitutes the complexity of the situation, for the categories brought to bear bring with them their own insight and blindness, and further are actively met by the nonmatching comprehensions and misrecognitions of the categories at work in those observed, who equally attempt to fit, manipulate and use the categories imposed. These, and comparable, activities together make up ‘the social’. Social facts then exist at the level of interactions between these viewpoints or centres of interpretation, that relate through what may be termed an interdependence of recognition. The necessity of mutual recognition is perhaps the crucial feature of social life, that underlies the complex division of symbolic labour whereby each person and group exists only in and through the judgements of others, however much these judgements are contested. Again, two conclusions follow. First, there are no pure, preexisting categories brought to bear, but rather, actors negotiate themselves into being, prolong and improve themselves in situations that always precede them; and yet these situations are prolonged, impelled human activities of mutual construal and self-definition, of concealment and claim. Second, in the case of this discipline, the ‘real’ persists far longer than events, personalities or interpretations, and exists at this obscure level: moral or social facts are situated in the constraints and compulsions experienced as humans make sense of themselves and others, in the constancies of mutual interpretation and the patterns of understanding.

IV A consequence of this approach is the simultaneous expansion and subversion of the category of ‘religion’. We began from a ‘religious’ event – a Sunday school procession – and had to invoke a number of other orders, concerning territory, time, local identity, aspects of economic and political order, legitimacy, and so forth. The consequences for religion might be either of two things. On the one hand, we might decide that the category ‘religion’ has proved to be an unsatisfactory framework or optic to bring to bear, that it bears a poor relation to what is going on. This does not dissolve the object under consideration; simply, the brief examination we have made of the conditions of apprehending the event leads to an appreciation of the interpenetrations of institutions and categories. On the other hand, we may note that consideration of a ‘religious’ event in this case raises the question of the entire ordering of local society. If we look at the topics raised by

00-Introduction

1/21/09

Introduction

4:25 PM

Page 13

13

adopting the anthropological approach, we may list five: first, the force of the empirical, or why one has to look and see or, indeed, start with a description; second, the question of motivation, or what energies are at work in the behaviour and convictions of the actors; third, the play of claim and concealment that is contained within each demonstration of belonging; fourth, the existence of the social order at the level of interaction between claims, or as mutual interpretation; and fifth, the interconnectedness of institutions and categories or, the other way about, the impossibility of isolating single institutions and facts for analysis from their complex background of meaning. These topics, however, bear a notable similarity to criteria used by earlier sociology to isolate and pinpoint the nature of religion; for example: the ‘magical’ force in things (or why things move people, rather than the other way round); the bases of behaviour that cannot be explained by rational criteria reducible ultimately to self-interest; the interplay of declaration and mystery; the interdependence of different social orderings; and the ‘imprecision’ of religious notions. A way of putting the matter would be to say one of the things society is like is religion, or that religion may serve as a clue to society and its orderings. Why is this so? Thus far, no kind of definition has been offered; we simply started from something that could be called a religious event, and followed the argument. It might, however, be suggested, along the lines we have been following, that religion be understood as the expression of the human aspiration to flourish, or – to put it another way – as the expression of the desire to be human in a particular form.9 The case studies that form the bulk of this book provide material in support of this definition; here I offer these clarifications. The term ‘aspiration’ or ‘desire’ emphasises both the sense of process and the sense of obligation that lies at the heart of human being; it is not an optional matter whether or not one is fully human, nor whether one’s neighbours are, while at the same time it is not in any way a simple or transparent matter that one is (or they are) such. And the term ‘flourish’ (together with its contrary ‘dysfunction’) aims at the multiple aspects of well-being, personal and institutional, that are engaged in being human in a particular, social form. For human being and social being in this perspective are aspects of the same project, aspects that will concern, for example, health and ecology as well as politics and economic matters, law and territory as well as the person, family and gender; the list could be prolonged. If, then, religion is concerned with expression of the aspiration to human flourishing, it is to do with the processes and purposes of the orderings of human life, with matters of self-definition and worth, with questions of belonging and distinction, with the definition of boundaries and the maintenance of right order, with making sense

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 14

14

Religion in English Everyday Life

and the establishing of continuities, and so forth. This formulation, moreover, has emerged from the example we have chosen. Religion, without seeking to absorb other institutions, is peculiarly concerned with the aspiration to be human in a particular form, and therefore with living satisfactory and responsible lives, both singular and in common, reflectively and actively. In Auden’s words (which refer to social anthropology, however), it ‘show[s] how common culture shapes the separate lives’. A church or chapel in Kingswood, then, considered as an institution, is to do with collective reflection upon that aspiration and its reiteration under varying circumstances, and so with its accompanying categories, forces and expressions, in short, its forms of life. It is therefore possible to contemplate an ethnography of religion, and to give an account of the local church, because of – rather than despite – the fact that any consideration of religious events immediately implicates other categories and institutions. It might indeed be possible to claim that an ethnographic account of religion will be a privileged way of coming to terms with the wider society, a key to an ethnography of everyday life. In short, I suggest two complementary possibilities. First, that religion (including religious institutions and events) might serve as a clue to social order because it is how humans pay attention to human welfare in a particularly concentrated way. And second, social anthropology will bear some strong parallels to religion thus conceived, as it too is a meditation upon the right (and wrong) ordering of human lives, upon social flourishing and failure.

V What can be said about the several essays that make up this book, considered in this light? Further, what contribution do they make to a broader ethnographic project? There is no single book concerning the anthropology of Britain. Although there are good monographs, for the most part concerned with Scotland or Wales, such works as exist are scattered in focus and method, and isolated in time and place one from another, and there is no overall appraisal of the situation of ethnography in Britain, neither its achievements, nor its limitations, nor its prospects.10 Moreover, if interest is confined primarily to England and its specificity, these criticisms may be redoubled. There are, however, good reasons for confining attention to English materials, which are threefold, intuitive, symbolic and pragmatic. The intuitive reason is a sense that English materials contain sufficient similarities between themselves, and sufficient differences with

00-Introduction

1/21/09

Introduction

4:25 PM

Page 15

15

Scottish and Welsh materials, to be worth investigating for their specificity, even if the ‘specificity of the English’ is a hypothesis that subsequently has to be modified or discarded. Then, there have been enough accounts of the symbolic division of labour in ethnographic studies11 pointing out the way that the social scientific gaze has been directed to ‘marginal’ communities, particularly rural and Celtic examples, to make one want to consider more ordinary, less marked cases, such as English urban or rural-suburban life, with their continuities (which will include manipulation of their unremarked status) and the surprises they may contain. Last, there are practical limits, both as to where the writer has lived and worked, and as to how much fieldwork can be achieved in the course of a professional life. Together with the relative paucity of monographs, these considerations impose limits to the horizon of possible ambition. It is not simply that more materials are needed, however, but – as suggested above – also an alteration of emphasis in understanding. Many of the monographs to which reference will be made, although written in the ethnographic present, are at the same time cast more profoundly in the past historical tense, which is expressed in a certain surprise at the phenomenon under consideration ‘still’ existing. There are many ways of marking this status, but – to give it a general formulation – ‘the world we have lost’ (which nevertheless survives in traces) is always the minor party in an opposition which treats the pragmatic (utilitarian, instrumental) as relating to ourselves, the future, the urban and so forth, and the symbolic (or the realm of meaning) as specific to local cultures, as possessing a history but no future. However, the claim has already been made that this structuring opposition, which we met initially in the material as the couple banal/exotic, should be construed as a function of the encounter between the anthropologist (as typical outsider) and the event, a simultaneity of language, thought and behaviour. This reformulation arises because anthropological and sociological theories map and evaluate the processes they are studying in the same way as does their subject matter. Making this adjustment in emphasis, this book offers, first, a discussion of the various traditions of local ethnography, with the aim of discovering coherent themes both in this dispersed body of literature and, potentially, in the organisation of its subject matter, that of everyday life in the different localities studied. Second, most importantly, it includes two detailed case studies which are of interest in their own right, and may serve as examples of the approach concerned which, at the same time, establishes continuities with older monographs. And third, through the case studies, a number of key ideas or concepts with potentially wide application are generated, that may permit the creation of a more integrated and coherent approach to the complex self-

00-Introduction

16

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 16

Religion in English Everyday Life

definitions, orderings and continuities of English society. The argument is developed in four stages. Part I represents a clearing of the ground, a clarification of the issues identified around the notion of a ‘sociology of religion’ in order to define the potential and limits of such an approach, the kind of knowledge it produces and, notably, how it produces its object: an account of religion in the perspective of modernity, cast in terms of a narrative of decline and diversification, in contrast to one that pays primary attention to indigenous patterns of meaning. Having set the scene, the subsequent parts are ordered around a progression that considers successively the scale upon which meaning is constructed, the role that the wish for distinction plays in the creation of social facts, and finally, the concept of secrecy as the concentrated form of distinction. Indigenous orderings of the kind at issue and their continuities exist neither in people’s heads nor in such positive group belongings as class, but rather, as has been suggested, are stored and reiterated at the level of the interactions of persons and groups, to which they simultaneously give form and limit: hence questions of both scale and temporality. Social facts, in this conception, are both active and obscure: more abstract, more real and longer enduring than more readily grasped entities and phenomena labelled as either individual or collective, mental or material. In part II, a rural case study is presented in this perspective. English villages are frequently studied in isolation from any wider context, and a description offered that is articulated around an opposition between a declining rural world on the one hand and incomers as agents of change on the other: a world undergoing radical transformation, on the point of vanishing. The study offered, of a village near Cambridge, in the south-east of England, attempts to break with this tradition, and looks instead to the persistence of the notion of ‘the village’ in the mutual interpretations exchanged between three different constituent groups: the ideas each seeks to embody and the understandings each seeks to impose, together with a consequent history of mutual misunderstandings and ill-comprehended conflicts. The situation of the village church is described within this interpretative framework, both as a contributing factor and as shaped by it. The complex structure of interpretation, which permits change to be construed and continuities defined, serves as an example of a social fact in the sense intended here. This understanding of the social fact as mutual interpretation explains why the processes of self-definition and self-concealment are to be found at the heart of social ordering, constructing the social in terms of interaction with the gaze of others, repeated at different levels. Part III offers a detailed case study of the discriminations and concealments at work in a suburb of working-class Bristol. We began

00-Introduction

1/21/09

Introduction

4:25 PM

Page 17

17

from an account of the Walk; it focuses around two themes, the primary one a sense of identity termed ‘local particularity’, deriving from the interrelationship of territoriality, local history and personality, with the secondary focus being upon ‘respectability’ as a locally recognised collective morality. Both themes structure the continuing presence of the churches and chapels in the area, whilst to a considerable degree being constructed and expressed through them. The study offers a detailed analysis of continuities in socio-religious politics and in local historical identity and its symbolic reference points; at the same time, it offers an account of the historical construction of the community: of the family and its women-centred, intergenerational structure; of gender roles and the different degrees of personal autonomy which they permit within a shared set of values; and of local reputation and the ‘penumbra’ of respectability – anxiety, conflict and the symbolic burden carried by the feckless. The everyday life of the churches and chapels is detailed within the context of social discriminations to which it both contributes and responds, expressing and in part creating on the one hand, and being shaped and constrained by on the other. Pursuing the line of argument concerning discriminations, in continuity with one of the themes of early sociology, a defining locus of social organisation will be ‘the secret’, when the form of concealment becomes in itself the marker of social distinction. Part IV,12 which is little more than an appendix to the previous part, takes up an aspect of life in Kingswood concerning the surprising commensurability discovered between a wide range of practices that includes not only nonconformist religion and trades union activities, but also more obscure practices such as Pentecostalism, healing and spiritualism. The link resides in the form taken by moral knowledge, practised both as selfdefinition and separation from the world, and expressed in degrees of concealment and secrecy. The importance of this piece lies, first, in its exploration of the extreme forms taken up by the structuring processes with which we have been concerned: the logic of distinction is revealed in secrecy and its social forms. And second, in the questions it poses as to the appropriate approach to social thinking, both as object and method. Understanding how ‘the secret’ works allows us to perceive the ‘magical’ thinking at work in many sociological accounts, which attribute unexplained causalities to and between categories, thereby reproducing uncritically the thought processes of the people under consideration. This piece therefore points to a more refined account of the sociological approaches that have been questioned and recast throughout the book, while at the same time indicating the abstract level upon which a social understanding has to be constructed, if these ‘animist’ tendencies are to be resisted.

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 18

18

Religion in English Everyday Life

VI What else of broader interest emerges from this approach? Colleagues in other social science disciplines point out the apparent limits of the knowledge produced by the ethnographic method which – in this respect resembling psychoanalysis – turns its back upon formulating generalisations, concentrating instead upon particularity. As has been established, however, the recourse to the monographic approach is related to the kind of understanding obtained: the knowledge aimed at is to an extent embodied, contextual and personal. Further, it is clear that more or less detailed accounts of this kind must be presented discretely and discontinuously, at least initially; hence the component parts of this book. Nevertheless, interpretative patterns of a certain kind may be identified, that resemble moral knowledge rather than codes or laws, an understanding of the kinds of ways people in these localities make sense in and of the world. It is true that one should not move too quickly to such an identification, just as it is also true that such general theories as emerge from anthropological case studies seem always to weaken in explanatory power the further they are extended from the context of their first formulation, as ambiguities in terms – usually deriving from an unconscious matching of local and outside categories – become clearer with counter examples. But here limited claims are being made, limited in scope and ambition, alerting the reader to a certain set of practical moves, pointing to the processes of claim and concealment, the scale upon which they take place, their capacity to generate complexity, and their reflexivity, or nature common to observer and observed, and then suggesting that comprehension of these moves may be useful for making sense of a certain practice of self-definition, or notion of identity. These limited claims refer back to the initial questions, linking a specific social scientific approach, a particular understanding of religion, and an appraisal of everyday life. Enough has been said on the first topic. Concerning the second, the anthropological perspective has a contribution to make to the description of contemporary society, not least because it places religious belief and practices again within the wider context of the construal of meaning, thereby avoiding, it has been suggested, the narrowness of much ‘sociology of religion’. The latter discipline tends to define its object in advance, as concerned with religious beliefs, behaviours and institutions (although it suffers much confusion over problems of definition), to track their alteration over time, and to attribute significance to the changes monitored, in terms of a narrative. Such an approach has both advantages and disadvantages; in practice, it tends to pass over the older and more established

00-Introduction

1/21/09

Introduction

4:25 PM

Page 19

19

forms of religion in favour of the more recent, and in particular to address ‘other’ – non-Christian – religions, and ‘new’ movements. Yet the approach adopted, and the case studies offered, may respond to these concerns. In the Kingswood example, as we have seen, the churches and chapels together with their associated organisations are locuses of distinction, serving to organise a complex moral space, in which lives are simultaneously constructed and lived out. The ethnography maps ‘habits for coping with reality’, which are resources for the local society, the basis on the one hand for receiving and interacting with incoming forms, and on the other for generating apparently anomalous developments (around what we have called the secret). While a study of an immigrant way of life in interaction with indigenous categories would be a desirable addition, it could be undertaken on the basis of the approach outlined here, of self-concealment and self-presentation in a process of mutual interpretation. Likewise, a description of ‘new’ movements could be initiated from the discussion of ‘the secret’; the resultant structures – which are not as new as they seem, and are of widespread occurrence in English social life – could serve as a basis to describe some of the categories and continuities of such phenomena as New Age movements and new religious movements. Neither of the preferred focuses of sociology of religion is excluded from this approach, but each takes its place within the wider context of meaning. Sociology of religion (in the – less than – ideal typical form in which I am employing it) tends to neglect the wider context, and to read its objects – events, institutions and beliefs – as if they contained their own (occult) explanations. What is presented here is rather some elements towards such a wider ethnography, the beginning of an inventory of resources. In each case, the starting point is a puzzle provided by a specific religious phenomenon – the life of a country church, an annual procession by the churches, a range of linked ‘spiritualist’ beliefs – which is examined with respect to the social life of which it forms a part. In working out the puzzle, however, each case gains a wider significance, in three respects. First, each offers an interdisciplinary approach, linking together sociological, historical and anthropological readings of English society. Notably, a number of community studies are reconsidered, showing how that method may incorporate historical depth, and contributions are made not only to religious sociology but also to topics in the sociology of the family and social historical studies, including aspects of conflict and delinquency. Second, the approach, by concentrating upon indigenous perceptions and behaviour, and the modes adopted within these of integrating the past within the present, and outside perspectives within local ones, has a potential for generalisation. It provides a means of articu-

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 20

20

Religion in English Everyday Life

lating different interpretative frames, both at a political and a micropolitical scale, and in so doing offers a model for understanding the mechanisms at work in a number of modern societies, by which they simultaneously provide sociological and other accounts of who they are, whilst imagining they are without any contemporary culture or continuity with their past. It hints, in short, at a way of doing anthropology ‘at home’. Lastly, the specific studies generate a number of theory-laden terms, notably an ‘economy of fantasies’, ‘local particularity’, together with its subsidiary themes, ‘respectability’ and ‘local historical time’, and ‘secrecy’. Whilst these belong to a sociological or anthropological repertoire, they also articulate ideas which might permit the writing of an ‘ethnography of the English’ which would be recognisable to the concerns of its subjects: an account which paid attention to the genius of place and continuity of local life which are characteristic of everyday experience, without either artificially isolating local life from the influences and movements of the wider society, or imagining too great a transparency or homogeneity within it. The concepts raise implicitly the question as to ‘who are the English?’, which social science has so far done little to answer; this book exemplifies an approach which could offer an account of the specific nature of English society.

VII In sum, this book is organised around the claim that religious events, behaviour and institutions may serve as a clue to the orderings of everyday life, considered in an anthropological perspective. Further, this claim has implications for an understanding both of the concept of religion and, more broadly, of the sociological tradition: its methods, objects and the nature of the knowledge produced. By and large, the more philosophical considerations have been left implicit; it has been my intention to present an ethnographic account and an anthropological argument. Since the situations described, or ones similar, will be familiar to every reader, I have not offered descriptions of how I reached the territory, nor of how the work was undertaken. The materials, and how they may be obtained, will be familiar to all. But I believe that the analysis, and what may legitimately be drawn from the materials, may not be. There remains much to be developed, in particular, in exploring the processes described at the scale of the persons involved, which would need to consider such concepts as experience and motivation, character and the place of decision; nonetheless, the material, analysis and thinking presented here has reached a stage of

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 21

Introduction

21

development that justifies its publication. I hope that it will be taken up by others, to be refined and, in its turn, put to work.

Notes 1. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, J. Hawthorn (ed.), Oxford 1983. I have drawn upon Hawthorn’s ‘Introduction’ in this paragraph and the next. 2. For an account of how long, and why this might be so, see Charles Taylor, ‘Language and human nature’, in Taylor, Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers 1, Cambridge 1985: 215-47. 3. See the discussion in Timothy Jenkins, ‘Metaphor and Religious Language’, Journal of Literature and Theology 3, 1989: 219-41. 4. See R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford 1939: chapter 5. 5. See Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’, Cambridge 1996, and the works upon which he draws, notably Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, New Haven 1987, Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Princeton 1986, and John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Oxford 1990. 6. The question of scale, albeit in epistemological rather than ethical terms, was posed by early ‘structuralism’, for example, in the discussion of ‘Maxwell’s demon’; see Edwin Ardener, ‘Introductory Essay’ in Ardener (ed.), Social Anthropology and Language , London 1971: liv, lxxxiii. 7. Implications that are explored elsewhere in a discussion of fieldwork as apprenticeship – see Timothy Jenkins, ‘Fieldwork and the perception of everyday life’, Man 29, 1994: 433-55. 8. Emile Durkheim, Sociologie et philosophie, Paris 1924. 9. Cf. Lash’s ‘the purification of desire and…weaning adoration from idolatry’ – Lash, Beginning and End: 70. 10. Excepting the sketchy remarks in Perry Anderson, English Questions, London 1992: 92-6; 231-8. I do not, however, precisely share his interest in the peculiarities of English intellectual culture. Mention should be made also of Ronald Frankenberg’s tribute to Max Gluckman, ‘A social anthropology for Britain?’ (in Frankenberg (ed.), Custom and Conflict in British Society, Manchester 1982:1-35). We still lack an adequate account of the contribution made by the Department of Social Anthropology at Manchester to the project of a British ethnography, from the factory and community studies of the 1950s and 1960s to the more recent accounts of identity and belonging, particularly in rural communities. 11. E.g., Edward Condry, Scottish Ethnography, [Edinburgh]1983; Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture, London 1978. 12. This part was originally written as a companion piece to Jenkins, ‘Metaphor and Religious Language’; both are concerned, from different angles, with the origins, definition, potential and limits of scientific language.

00-Introduction

1/21/09

4:25 PM

Page 22

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 23

PART I: TWO SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO RELIGION IN MODERN BRITAIN

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 24

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 25

TWO SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO RELIGION IN MODERN BRITAIN I There is a contemporary perception that, in Britain, formerly secure institutions and ways of behaving and understanding are wearing away; at the same time, corresponding to this sense of ‘fraying’, there is a desire to appraise what is our true situation and, indeed, who we are. If a consensus of views were possible, however, it would not be an agreement at the level of diagnosis or prognosis, but rather at one step removed: it is clear only that there is a need to make sense of things. In a context where such a need is perceived, social theory is brought to prominence,1 for it is one of the tasks of social theory to consider questions of identity, of who makes up the normally unreflectingly used ‘we’ and, in periods of fraying, to seek continuities by discerning repetitions underlying the often bewildering experiences of reordering. In this phase of its activity, social theory is at once descriptive and creative, for by seeking to discern order and continuity – by making sense of our condition – it is playing a modest part in the production of what it seeks. It has a future component. Social theory orders and continues, and by so doing, shares some of the characteristics of its subject matter, the social. It will therefore be contested, for if the social is made up to any extent of differing interpretations, a new interpretation – or the reiteration of a known interpretation – will itself have an effect: some ‘social future’ is potentially at stake in a sociological interpretation. Each account offered constitutes an intervention in the social, and so to this extent bears a resemblance to the topic of religion, which sociologists have seen as amongst the most total forms of ways of making sense of and in the world, where the ‘habits for coping with reality’ which are conveyed are of as great a significance as any ‘truth claims’.

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 26

26

Religion in English Everyday Life

In this context of the erosion of certainties, two British publishers have established series that adopt a historical approach: a detailed review of the recent past is to help to situate us in the world in which we find ourselves, and indeed to help us to become ourselves. In one case, the General Editor’s Preface claims that ‘the health and future of a liberal democracy requires that its citizens know more about the most recent past of their country than the limited knowledge possessed by British citizens, young and old, today’.2 The other series, it is true, is presented without this overt political emphasis, but still makes strong claims: the series ‘is designed to fill a major gap in the available sociological sources on the contemporary world. Each book will provide a comprehensive and authoritative overview of major issues … (The books) are written by acknowledged experts in their fields, and should be standard sources for many years to come’.3 Both statements have a sense of urgency and make a claim to importance beyond simply the scholarly value of the book; they sustain sociology’s implicit vocation to speak about human flourishing: they have a salvific intent. Both the series have spawned a book upon the identical theme of religion in modern Britain, and so each brings together in a single volume both the form and content of a proposition about salvation or hope, although the hope propounded by each author may not be the same as the hope offered by the subject matter. Indeed, the two books4 form an interesting pair because, despite their common topic and although they share a common pool of primary studies upon which they draw, they offer contrasting views both of religion and of the sociological task. They each comprise a distinct interpretation and intervention. The aim of this chapter is to describe and distinguish these two interpretations and to draw out their sociological implications, while at the same time elaborating the connections that are sometimes left unremarked between religious and sociological approaches. I will begin the argument, however, by taking up briefly the topic of ‘making sense’.

II A recent social anthropological account of features of contemporary English society5 claims that a characteristic move in the process of making sense of things – at least in an intellectual, middle-class culture – is simply the making explicit of the implicit: we make sense by placing things in their (hitherto unremarked) context. Strathern calls this process ‘literalisation’. This (at first sight banal) observation exemplifies itself; such a move of itself generates complexity and diversity, for as we see better the interdependence of things, at the same time we gain a sense of being somehow more individual, more aware through our

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 27

Two Sociological Approaches to Religion

27

own conscious grasp of the facts of the matter. Consequently, complexity and diversity have themselves a temporal direction, a sense of the irreversibility of time built in: it appears as if, in every generation, complexity, diversity, individuality and awareness increase and, by the same token, simplicity, unity, community and tradition are being left behind. Strathern sums up her initial claim: ‘the processes by which the English produced a sense of complexity for themselves were alarmingly simple … In showing the way literalisation constantly produced new perspectives, one has said all that needs to be said about the mechanism by which we once imagined ourselves in a complex world’.6 Strathern develops her analysis by pursuing in particular the privileging of generation and kinship as constitutive metaphors; we shall not follow her, but note instead the morally complex structure that she has described. The notion of ‘making sense’, the thoroughly English business of ‘seeing what is the case’, of being pragmatic and untheoretical, gives a framework in which change, or difference of any kind, may be classified simultaneously both as progress and as decline. It is defined as the decline of the traditional world, with its values of community and mutuality, and as the progress of modernity, the development of the individual and of consciousness. We may regret one and celebrate the other according to taste, but the overall structure, the interdependence of the elements and the single direction of time’s arrow, is rarely questioned. It is a way of looking at the world that is of course localisable – the perspective of a particular group in a particular period – but which claims to be universal: taken on its own terms, it claims to be the truth of Western culture, on its way to becoming the truth for the whole world. Within such a perspective, the study of society becomes defined by two tendencies, the decline of community and the rise of individualism, described in terms such as the exchange of belonging for becoming, or of status for contract, and so forth; and in such an economy of concepts, religion is perceived as in some respects the essence of what is being lost. A sociology of religion is then shaped by two matching concerns: the decline of traditional religion on the one hand, and the growth of diverse, individualistic forms of spirituality or consciousness – new religious movements, cults, New Age experiments – on the other; and by the question of the relation between the two. Bruce’s Religion in Modern Britain is constructed entirely within this framework of decline and fragmentation (as was an earlier review) and as such has an exemplary quality.7 The first chapter, describing the past leading to the present, charts the successive stages of a typology that develops from Church (‘coextensive with society’) to reforming sects (or competing versions of total truth) and thence to denominations (which accept that theirs is one version of the truth),

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 28

28

Religion in English Everyday Life

correlating each stage with a loss of collective consciousness and a growth of individual consciousness, reflected in the diversity of what one may or may not believe. Indeed, the shift can be summed up in terms of ‘the decline of the supernatural’ and the fulfilment of the self.8 The second chapter, concerned with the present, is likewise focused upon decline but in greater magnification. Bruce presents successively the statistics of contraction in clergy numbers, and ageing of the clergy; of reduction in the memberships of the major denominations, in church attendance and in Sunday schools; and of the diminishing beliefs of the population at large. He concludes: ‘In size, popularity, and influence, the mainstream Christian denominations have declined markedly … Most British people now have no church connection and are linked to organised religion only by their infrequent attendance at rites de passage, by their residual respect for ‘religion’ (which they think is a good thing), and by their nostalgic fondness for church buildings and hymns’.9 Notice the temporal vector implied in the language used: declined, now, only, residual, nostalgic. Once he broadens the story of decline into that of diversification, Bruce identifies two new factors at work: ‘there are three roads to cultural diversity … The fragmentation of … (the) dominant Christian culture, beliefs and practices … brought by migrants … and innovation … (when) people feel free to search the global supermarket of cultures for new ideas and new perspectives’.10 This further diversity of modernity is reviewed in the two subsequent chapters. On the one hand, the presence of other faiths in ‘Multi-Cultural Britain’ is introduced, in terms of the importation of the traditional and communal from elsewhere, and their potential for dissolution along the lines already discussed: the Jewish potential is high; Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs are being forced to revalue their religious commitments. On the other hand, there are innovations within the majority population, the new religious movements (subdivided into world-rejecting and world-affirming groups) and New Age spirituality. Bruce comments upon the apolitical, democratic-egalitarian and individualistic character of the latter in particular, and concludes11 that such individualism in the end may threaten the rational bases of society (and so, presumably, by the same token, the possibility of sociological accounts).

III Why is this an unsatisfactory account? Bruce is rightly concerned to reject a pious optimism of the kind that chooses to see only what it wishes in the evidence, and interprets new movements in terms of the continuation of older religious impulses; yet the powerful optic of

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 29

Two Sociological Approaches to Religion

29

decline and diversity also proposes a narrative which selects and shapes the material in advance of any empirical investigation. By doing so, it occludes indigenous voices, whether in the past or actual, which then appear at best in fragmentary form, and often only in anomalies, lacunae and silences. Before turning to the question of indigenous voices, let us consider first the question of the sociological narrative. Bruce’s account is proposed in terms that have the trajectory of decline built in: defining the vector by its end-point, there is what we might call a ‘teleology of the individual consciousness’ in every part. This appears in the preliminary matter of definition, of giving a content to the notion of ‘religion’. Bruce poses as alternatives the possibility of religion ‘providing solutions to “ultimate problems”, or answering fundamental questions of the human condition’, which he refuses, and the definition of religion as ‘beliefs and actions which assume the existence of supernatural beings or powers’,12 which he adopts. Yet these are common sense, broadly psychological or intellectual, definitions of religion, rather than sociological ones. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, considers that to define religion either in terms of explanations of the inexplicable or in terms of spiritual or supernatural beings is to rely too heavily upon our own experience and preconceptions, and he rejects both criteria, before offering his own, seeking rather the ‘compulsions which order society’: an approach which might permit a different understanding of the forms of existence of the sacred in modern society, a shift in terminology reflecting a shift in perspective. Bruce is in this respect pre-Durkheimian, for his definition concerns the psychology and intellect of the individual. Any account of religion that begins with a belief in the supernatural is bound to include the endpoint of demythologising, and in such an account the collective is identified with the unconscious and error. It will always be being left behind by the irreversible dynamic that moves towards the clarification of consciousness and truth, and the emergence of the individual. This teleology, which places the figure of the individual within the basic definition and describes its inevitable emergence over time, explains the employment of statistics in such an account, which has two aspects. For if the individual is the real base unit, a collectivity can only be described as an aggregate, and the best way of giving an account of an aggregate is by statistics. Furthermore, the use of statistics can readily support the givenness of the parameter of decline and diversity, opposing institutions and individuals, for change is measured in terms of alteration from a fixed point, difference being perceived at once as a diminution of the known (or previously measured) and as a multiplication of the new. The principal effect of the use of statistics is to homogenise the material for the purpose of comparison. Take the discussion of Church mem-

01-Part I

1/21/09

30

4:27 PM

Page 30

Religion in English Everyday Life

bership. The difficulties of estimating memberships are briefly reviewed: the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England ‘traditionally count those whom they baptised’, while at the other extreme, in the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, people may attend all their lives without feeling sufficiently sure of their ‘calling’ to be admitted as full members. We are then told that: ‘with various adjustments to compensate for most differences between denominations, we can estimate the present population of the United Kingdom which ‘belongs’ to the Christian Churches as about 14 percent’.13 There is a brief nod to the self-definition of the institutions, an even briefer one to the self-definition of persons with respect to these institutions, and a conclusion whereby the sociologist’s perspective subsumes both. This latter account does not include the former views in any simple way: one issue can reveal the arbitrariness of the process. From a table14 concerning the percentage of live births baptised in the Church of England, it appears one-quarter of babies born in 1993 were baptised, while at least half their parents and two-thirds of their grandparents were, so if one accepts the ‘traditional count’, a good deal more than 14 percent of the population appear to come within one institutional definition of ‘belonging’. Nor are we ever told to what definition of ‘belonging’ the 14 percent corresponds. We are offered a straightforward story of ‘remorseless decline relative to the adult population’,15 which is far from being wrong, but is radically incomplete. On the one hand, it leaves unexamined points of possible interest that do not fit. For example, lay membership of the Church of England, which has declined in absolute terms over the century to half in 1990 what it was in 1900, rose in absolute terms between 1900 and 1930, though declining in terms relative to the whole population. In the same period, the percentage of live births baptised also rose. These variations are passed over without comment. On the other hand, distinct histories are handled so as to tell the same story. Although it appears the percentage of Roman Catholics as a part of the population increases steadily over the century, the proportion of ‘observant’ Catholics can be shown to have declined. Baptist membership has increased, but the Baptist proportion of the population has fallen over the century. Another sample, the membership of the Church of Scotland, has held up relative to English decline, retaining 70 percent of its 1900 figure; this is explained by existing members living longer, as opposed to recruitment, so that decline is anticipated, or only postponed. Put more abstractly, the limits of such an approach are threefold. First, it ignores the complex self-definition of each institution. Indeed, the process of homogenisation extracts each case from its particular situation, collective values and history, and uses these denatured complexities to tell another, often simpler, story, one corresponding to questions asked within the particular complex situation of the enquir-

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 31

Two Sociological Approaches to Religion

31

ing (sociological) community. The statistical approach, as employed here, is unable both to deal with the various churches’ self-definitions, and to distinguish what one might call generative values from consequences. Recording church attendance, for example, says nothing about how the people so recorded regard attending or the act of worship and its relation to the wider society. Each Church situates itself differently with respect to the total population (and moreover with respect to the State): each represents a different (political) ‘settlement’, which defines its claims at both the local and the national level. A sociology of religion may find it necessary to examine both the settlements each Church represents, and the relationships between these settlements. Second, because the statistical approach does not distinguish facts that are generative from those that are probable, it cannot distinguish significant change from dependent variations. Despite initial appearances, then, this approach cannot readily measure change; rather, it generates its own chronologies. The process extracts measured units from complexes of values, continues to collect data for these units, and having noted changes in the behaviour so awkwardly monitored, seeks correlations and motivations through secondary surveys, of attitudes and the like. In this kind of process, history is effaced, and the past homogenised. Take this judgement, concerning the Creed: ‘We can never be sure what went on in the minds of people of other times and cultures, but we can be pretty confident that, until the middle of the last century, almost everybody who recited the Creed took it at something like face value … ’16 The past is evoked as a single state to stand in contrast with the present. Third, to complete the circle, this approach obscures its own production as a sociological account with its own criteria. It would be possible to give a sociological or historical account of the treatment of human ‘populations’ as if they were natural populations, and the limits of such treatments. The question of the status of decline and flourishing is of particular importance: human populations do not necessarily affix these qualities to numerical decrease and increase respectively, they classify rather than count and, as we have seen, a statistical account may be more an act of moral classification than strictly an exercise in enumeration. To reiterate the point, a sociological account has features in common with a religious account, being, among other things, a moral ordering of the world.

IV Consideration of the sociological account leads then to the question of indigenous voices and how they emerge in the description. Four related concerns have come out of the discussion so far. First, there is

01-Part I

1/21/09

32

4:27 PM

Page 32

Religion in English Everyday Life

the business of discerning the ordering values or compulsions that create, define and propagate any social group, of whatever order, and of distinguishing these values from the continuous variation of everyday life. Then, there is a need to recognise a political dimension, for these are values that express and create a ‘polity’, one particular kind of social flourishing rather than another. Third, one must distinguish how different people participate in the ordering that results, both how they take part and the parts they regard as fit for others to play. And last, there is the perception that sociological accounts are in some respects of the same kind as the accounts under consideration, and contribute to the same world. These concerns are not, by and large, raised as such by Bruce, although he gives many hints, so we must proceed by interrogations and the barest hypotheses. A simple case to raise to complicate the story of decline would be the relation between the Roman Catholic element of the population (put at 9.1 percent in 1990) and ‘observant’ Catholics. The latter may both regard themselves as ‘representing’ the non- or occasionally observant, and be accepted by the nonobservant as doing so. There may be further complexities, the practising believer being at one and the same time in opposition to the nonobservant, as being ‘in good standing’, and dependent upon the latter for recognition of that standing, within a shared value system. The nature of the boundary between observant and nonobservant behaviour needs to be defined, and may shift, and the reasons for such shifting need to be investigated, but both kinds of person may belong together in what one might call the same ‘symbolic economy’, participating differently whilst recognising at some level a symbolic division of labour. A similar set of questions may also be posed for the Church of England data, although the population defined is different. The task of the congregation is given in the Prayer Book as ‘to make prayers, and supplications, and to give thanks, for all men’. Whether or not this happens, it again raises the matter of the complex distribution of forms of participation, in this case, in a small geographically defined population, a parish (rather than a body defined by membership). Bruce alludes in passing to such questions, as for example in his summary of attitudes to the ordained clergy: ‘it is a good thing that there are people like that, but we do not want to be like them’;17 or in the desire for daily prayers in school (64 percent in 1991);18 or in the statement that ‘most people like the idea of religion and are keen to have some taught to their children’.19 Further, his conclusion, cited earlier, that most people now are linked to organised religion only by rites de passage, residual respect and nostalgia for buildings, also indicates how one might view participation in the religious life: rites de passage may be the key (in the local perception) to ‘well formed lives’, and a ‘residual

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 33

Two Sociological Approaches to Religion

33

respect for religion’ and a ‘fondness for church buildings’ may go with an apprehension of self-identity, of who one is, in family, neighbourhood and class terms, together with a localising of these identities in part in a particular geography. These are brief references to an ordering of personality, society and space which, in classical sociology, is held to have an inescapable religious component: ‘It is invariably the fact that when a somewhat strong conviction is shared by a single community of people it inevitably assumes a religious character’.20 The statistical approach may be incapable of studying the religious life precisely because it cannot make the particular discriminations needed in order to perceive these matters of participation in forms of social intensity (whether expressed in terms of value, identity, polity, or in other ways). Yet many points of potential interest are touched upon. For example, the social composition of church goers is considered, which shows that ‘working-class adult males living in towns and cities’ are the least religious of people. Contrariwise, active participation in church going tends to be highest among women. One might then be led to examine not only degrees of participation but more exact questions of social order and meaning in local populations: the nature of the claims made by active attendance in terms of status, the division of labour between the sexes, the spectrum of forms of participation, and how these vary in different populations and localities, and how they vary too over time. It might then be possible to speculate that in some places active church going remains a clear claim to participate in the core and the core values of locally perceived social order and that, over the century, the proportion of the population who not only feel themselves to express social flourishing but also to be capable of sustaining that claim in public, has fallen. A refinement of method and approach would be needed even to pose the hypothesis with clarity, but it would permit a move away from the perspective of decline and the primacy of individual consciousness, without slipping into a pious optimism.21 Individual consciousness is a frail support upon which to base sociological explanation; yet Bruce is reduced to this. Although he makes the point that one should judge people less by what they assert than by what they do,22 in order – rightly – to attack the thesis that those who do not go to church still have residual beliefs, he does not then go on to discuss what sort of behaviour would or would not constitute acceptable evidence, moving on instead to attitude surveys. Yet, in another recent book, on Northern Irish material, Bruce begins from the contrary point of view, by pointing out two failures of the survey method. First, he notes, ‘our views about complex but important matters can rarely be expressed sensibly by picking one of four choices in answer to a question asked of us by a complete stranger’. And second, a ‘feature of surveys is that they treat all

01-Part I

1/21/09

34

4:27 PM

Page 34

Religion in English Everyday Life

respondents as if they were of equal importance. That is, they investigate the typical, which is fine for those areas of life where the ‘typical’ is important but not terribly useful in settings where some people are far more insightful or influential than others and where the actions of a few can change the world of many’.23 Bruce concludes that, under these circumstances, one has to talk to the people who can lay claim to ‘vital symbols’ and who ‘can exert considerable influence … beyond their numbers because they articulate and act out responses which, to a greater or lesser extent, are found in almost all (concerned)’.24 In short, one talks to the people who ‘hold positions which will be taken up by a much wider … constituency when circumstances press them’. The matter could scarcely be put better. Why then has this approach not been applied with respect to expressions of religious faith in Britain? Instead, we have cited results from the 1991 British Social Attitudes Survey: ‘10% claim to be atheists (position 1) … Of the forty five who asserted that there is no God, twenty also claimed a denominational attachment, ten believed in some sort of spirit or life force, ten believed in life after death, and one believed in a personal God’.25 These results are then attributed to the confusion, ambivalence and inconsistency of the respondents although, as one might expect, the overall pattern is ‘one of increasing unbelief ’. The familiar account is elaborated: acknowledging ‘the usual cautions about comparability’, the results of a number of surveys show ‘the traditional Christian view of God … to be the minority one … The majority … no longer accept the traditional teachings of the Christian Churches’.26 In 1951, 71 percent agreed that ‘Jesus Christ is the Son of God’; in 1965, 64 percent, and in 1982, only 43 percent. ‘Further evidence of the lessening popularity of what were once core Christian beliefs’ is presented in tabular form. The survey results pose the problem in a succinct form: in an account of this sort, the views, interpretations, commitments and practices of the people concerned appear largely as unexpected silences, apparent confusions or downright contradictions. Yet these anomalies may be symptoms of a meeting of incommensurate forms of interpretation, symptoms therefore which pose a fundamental challenge to a sociology of religion that on the one hand affirms a broad theory of the world, and on the other seeks to illustrate this theory with eclectic evidence. For this is Bruce’s method in sum: a thesis illustrated by anecdotes. Take this brief paragraph as an example: This century has seen a marked change in (the size and) social composition of the clergy. The novels of Jane Austen in the eighteenth century and Anthony Trollope in the nineteenth show the Church as a profession thought suitable for the younger sons of the gentry and for poor but clever men on the make … In 1860 all the Church of England bishops had some

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 35

Two Sociological Approaches to Religion

35

connection with the peerage and the landed gentry. By 1960 no more than twenty-three of forty-three had such links. Now there are none …27

The succeeding paragraphs perform the same task, substituting numbers for eclectic facts. In this dialectic of social theory and illustration, there is no complex ‘middle distance’ in which human lives are lived, and by this omission, the sociological account resembles the structure of many unorthodox religious descriptions of the world, which assert the existence of some imponderable power or theory, and bear witness to it through appeals to experience.28 Bruce’s reiteration of the decline of material institutions and the rise of the individual consciousness bears some of the marks of a Gnostic spirituality, not least in his despair with respect to the world to which it leads (see above), and the paradoxical claim that, in a world where rationality is ceasing, the sociologist’s consciousness nevertheless contains an establishable and communicable truth. But as we have seen, this is not the only possible account; Bruce also sets the agenda for a different approach to the sociology of religion, in which the task is, starting from ‘vital symbols’, to investigate their conditions of existence and workings, including the self-understanding of the people who articulate and act out responses that others participate in to different degrees according to circumstances, and to map the institutional and other relations between these different parties.

V In Religion in Britain since 1945, Davie covers much the same ground as does Bruce, but at the same time proposes another perspective, raising another set of questions.29 In his brief ‘Foreword’, David Martin sums these up: Davie ‘takes into account the inner life and interior narrative of the life of religious institutions’; she emphasises the diversity of ‘regional climates’ in Britain, setting Britain both in a European and in an English-speaking international context; and she notes that the collapse of grand narrative may itself apply to the concept of ‘secularisation’.30 We are offered instead an account that is ‘incomplete’ or open, concerned less with decline than with the ambiguities of religion, its political and cultural effects, its geographical distributions and continuities through time. Davie does not eliminate the two polar concepts of institutional decline and increase in individual consciousness, but she reshapes and recombines them in her principal innovation, the characterisation of contemporary religious belief as ‘believing without belonging’. She introduces this notion by focusing upon the increasing mismatch

01-Part I

1/21/09

36

4:27 PM

Page 36

Religion in English Everyday Life

between the statistics relating to religious practice and those indicating levels of religious belief,31 a move which assumes that in order to generate numbers, one has to look to categories of the mind, not vice versa. By pointing to the modalities of indigenous belief, she raises the question of differential participation in belief, which then appears through a range of topics, such as the existence of parishes, the practice of bringing infants to baptism, the expressed preference for religious education and interest in religious broadcasting, as well as the results of surveys, attitudes towards religious professionals, and the role of cathedrals. In Davie’s view, the crucial challenge to the Churches is not a move towards a secular society, but rather the drift of belief from any orthodoxy.32 A related issue follows from this: is there a minimum size for the active religious minority to be effective in society,33 and what factors might determine this effectiveness? A refocusing of interest therefore takes place, away from matters of consciousness and psychology, and towards a more sociological set of questions. One of the merits of Davie’s book is its constant meditation upon the variety of ways that populations relate to bodies of believers, taking into account both geographical variations and the different significance that the various Churches represent. A blindness produced by the process of homogenisation is to treat the different Churches as interchangeable, or equivalent, an approach which ignores their different forms of existence on the ground, and which generates such ‘problems’ (which we have met) with respect to the population at large as the self-ascription of nonobservant Catholics, or the widespread participation in Church of England rites of passage, or the abiding significance of chapel membership in non-church settings. Davie’s approach allows her to pass over the statistical materials, giving a more sensitive and open account. We have also touched on the way the process of homogenisation tends to ignore the Churches’ various self-definitions. Davie is aware not only of the reception of religion, but also of the proactive, rather than simply reflective, potential of religion.34 Religion, in this respect resembling social science, is a form of collective self-imagining, presenting visions of social flourishing: of right social order and of what it is to be human. In this respect, all versions of religion are political, a matter which Davie raises, not only calling attention to the political impact of the statements made by some Church leaders, but also referring to the various (in my term) ‘political settlements’ represented by the different Churches. Perhaps the major difference that separates the Churches concerns how they relate in imagination and in practice both to the local population and to the State. This is more important than doctrinal differences, and may indeed give the latter distinctions their force. It is at this level that the Churches are not simply not equiv-

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 37

Two Sociological Approaches to Religion

37

alent, but possibly incommensurable. Davie combines an understanding of degrees of participation and the distributions of belief within the population at local and wider scale with glimpses of a symbolic economy in which the Churches take part both locally and nationally. By virtue of their histories and their own self-definitions, the Churches play distinct and different roles from one another at both these levels. This is frequently passed over by sociological accounts of religion which tend to treat all ‘denominations’ as equivalent and to a great extent comparable: all versions of the ‘Christian religion’. Atheists and agnostics on the one hand, and ecumenists on the other, concur in this treatment, though for different motives. Davie can offer more nuanced historical accounts of the different traditions, without falling into essentialism; in her chapter on ‘Establishment’ she overtly raises the question of the different political tasks of the various Churches, concentrating in particular upon the potential and continuing ‘vocation’ (again, my term) of the Anglican Church. Having focused upon matters in this way, upon differential participation in religion, upon the proactive potential of the self-definition of believers, upon the various religious settlements and their role in the wider self-understanding of the society and its institutions, it is unsurprising that Davie has the basis for possible comparisons with European constellations of forms of participation, self-imagining and identity; she offers the way to a comparative approach, pointing repeatedly to the wider European context, in which the peculiarities and anomalies of the British case (nominalism rather than secularism, for example) may appear. For the same reasons, she is relatively unconcerned with the problems of decline: change does not necessarily imply worse or better for religion.35 The focus has moved from the consideration of abstract theory illustrated by empirical examples to an intermediate scale, at which theoretical accounts are noted for what they are, situated human products, on a par with the phenomena in which they deal. The continuities are then situated very differently, not in the overarching narratives, nor in the individual psyche, but in the processes by which (and the scale at which) humans collectively make sense, both reflexively and actively. Davie’s sociological account shows the traces of an ‘Anglican’ mind. It expresses a view of differentiation of tasks and differential participation, and a vision of political settlement, that would not gain agreement in every quarter. (Indeed, I have seen her taken to task by a distinguished Roman Catholic colleague on this point.) It may be in accordance with this vision that she does not develop her insights to the extent of making a clear break with other styles of approach. Yet her account offers a pointer as to how to develop a sociological description of the significance of religion in modern Britain, nuanced, varied

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 38

38

Religion in English Everyday Life

and open to the future. She does so by taking seriously what I have called the political implications of the forms of the religious life: both politics and religion lie within the wider ‘field’ of ways of imagining social flourishing and shaping identity, a field which thereby includes social theory as well. Rather than opting for an ‘objective’ perspective of institutional decline matched by the rise of the (ultimately irrational) individual consciousness, a renewed sociology of religion may place itself within the picture, as one account among several competing interpretations, a minor player but with a real stake. Such a perspective embodies a particular understanding of the nature of the ‘social fact’, which it is the purpose of the next chapter to explore. Just as social scientists tend to give an artificial permanence and clarity to their accounts, so social actors take their understanding of a situation as its truth, rather than as a ‘vector’ that carries them through, giving them orientation and energy, allowing them to make sense, both actively and intellectually. My concern is now to alter the focus, to concentrate primarily upon the forms of social life composed by these vectors, and to leave in the background considerations of social theory. This is, however, a change of focus rather than of subject, for the same broad topics that motivate the sociological debates – flourishing, decay and transition – equally animate the descriptions of the life of the country church, and the perceptions and interactions that make it up. There is a congruence between description and object which leaves neither untouched, and which shapes participation in social life.

Notes 1. pace Charles Taylor, ‘Social theory as practice’ in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers Vol.2, Cambridge 1985. 2. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, Oxford 1994: x (Blackwell, Making Contemporary Britain Series). 3. Steve Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain, Oxford 1995: v (Oxford University Press, Oxford Modern Britain Series). 4. Davie, Religion in Britain; Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain. 5. Marilyn Strathern, After Nature, Cambridge 1992. 6. Ibid.: 8. 7. This exemplarity implicates the entire ‘secularisation’ debate. In British sociology, the works of Bryan Wilson have to a great degree set the agenda; see B.Wilson, Religion in a Secular Society, London 1966, Religion in a Sociological Perspective, Oxford 1982. Also influential, and more nuanced, David Martin, A Sociology of English Religion, London 1967, A General Theory of Secularisation, London 1978; in a different key, James Beckford, Religion and Advanced Industrial Society, London 1989. For an overview, see David Lyon, The Steeple’s Shadow. The Myths and Realities of Secularisation, London 1985. Alan Gilbert’s work, drawing upon Wilson, sets out the argument in influential social historical form: A. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change 1740-1914, London 1976, The

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 39

Two Sociological Approaches to Religion

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

39

Making of Post-Christian Britain: A History of the Secularisation of Modern Society, London & New York 1980. For the earlier review referred to in the text, see R. Wallis and S. Bruce, ‘Religion: the British contribution’, British Journal of Sociology 40, 1989: 493-520; and for a recent review of social historical material in this perspective, see T.W. Heyck, ‘The Decline of Christianity in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Albion 28, 1996: 437-53. Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain:15ff. Ibid.: 70. Ibid.: 95. Ibid.: 135. Ibid.: viii. Ibid.: 35. Ibid.: 59. Ibid.: 37. Ibid.: 16 – italics added. Ibid.: 34. Ibid.: 53. Ibid.: 54. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour, London 1991:119. See part III. Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain: 47. Steve Bruce, The Edge of the Union, Oxford 1994: 1. Ibid.: 2. Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain: 48. Ibid.: 50. Ibid.: 32. See part IV. Davie has more space at her disposal to produce a more nuanced account; Bruce has announced a longer book – entitled From Cathedrals to Cults: Religion in the Modern World – of which the essay under consideration is a shortened version. But it is not suggested that he intends to move away from the framework of decline and diversity – encapsulated in the title – and to work more in the spirit of his Ulster study. Davie, Religion in Britain: viii-ix. Davie cannot be exemplary in the same way as Bruce’s approach succeeds in being (cf. note 7); she is more individual. It is, however, worth drawing attention to two recent, very different, books that nevertheless make connections in comparable ways: David Martin, Reflections on Sociology and Theology, Oxford 1997, and Kieran Flanagan, The Enchantment of Sociology: a Study of Theology and Culture, Basingstoke 1996. Davie, Religion in Britain: 4. Ibid.: xii; cf. 70; 107-8. Ibid.: 107. Ibid.: 9. Ibid.: 193.

01-Part I

1/21/09

4:27 PM

Page 40

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 41

PART II: THE COUNTRY CHURCH – THE CASE OF ST. MARY’S, COMBERTON

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 42

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 43

THE COUNTRY CHURCH – THE CASE OF ST. MARY’S, COMBERTON I It might be supposed that the parochial system of the Church of England would best flourish in the countryside, where a single church serves a natural community that is well-defined geographically and socially, and that contains sufficiently few parishioners for the incumbent to know each one of them personally. In practice, however, the country church apparently consists in a small congregation that is determinedly traditionalist and reactionary in spirit, a clergyman (or woman) who is isolated and depressed, being either overworked to little effect or reduced to indolence, and an uncared-for church building that is in danger of falling down. In many people’s minds, these two conditions – that of a flourishing or at least functioning country church, and that of the country church in crisis and decay – are perceived respectively as the past state of affairs and the present: the country church has declined from, relatively speaking, a golden age. Various factors are then invoked to explain the change. As the mechanisation of farming has progressed, and the population has become increasingly mobile, and the effects of urbanisation have spread (for example, the disappearance of village shops and schools), the social composition of the countryside has altered drastically, with the loss of rural employment, the disappearance of the rural gentry, and the coming of the retired person, the weekender and the commuter. Leslie Paul, discussing the deployment of the clergy in 1964, pointed out that such changes have tended to undermine the clergyman’s social position, isolate him, and weaken his congregation, whose sense of obligation to the church has evaporated as the old social

02-Part II

44

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 44

Religion in English Everyday Life

order has crumbled.1 At the same time, the clergy too have undergone changes: there has been a decline in numbers, coupled with an ageing population and a redeployment of manpower to the towns. As a result, the rural clergy have become marginal, both to the communities they serve (most often now in several parishes), and to the Church’s interests and priorities. At the same time, and in the same perspective of change, sociologists2 also acknowledge another factor which complicates the life of the country church. This is the survival of traces of former attitudes in the form of ‘tradition’, or what is sometimes called ‘folk religion’. Such survivals are in apparent contradiction with the modernising trends at work. Thus the church building can serve as a symbol of the village identity and be perceived as an important part of the birthright of every villager, while at the same time in its decay it stands as a testimony to the villagers’ indifference. In the same way, the incumbent is subject to contrary demands: he (or she) is required in theory to fulfil the role of the ‘village priest’, a well-defined role with high status attached, but is met in large part with indifference or even, at times, contempt, as he fulfils a miscellaneous collection of tasks which can place great burdens upon him. The two ‘epochs’ in the life of the country church therefore also exist, in a sense, simultaneously, and indeed one can point to either state as being the ‘true’ condition of the country church. In the correspondence that followed the suicide of a north Oxfordshire country priest in 1960, one letter to The Times painted this sad picture: ‘The trouble with village congregations is not that they are unfriendly but that they are exiguous (Christian disunity is partly to blame) and shamefully unadventurous, and the unhappy clergyman is daily depressed by the surrounding atmosphere of lapsed Christianity, apathy, fecklessness; personally unaccepted by the ‘county’ because he is poor and by the ‘village’ because he is educated’. On the other hand, another correspondent in the same column wrote in a more optimistic vein: ‘I am quite convinced that much of the most distinguished pastoral work in the Church of England is being done unobtrusively in rural parishes’, and he concluded: ‘Heaven forbid that we should think that the country parson needs pity. It is the whole Church that needs the country parson’.3 Since it emerges that these two conditions of the country church may be taken either as successive states or as simultaneously coexisting, it might be useful to look at them from another angle. These two states can be taken, not as describing the ‘real’ past and the ‘real’ present, nor as an optimistic or pessimistic attitude to the present, but as the two faces of a single coin, as complementary aspects of a single stereotype. The different aspects of this stereotype of the country church can be

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 45

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

45

called upon in different circumstances, but the point at issue here is that it as a whole provides a framework for interpretation, the ground rules so to speak, that govern and limit any discussion of the church in the countryside. The stereotype holds not only for the sociologists but also for the man in the street, especially for people who live in a village. The stereotype therefore has effects on the ground: it exists in the way people behave and speak, and expect others to behave and speak. My purpose in this chapter is to describe the stereotype, how it is created, reproduced and made effective, and to do this I have chosen a specific case, the parish of Comberton in west Cambridgeshire. The choice of the village has been determined by the chance that I lived there for three years and was a member of the congregation of the parish church, St. Mary’s. The village, however, has an intrinsic interest as a case study, in the sense that the stereotype operates although the village population has grown to almost two and a half thousand, and so by some criteria (for instance, that a resident should know all other residents by sight at least), Comberton has ceased to be a true village at all. It is a good case, therefore, to demonstrate the power of the stereotype. As it will emerge from this study, the idea of ‘the village’ is in this case the key to that of ‘the country church’, and therefore consideration of the church will have to be set in the framework of a consideration of the village.4

II The parish of Comberton5 lies four miles south-west of Cambridge (see Map 2.1). It is a long narrow wedge which stretches for three miles, from the Cambridge to St. Neots road in the north, widening towards the Bourn Brook in the south. Its eastern and western boundaries mostly follow ancient ways dividing its fields from those of the neighbouring parishes (see Map 2.2). The land slopes from over two hundred feet at the northern tip to about fifty feet on the southern boundary. The soil is gault (clay and marl) and chalk, which is overlaid by boulder clay on the higher ground. The southern part of the parish is nearly flat and lies on the gault, though a narrow ridge of boulder clay reaches eastward from the parish of Toft, running between Tit Brook, a shallow stream, and the Bourn Brook. The land is devoted to cereal culture, with occasional copses of trees. The old village stands on a slight gravel rise north of the Tit Brook, near the western edge of the parish, where the Cambridge to Caxton road is crossed by a road from Harlton. It consists of three small districts. The majority of the older houses, dating from the seventeenth century, lie facing north and south along West Street, which runs from

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 46

46

Religion in English Everyday Life Dry Drayton

Madingley A45 Highfields Caxton

Hardwick Bourn

Cambridge

Coton

Caldecote Comberton Toft

B1046 Kingston A14

Barton

Granchester

Little Evesden

Great Evesden

Hazlingfield Harlton Harston

Orwell

Arrington A603

;y

Barrington

Map 2.1 Comberton and the surrounding district

Houses

B104

6

y ; ;; yy y ; ; y ;; yy T it B ro o k

Bo

ur

n

Br oo

k

03 A6

Map 2.2 The Parish of Comberton

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 47

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

47

the crossroads towards Toft (see Map 2.3). The street that leads north formerly traversed a green some six hundred yards long, which was later enclosed, although the pond remains in the north-west angle of the crossroads. The street takes its name from Green’s Manor, which lay on the north-west edge of the green. The east edge of the green was bordered by Hines Lane (formerly Small Street), along which some old houses lie, facing west. A second district is made up of the houses in South Street and Swaynes Lane (formerly Swine Street), where a back lane runs around the south-east quarter of the old village closes, from which other closes reached south to Tit Brook. The parish church of St. Mary’s, the Rectory and Church Farm, along with a few cottages, comprise a third district, which stands upon the ridge south of Tit Brook, at the meeting of two ancient ways across the fields, some eight hundred yards from the crossroad to the south of the village. It is not clear why the church, which is accessible only along a muddy track or along a road which has no pavement, is so separated from the village; its siting may have been affected by the position of the manor house of Burdeleys (now Birdlines Manor Farm), since before 1100 the church briefly belonged to the lord of that manor. These three districts are marked on Map 2.3. The church consists of a chancel, nave with north and south aisles and a south porch, and a west tower.6 The building is made of the soft limestone known locally as clunch, with facing in field stones, except for the tower which is exposed. The chancel roof is tiled; the other roofs are lead-covered. The chancel, south arcade and south aisle are thirteenth century; the arches on the south side of the nave are early English, plain and pointed, resting on solid octagonal pillars with plain moulded capitals. The west tower is early fourteenth century, as is the rebuilt south porch in origin. Two windows in the south side of the chancel, and one at the east end of the south aisle, are also from this period. The north aisle and clerestory are late fifteenth century or early sixteenth century, with the wide, flat-topped arches and windows of the perpendicular style. The oak roof, rood screen and carved oak benches are all from this period. An act for the enclosure of the parish was obtained in 1839. Under it, the comparatively wide street verges in the village were allotted to the owners of the adjacent houses. The old village therefore consists of a considerable number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses – some forty are listed as being of ‘historical interest’ – and the church. These houses, both farm houses and cottages, which are timber-framed and plastered, and some of which are still thatched, are set back from the road in a mosaic of trees, pastures and gardens. The impression one receives is of an ancient, rural settlement, nestling in Nature’s bosom, and this has not been ruined by the considerable amount of nine-

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 48

48

Religion in English Everyday Life

yyy yy ;;; ;; yyy ;;; yyy ;;; yyy ;;; yyy ;;; yyy ;;; 'Old Village'

'New Estates'

Foxs Wa y

Close

Lane Hines

tl

Long Road

S .

Barrons Way

ds an

Ke ntin g s

a ne aynes L Sw

W es

Village College

e

h Close Bus

6

t

Av

ns ote Wo se Cl o

B1 04

d n Roa Barto

Har bo ur

Primary

School

t Stree Wes

d Hillfiel Road

er Miln Roa d

Baptist Chapel

T he

N

;;y; ; yy y ;;y; ; yy y ;y; y ;;;yy yyy ; y;; ; y ; y;y; y ;; yy ;;yy yy ;yyy y;; ;;;yy y; ; y ; ;; y ; y ; ;; y yy ;y;yy y;; yy ;;y;y;y ;yy ;;y;y;yy ;;yy ;yy y;; ;yy y;; ;y; y;; y; ;;y; y; y;yy y;y;y; ;yy y;; yy ;y; y;;

The Covers

Bakers Close

d

n En

G re e

'Green belt'

Va lley

;yy ;; yyy ;;; ;y;yyy y;; ;;y; yy

Branch Road

t . Thomas

02-Part II

t tree th S Sou

y ewa aus eC Th

Tit Brook

;yy y;; yy ;y; y;; ;;y;yy ;;y; ;yyy ;y;yy y;; yy ;y; y;; y;y; Ro ys ton L ane

St. Mary's Church

Church Lane

Map 2.3 Plan of Comberton

teenth-century infilling. There were 53 houses recorded in the Census of 1831; this had doubled by 1841 to 102 dwellings. The number recorded in 1921 was 119. The few examples of more recent infilling have conformed in character and tone to the old village; Pevsner, indeed, commends one example as conforming with the old cottages ‘without any sentimentality’.7 In the twentieth century, most of the new building has taken place outside the old village. There was limited growth between 1921 and 1931, when the number of houses increased from 119 to 164. Several

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 49

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

49

council houses were built along the Barton Road, some way out of the village to the east, around the entrance to Swayne’s Lane. However, after the Second World War, the County Council decided to make Comberton a centre for growth in the surrounding district. That policy was complemented by the establishment of the Comberton Village College, opened in 1960, which stands just outside the parish boundary at the west end of the village. Almost 100 houses were built between 1951 and 1961, and the village was greatly further enlarged in the 1960s. Although the process of infilling along the village streets was continued, on the whole new land was used, outside the old village. A council estate of 44 houses was built south of the east end of Swayne’s Lane (Bush Close). Almost 40 houses were erected at the western end of the village, near the College (Kentings). The largest estate, of about 300 houses, was built by a company called Janes in the angle between Barton Road and Long Road, on the Harborough field, one of the parish’s four fields before enclosure (hence the odd name, Harbour Avenue). Building continued in the 1970s; this included the Barrons Way estate in 1974, and a development opposite Manor Farm in Green End. There were 780 households on the 1983 Electoral Register. An additional 23 houses were built between 1986 and 1993, with planning permission granted for a further 27. There is a considerable contrast between the old village and the new estates, and the Comberton Village Plan (1971) describes Comberton as a split village. The difference is perfectly visible, for while the old village is built in a random layout, the post-war developments are characterised by hard, geometrical lines and a lack of mature trees. The split is also geographical, for the estates lie outside the village, to the west and to the east. This is particularly true of the big Janes estate and the council houses to the south of it, which are completely isolated from the village by a green belt of fields and market gardens. The position of the new estates and of the green belt are shown on Map 2.3. The split is also reproduced socially. Between 1801 and 1951 the population of Comberton, as recorded in the decennial censuses, fluctuated between 300 and 600 persons. In the last forty years, the population has multiplied, now being over 2,300 persons, or almost four times what it was in 1951. As the population has expanded, the purpose of the village has changed. Formerly, the village was largely an agricultural community, with some employment in quarrying. Now, a handful are employed in agriculture or in other jobs locally, and the village has become a commuter settlement, with the majority of the population working in Cambridge. There is, in addition, a certain number of people who have retired from elsewhere to the village. The village also serves another purpose: it is a rural educational centre. The Village College draws children from some sixteen villages

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 50

50

Religion in English Everyday Life

in a triangle bounded by the A45, the A603 and the A14, as well as providing adult education courses, and library and sports facilities. The village school, opened in 1846, was replaced in 1968 by the Meridian primary school, which serves the neighbouring villages of Toft and Little Eversden. There is thus a two-way flow each day, of children from the hinterland into Comberton, and of adults out of the village to work in Cambridge. Despite the increase in population, there has been no increase in local employment. This is due to two factors, one of which is peculiar to the area: the Lord’s Bridge radio telescope, which lies to the south-east of the parish, is extremely sensitive to interference, and new projects for local industry cannot therefore gain planning permission during the active life of the Observatory. But nor has there been an increase in village facilities, for the commuter population does its shopping and looks for its entertainment in Cambridge. The village, for instance, supported four pubs in 1851; it now supports two, one to the north and one to the south of the crossroads. There are three general stores, one being the post office, a butcher and two garages; there is also a hairdresser, an antiques shop and a joinery. All these businesses, bar the smallest store, lie in the old village, and this contributes to the somewhat anachronistic impression of a thriving small rural community.

III The population of Comberton has increased fourfold since the War, and the change in the social composition of the village is recognised by all residents. This recognition is made in terms of the opposition of villager to incomer (or some such equivalent – for example, old Comberton to new villagers). Two things should be said about this opposition. First, while such terms as villager and incomer are common to all residents, they are not always used in the same way, and I shall come later to discuss two distinct and incompatible models of the village which understand these terms in quite different senses. Second, despite appearances, it is impossible to draw up a strict list of who is a villager and who is not; exclusion from or inclusion within the category depends upon the context. So, for instance, while Mrs Green may epitomise the village element to a recent incomer, she may herself be considered an incomer by her brother-in-law because she married in from a neighbouring village twenty years ago. The category slides, and both points of view have their truth. It is quite possible on the one hand to distinguish two groups in the village by external criteria: by employment, education, how people spend their money, patterns of eating and entertainment, and so forth. This

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 51

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

51

division corresponds very roughly to the distinction between working and middle class. The villager is, broadly speaking, a member of the working class. But on the other hand there are other criteria at work in addition to that of class, which may indeed cut across the class category. There is a core (to use Marilyn Strathern’s term) of village families, who have lived in the village for several generations, who formerly were employed locally on the land, and who are interrelated. This core comprises the remnant of the agricultural labourers, who worked on the local farms and lived in tied cottages before the decline in rural employment and the growth of the village. They in a sense constitute an élite, the highest rank in the lowest status group. These families used to live in the houses which lie in the old village, which they did not, however, own. These houses are now for the most part occupied by incomers. The core village families now live in council houses, which are regarded as a ‘right’, much as tied accommodation was previously. In recent planning regulation, there is also provision made for low-cost housing. As there is a strong component of class and residence in the indigenous definition of the villager, there is a community of interest with other, nonindigenous council house dwellers, who also perform manual work for wages. This is most important in that the core families themselves, some four in number, are numerically insignificant in the enlarged village. This community of interest also extends to some families that live on the least expensive of the private estates, Janes, where there are links through family or through work. The villagers therefore reside, not where one would expect, in the old village but, on the contrary, to the east of the green belt outside the old village, in the council estate and (in part) on Janes estate. In the perspective of the core, the villager is defined by two sorts of opposition. First, particularly among the older people who worked locally, Comberton is defined in opposition to the surrounding villages. There is a local folk geography, in which the various villages and their inhabitants are attributed different characteristics. These stereotypes, which may reflect in part former village rivalries over such material assets as wives and jobs, assume the criteria we have already met: Comberton consists in a group of people defined by residence, class, employment and marriage. The stereotypes may also include elements contributed by the presence of incomers – for instance, Hazlingfield is a ‘rich’ village – but the detail refers to the villagers. Such stereotypes appear particularly at local football matches. Those who marry in from neighbouring villages have the option of continuing to consider themselves as coming from their native place, or of identifying with their spouse’s family and considering themselves as ‘Comberton’. Context and strategy determine which is chosen: a person may include himself as a villager or exclude himself as an

02-Part II

52

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 52

Religion in English Everyday Life

incomer, or be included or excluded, depending upon who is being spoken to and what is being discussed. It is worth remarking in this context that the way that the terms are employed may vary between men and women. Men’s status is associated primarily with their occupation, and their class is thereby fixed, for all to know. The men’s use of the villager/incomer opposition emphasises the villagers’ solidarity with respect to jobs and residence. Women however can constantly recreate status, ‘better themselves’, so to speak, by emphasising those contacts which reflect credit upon them. Women are capable of greater social mobility, and show more openness to contacts and values from outside the village and their class; they may manipulate the opposition with much greater subtlety according to context. This terminology can therefore in one context serve to distinguish a Comberton man from a man who has married in from a neighbouring village, and in another to distinguish both these men from another council house tenant who has no local kin ties. By extension, the opposition between the villager and the incomer can serve a second opposition, and comes to define the villager within the town/country or urban/rural dichotomy. While previous incomers became absorbed into the village through marriage and local employment, there is now a far higher influx of incomers than ever before, combined with a high turnover. This means that the village is now predominantly made up of strangers who are not related to the longer-term resident population by blood or marriage, nor to the locality by employment. These recent incomers come from further away, from all parts of the British Isles. They tend to be young married couples or older retired people, whose perceptions and way of life vary considerably from those of the village constituency. They have, for example, no perception of the local folk geography, both because they come from outside the area, most often from towns, and because their reasons for coming to Comberton are arbitrary, in the sense that they could equally well have chosen any other similarly sited village. In other words, they do not distinguish between Comberton and the other villages that lie around it. Just as residence is arbitrary, so are kinship ties; though incomers of some duration may move their elderly parents into the village, or have adult children who may marry and live on one of the estates, such families are of no significance as such in the social organisation of the village. Furthermore, the incomers are in general salaried, not waged, and few come to Comberton in order to work there. Most commute to Cambridge for work, and look to the town for shopping and entertainment. In short, it is the availability of accommodation alone that determines the incomer to choose Comberton. There is an ideal progression for a family, to begin in a house on Janes estate, and to move first to a

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 53

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

53

larger estate house, either on Harbour Avenue or in Barrons Way, and thence to one of the older houses in South Street, West Street or Swaynes Lane. As we shall see, this progression corresponds to an increasing integration into quite another view of what the village is.

IV All residents agree that Comberton is a village, despite the rapid increase in the population since the War. Indeed, the perception that Comberton is a village is important to all who live there. But as one listens, it becomes clear that two separate and incompatible models are being employed, which are being evoked by the use of the term ‘the village’. These models correspond, roughly speaking, to the views held respectively by the villagers and by the incomers. However, it should be emphasised – following Marilyn Strathern, from whose work the distinction is drawn – that the two models must be considered as polar types: they represent two alternative sets of assumptions to which an individual can make appeal when he or she speaks of the quality of village life and of participation in village affairs. The first model, that held by the incomer, generally reflects urban attitudes and aspirations. In this model, the idea of a community is central: the village is envisaged as a self-sufficient, intimate community, in which residents have common interests, and should help one another. It is the village as a whole that gets things done. This is an egalitarian model, in which the village as such imposes a purpose in terms of itself upon those who live there: one should act in the interests of the village. It would be of considerable interest to trace the development of this ideal of village life in literature, for it is there that most town people meet and internalise the model. Of course, not all incomers subscribe to such a model. People who come from other villages or from provincial towns may have a much less self-conscious image of what a village is and what country life entails. Some incomers, by reason of their life and ties outside the village, dissociate themselves from the village and do not feel bound in any way by responsibilities towards it. Others, as already suggested, through their occupational standing and residence identify with the villagers. The model most concerns those who want to make something of living in the village. The villagers are then incorporated in this model as the group that exemplify this solidarity and social life, and the incomers accept themselves as, for the moment, outsiders, but as ones with a duty, imposed by the nature of the presumed community, to become involved and to participate. Incomers should add their bit as the village gets things

02-Part II

54

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 54

Religion in English Everyday Life

done, and so they become integrated into the community. As F. Oxford8 points out, this duty is in part imposed because incomers recognise that, by their intrusion, they are destroying the community they seek. This model creates a sense of responsibility towards the community as a whole; in other words, it is based not upon the recognition of the needs of a particular section of the population, but upon the premise that the problems and interests of the various groups that make up the village population are ultimately compatible. Conflict and a separation of interests are unacceptable, because they would overthrow the image of an amicable, unified community. The villagers therefore hold a key role in the model in one sense, for they represent the core of village life in all its authenticity. Yet in practice, the village life that the incomers participate in is largely self-created and independent of the villagers, who can indeed be harshly criticised in individual cases for their apathy toward and lack of cooperation in village ventures. In reality, the community model tends to develop into ‘doing something for’ the villagers, for needs are discerned in the village, in accordance with the model of what a village ought to be, and organisations formed that meet these needs. In the name of the village the largely middle-class incomers help those whom they define as its representatives, the villagers. The ventures organised by incomers – and incomers organise everything except the sports and recreational clubs – tend to have either the aspect of welfare – for instance, the Help Scheme, the Over-Sixties, Meals on Wheels – or of education – the Women’s Institute, and various youth clubs and groups. Despite the egalitarian ideology, a hierarchical view develops: the communal nature of the village imposes a duty upon the privileged to assume responsibility towards and to assist the local underprivileged who, characteristically, do not always know what is good for them, and who have to have decisions taken upon their behalf. Matters are complicated, moreover, by the fact that there are two variants of this community model, or two styles of participating in it, and this distinction has important consequences. In the first version, which I shall call the democratic variant, the incomer persists in supposing that ideally the village should work together in accordance with an egalitarian ideology. This is despite the fact that the organisations founded by incomers are concerned, broadly speaking, with welfare and education, and hence with a division into donors and recipients. In the second version, which I shall call the conservative variant, the incomer accepts the role of donor, and acts as a benefactor or patron. There is something of a tension between the two variants of the model. The hierarchical version is most commonly consciously held by a group of people in the village who have in some senses come to be associated with a now-vanished squirearchy. Thus the farmers and

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 55

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

55

certain other families form a conservative and influential part of the incoming community. The composition of this group is mixed; perhaps the predominant characteristic is that its members appear to have lived in the village for a long time – although this is a characteristic of the category, rather than a necessary qualification of the individuals who make it up. Some of the farmers and shopkeepers are indeed at least second generation. Others are the successors of the first post-War wave of incomers who bought village houses for the purpose of retirement or commuting, before the estates were built. The group in general is defined by three markers: wealth, age and residence. Its members tend to be upper-middle class by the criterion of wealth. They also tend to be older, and indeed many are retired. As others – builders, shopkeepers and farmers, for instance – work locally, this group as a whole has a visible presence; they make up a good proportion of the people to be met in the village during the day. Most importantly, they live in the old village, with its thatched cottages and preserved farm houses. As a consequence of all these factors, this group has come to represent the village, in the sense that it fills the empty space created by the literary image of the village, complementing the core of labourers. Thus it is relatively easy for a person who lives in the old village to appear both to have always lived there and to be close to the heart of village life, whether they have lived there for three years or for thirty. This group can resent the public-spirited incomers with their egalitarian ideology as usurpers. On the other hand, as we have seen, even the latter end up by conforming largely to the hierarchical welfare version of the model, and in practice cooperation is often possible. Cooperation appears to be the rule, for example, on the Parish Council, which formerly was run by farmers and tradesmen, and now contains many more recent incomers. Nevertheless, there is a conflict in styles between these two groups, and it is fought out in the already familiar terms of village and incomer. In this case, unlike the earlier one, the visible contrast between the old village and the new estates serves to mark very clearly the contrast between the older, conservative group and the younger, democratic couples. This divide is, in practical terms, quite as important as the villager/incomer divide discussed above, and the villagers are in a sense the stake: who represents their interests? In practice, as hinted above, the conservative group appears to fit the urban or community model of the village far better than do the democratic group: they take on protective colouring, by their presence in the village during the day, by their age, and most of all by their residence in the old village houses. Moreover, as we shall see, the hierarchical version of the model to which they subscribe fits superficially far better with the villagers’ view of the world – and the villagers stand at the centre of the village perceived as a community.

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 56

56

Religion in English Everyday Life

V The core of villagers, although numerically insignificant, are of importance because of the place they hold at the centre of the community model. Yet they do not participate in village affairs, as the model demands; it is left to the incomers to organise on a village-wide basis, who in turn criticise the villagers for their apathy and non-participation. On the other hand, the villagers are active enough in arranging their own recreational activities. The sports clubs – cricket, bowls and, in particular, football – have their own cycle of activities, socials and fund-raising, in which the villagers take part and which they organise. The attitude of villagers towards incomer-organised activities appears at first sight to be simply negative and critical. Whilst the villagers accept, for example, meals from the Meals on Wheels, help from the Help Scheme or outings with the Over-Sixties, they do not participate actively on any of the committees, and they are very ready to criticise: they feel themselves to be ignored, that their voice is not heard, and they resent ‘interference’. At the same time, apparently paradoxically, they also resent the fact that those who ought are not doing what they should: that the farmers, or the vicar, or the incomers in general, do nothing for the village. The villagers, in short, feel themselves to be subject to powerlessness, neglect and interference. This distinction may be made: that when incomers act as patrons or benefactors towards certain recipient sectors, they are accepted, within certain limits. But they are not accepted when they undertake to integrate the village as a whole, and seek to represent it. The villagers’ model is an exclusive one; it excludes the incomer who, by his representative activities, confirms himself as an outsider. It may be called, in contrast to the community model, the interest group model. This interest group model is hierarchical, and emphasises the divisions between the constituent sections of the village. It assumes an ordering of roles in public life such that organisation on a village basis is always the prerogative of other people. Villagers do not feel they should be expected to participate. This is not simply a working-class egalitarianism, but includes the component attitude that they, the villagers, are the legitimate recipients of charity, welfare and education. This model implies both that benefits come from the outside, and that only amongst themselves does any community of interest lie. This is implicit in what has already been said of the villager/incomer opposition. Hence each group in the village is seen as having its own interests, and organisations are usually referred to by reference to their patron. In this view, the idiom of ‘community’ simply represents a marker of a particular (and powerful) group interest, and as such can of itself militate against villagers’ participation.

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 57

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

57

The Parish Council serves as an example. Incomers regard the Parish Council as being concerned with everybody’s interests, as it deals with local maintenance and village amenities. But villagers neither participate in it, nor regard it as ultimately concerned with their welfare. There was a particular quarrel which is illuminating. The Parish Council wished the playing fields on the village recreation ground to be maintained at the cost of the users. The sports clubs, however, which are run by villagers, refused even to discuss the question of making a payment. In their perspective, on the one hand, the fields should be provided for the village, and the Parish Council’s move only confirmed the view that it represents interests other than theirs. On the other hand, there is no value in discussion, for they regard themselves as largely powerless. There is then no point in going to meetings; the organisers are a group apart with motives of their own that cannot correspond to the villagers’ sectional definition of their interests. One key to this pattern of attitudes lies in the historical idiom in which complaints are made. Comparisons are always being made with the past. On the one hand, incomers are seen as filling the place left by the old rural middle class, which has now more or less disappeared. On the other hand, in practice the incomers fail to fulfil the role which they appear to have taken on, for as the old middle class disappeared, so did the hierarchical structure of rural life of which it was an integral part. The incomers appear therefore as somehow bogus; they act as patrons and thus imitate the old order, and yet act outside an institutionalised framework of patronage. The previous hierarchical structure was in large part reciprocal: the farmers provided welfare, housing and employment, and the farmworker in return provided his labour and cooperation. This structure provided a meeting of interests, whatever may be said of the distributions of power. In it, being of the village used to entail certain ‘rights’ to jobs on local farms and to village houses, as well as to certain amenities and welfare on the part of the local middle class who, whilst never claiming to be of the village, took certain responsibilities within that structure. With the growth of mechanisation and the reduction of the labour force on the farms, in conjunction with such factors as the disappearance of the squire and the increase in mobility, the social order in the countryside has changed and the hierarchical structure has now gone. Now, welfare is resented, for it by-passes old reciprocities. The old attitude remains, but the structure within which it made sense has passed. The new middle-class patrons and benefactors act very similarly to the old in that they provide leadership; but very often this leadership is exercised in a way that undermines the framework that provides legitimation. Incomers often indeed perceive the old structures, attitudes and way of life as repressive, and see their role as leaders as one of

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 58

58

Religion in English Everyday Life

freeing people from their past dependence and enabling people to do things for themselves. In this view, the villagers stand in need of education, so as to come closer to a proper community. Yet in the villagers’ idiom, education is rather to fit one for a place in the hierarchy, and this new view is in fact an attack upon who the villagers are, or who they feel themselves to be.

VI It should by now be clear that each model of the village perceives Comberton in terms of villager and incomer, but that in each case the distinction means different things. While from above the class divide, the difference can appear to rest upon differing life styles, aspirations and use of opportunities (for instance), from below, it appears to be about power, privilege and those things to which one is subjected. In the case of the incomers, the idea of community legitimates their position in their own eyes, through the notion of participation or making a contribution. By means of this idea, incomers can make of the village very largely what they will. They in a sense project upon the villagers an urban fantasy of what rural life is. It is because the villagers are necessarily at the centre of this image of rural life – as an interrelated, long-established, locally-employed community – that they retain a disproportionate power of disapproval which, even if it can be shrugged aside (for villagers have very little actual political power), is still felt, and to that extent resented. The matter is further complicated by the distinction within the incomers between the two variants of the community model. I distinguished between the (on the whole) wealthier, older, longer-established incomers who hold a more hierarchical model of patronage and who tend to live in the old village, and the younger, less wealthy, more recent incomers who hold a more egalitarian and democratic model, and who tend to live on the new estates. In the context of this distinction, the villagers’ views, or their supposed views, take on a much greater importance, as they represent a high card to be played by either side. Both groups can claim to speak in the name of the true interests of the villagers; on the whole, however, this card is better played by the conservative group who, as suggested above, take on for a number of reasons the appearance of representing the real village, or old Comberton. It should not be supposed, however, that the villagers are simply passive victims, the cardboard cut-out figures used to people the village world of urban incomers’ fantasy. For they too manipulate the opposition of villager to incomer. As we saw, this opposition formerly served

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 59

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

59

to demarcate the village from its neighbours, to draw a boundary and to claim ‘rights’ to houses, jobs and, most probably, wives. This opposition was set out in a kinship idiom, so that a related group of people, the village, had common interests in certain local resources. This idiom has been adapted to the new situation, where incomers are no longer from neighbouring villages, seeking wives, work and housing, but are commuters or retired people, simply seeking houses. Village interests are still marked in opposition to those of incomers. Yet the villagers have also changed. They are not anachronisms, survivals from a bygone age, threatened now with extinction. As rural society has changed, so have their patterns of work, their mobility, their aspirations and so forth. But this experience is not remarked as such; rather, change is experienced as people coming in, as something that lies outside the villager. In this sense, the villagers project their changes upon the incomers. Incomers pay the price for the villagers’ modernity: they permit the villagers to live as contemporary members of late twentieth-century British society while still considering themselves to be ‘the village’, an egalitarian group of related members with common interests. The question of housing illustrates the complexity of the attitudes involved. Outsiders came in and, in some cases, saved the old houses from ruin; in their own perspective, they preserved the old village, which is now in a remarkable state of repair. The villagers, however, resent the incomers as taking away ‘their’ houses; the occupation of the old village houses is a marked symbol of change in their lives. Nevertheless, the villagers showed no sentimentality about wishing to live in the old houses themselves, but sought to move to the more modern council houses. Indeed, their attitude to the village as a whole is not markedly conservative, and they support new building to the extent that the new houses will be available to them and to their children. They welcomed, therefore, the council houses and Janes estate, which the planners9 condemned as a blot on the village. Incomers, like the planners, are more critical of the new building, and condemn the ‘speculative’ – or, in other words, cheap – character of the Janes estate. They are in general more solicitous of the character of the village, and concerned with its conservation. It is among the old Comberton middle class, with their role as representatives of the village, that one hears the harshest criticisms of the new estates. One of these critics, a farmer, in fact sold the land upon which one of the estates is built. His complaints against incomers are not so much hypocrisy, but rather a testimony to the power of the village as a symbol. There is, therefore, in the village an economy or exchange of fantasies, in which the notions of the village, the villager and the incomer circulate, serving as the currency which allows each perspective to

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 60

60

Religion in English Everyday Life

interact with the others. The villagers define themselves in opposition to the incomers. The incomers define themselves in terms of the same opposition, but in accordance with their own perspectives and ambitions; and within the incomers, one group projects itself as ‘the village’ in opposition to another, that of the newcomers or commuters. If ‘the village’ exists at all, it exists in these mutual explorations and misunderstandings of mutually incompatible systems of interpretation, each with its own preconceptions and patterns into which the actions of others are fitted. The notion of the village is not therefore an inert survival from the past, but has a positive contemporary existence. It consists in a balance of forces, and can only be understood in the events that are constituted by the various mutual interpretations of the models which I have discussed. This existence can be seen in examples such as those that have been sketched, to do with village organisations, problems of leadership in the village and the question of housing. It can also be seen in the example of the life of the village church.

VII The village church is caught up in this economy of fantasies, and the stereotype with which I began is held in being by the conflicting demands and perceptions that are exchanged. There is indeed no stronger stereotype in the repertoire of novelesque rural imagery than that of the church and its vicar, the country parson. Before considering the present existence of the stereotype in Comberton, it is worth sketching out (following Anthony Russell)10 where the elements – both positive and negative – come from that make it up. Russell quite rightly warns that it is impossible to make generalisations that cover all cases. Nevertheless, the emergence of the idea of the modern clergyman can be traced to the second half of the eighteenth century. In this period, the value of benefices rose in conjunction with improvements in agriculture, and the social status of the rural clergy improved as high status was associated with land ownership. A higher status attracted entrants of a higher social class, and the rural clergyman became identified with the gentry, sharing his interests, education and politics. The roles of both clergy and gentry changed in the course of the nineteenth century; in particular, certain changes in the clergy, due in large part to the religious movements and reforms, led to a separation of interests: for instance, the withdrawal of the parish church from direct involvement in agriculture, formerly represented by tithes and glebe farms; the increased emphasis upon the sacred role of the priest; and the growing ‘professionalism’ of the

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 61

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

61

clergy. Despite this, other common interests held them together in the same hierarchical social system. The church held a particular place in the organisation of rural social life; in particular, in the organisation of welfare and education. The church provided provident societies – thrift clubs, rent clubs, clothing clubs, coal clubs and so forth – as well as a system of parochial visiting. Charity is of course an old task of the church, while visiting was essentially an innovation. The church also organised the schooling of the parish’s children. Church attendance on the part of labourers and their families was then part of a total and well-defined system of patronage, in which, in exchange for labour, jobs and houses were provided by the farmers, and welfare and education by the church. The vision of an incumbent resident in every rural parish, with the church well-attended and integrated into local life, which in many respects serves as a symbol for a timeless rural society, was in fact a very specific product of nineteenth-century economic, technical, social and moral changes. Further, it was never more than a vision, for the picture is more complicated. As Russell argues, the clergyman is also heir to a long tradition of animosity with his parishioners. He makes three points in this respect. First, he hints that the sixteenthcentury Reformation was the origin of the current state of the country church, or the beginning of the process that leads to the present: it was a predominantly urban movement that destroyed a religious system – and a priestly caste – that for all its abuses ‘had its roots in the hearts of country people’.11 Then, he suggests that the alienation of the working class from the Church and the decline in church attendance is not simply a nineteenth century urban phenomenon, but has its roots in the abuses of the rural clergy from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Lastly, the unpopularity of the rural clergy is related both to their role as magistrate and landowner on the one hand (with respect to the agricultural labouring class), and to the collection of tithes from farmers on the other. The compensation for these conflicts was that the priest shared in the agricultural interests of his parishioners (George Eliot’s Mr Gilfil fulfilled the triple role of being a priest, a gentleman and a farmer). Small congregations and hostility or at least ambiguity towards the clergy are therefore no novelty in the countryside. Here we have some of the elements that go to make up the other side of the coin, the ‘realist’ vision of a small and reactionary congregation, and a harassed priest. Just as, in the course of the nineteenth century, the clergyman lost any community of interest with his parishioners in agricultural matters, so, in the twentieth, he lost any monopoly of interest in matters of village welfare and education. As a result, the clergyman has become increasingly isolated. He has become peripheral to the life of rural soci-

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 62

62

Religion in English Everyday Life

ety, no longer an acknowledged leader of the local community sharing an interest in farming and country life, but separated from both village and gentry. At the same time he has become peripheral to the Church as it has become increasingly professional, and as it has concentrated its forces upon the cities.12 The country clergyman is left high and dry; his only resource often appears to be the folk religion which centres upon the church building, which in practice consists of a complex stereotype that describes and confirms his predicament without offering any solution.

VIII The villagers’ view of the church, and their demands upon it, stem from this complex history, or the local version of it. Villagers hark back to a period of real village life, when things happened, and the vicar was central to organising them. Older members produce a litany of former incumbents, going back to Gardner-Smith, who came in 1916. The main point of the list is to contrast with the present incumbent, and no doubt each member of the list was subjected to the litany in his turn. The vicar is criticised for not participating more in village affairs; as we have seen, this is a comment upon the existing social structures, in the light of certain expectations about the role of such persons. In the villagers’ minds, the vicar is not doing what he should; this is expressed in terms that he is not sufficiently interested in their welfare. The question of church charities is sometimes raised in this connection: in local memory, the church is connected with certain charities once administered by the vicar, which were in contemporary terms quite substantial, and which have now disappeared (under the twofold pressure of the Welfare State and inflation). Moreover, he is not interested in their general well-being: the vicar does not visit enough, he does not enquire after people’s health, nor does he bother what they do on Sundays. The vicar, in short, lacks involvement in the villagers’ concerns. Previous vicars, in contrast, were hail-fellow-well-met, they visited their parishioners weekly, they were accessible, everybody went to church, and so on. This is simply a structure of complaint; lest it seem invidious, it is worth noting that were the vicar to respond to these criticisms, another set would be formulated: he has nothing better to do than call on people, he does not mind his own business, he exudes a false bonhomie, and so forth. The vicar still holds some vestiges of his former offices, in particular, membership of various village committees, that reinforce the image tradition holds of him. But much more importantly, the church itself is a highly visible reminder of the old order of things. In appearance,

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 63

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

63

nothing has changed: the vicar holds services in a church that has been there for that purpose for six hundred years, christens children in the thirteenth-century font, marries young people at the chancel steps, and buries the dead in the churchyard. Correspondingly, old attitudes persist. The villagers see the church as theirs by right; it should provide services and welfare for them, and they see little or no need to support the church reciprocally. They no longer go regularly to church, as church-going is not a part of the same weave of jobs and houses, a texture supported by transactions in both directions. But that does not mean that their interest in the church is completely dead. Indeed, many of the older forms of involvement with the church persist: a few villagers are involved in maintaining and cleaning the church, and in decorating it with flowers; many attend the annual fête and church jumble sales. Some of their children go to the Cubs and to the Bible class, and carry on to confirmation. Villagers, of course, attend certain weddings and funerals, and some come on Whit Sunday, Harvest Festival and Remembrance Sunday. But all these activities are possible within the village framework of interpretation. In short, the villagers view the church in a historical idiom, as part of a system of patronage. This perspective is critical, since the old structure has disappeared, and the church cannot live up to what is expected of it; indeed, the church is failing to play its role whenever it draws attention to itself and declares its own interests. The perspective is also naturally conservative; all attempts at change are unwelcome, and changes in practice appear to threaten the hierarchical view of things. Recent changes in liturgy, for instance, seek to make better sense to the congregation and so to involve them more, and as such imply an urban, egalitarian ideology. So do any moves towards lay participation in the organisation of church activities. And so too do any references the church might make, outside the form of words of the services, to the faith of its members: the villagers are embarrassed by and resent any attempt to make them articulate or discuss matters of belief, or to deepen their own religious life. Faith is not their business but the vicar’s, and any attempt to make it so comes into conflict with the interest group model they hold of the village and its institutions. Moreover, in this regard, the village has a strong Baptist tradition – the chapel was founded in 1869 – and it may well be that religion of an overtly personal character is held to be a marker of Nonconformism. (The Baptist chapel does not of course represent a part of the hierarchical structure in the way the church does, but rather functions as a specific interest group.)13 The villagers, as we have seen, possess, by virtue of their position at the centre of the community model of the village, an importance that is disproportionate to their numbers. Their importance is perhaps seen

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 64

64

Religion in English Everyday Life

nowhere more clearly than in the case of the village church, which serves as a unique symbol of the village. It is their point of view that, despite their lack of effective political power, lies beneath the surface, giving the impression of a reactionary congregation. Their contribution is felt, rather than perceived, as a shadow of disapproval, a weight of inertia, a lack of cooperation.

IX The conflicts in interpretation that arise in the life of the church almost invariably have in practice a financial component that imparts to them their edge and insistence. The church building and its repair is a major constraint, and this is nothing new, but rather a constant in the life of the church. The church building was more or less complete by the beginning of the sixteenth century, and it is unlikely that it has ever again been in such good condition. The demands of repair and restoration have been a constantly recurring fact of church life (while the records – of neglect and restoration – reflect the history of the English parish church in miniature). In 1554 the glazing of the chancel was in decay; in 1561 the chancel was in disrepair. In 1643 William Dowsing, an agent of the Puritan Parliament, ordered the destruction of the carved cherubim from the north and south aisles, and of the glass, as it contained superstitious images. In 1665 the town plough was kept in the church, which in 1685 was filled with stones, lime and rubbish.14 The first repair of which I have found record occurred in 1767; the west part of the nave roof was repaired, though with inferior workmanship. They follow in a steady rhythm. Although in 1783 church and chancel were in tolerable repair, about 1820 the tower was in decay and had to be partially rebuilt. A grant from a church building society enabled the church to be repaired around 1850. Restoration to the exterior was carried out by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1874-9, and again in 1884-5. The south porch was almost entirely rebuilt at this point. In the 1890s the vicar (Peake Banton, who later went mad) raised £700 for further repairs. A new chancel roof had been built by 1898. There were fresh repairs in 1902-3, and the tower was again restored in 1921. It appears from the church accounts that there were no repairs of any importance carried out between 1921 and 1961, except for £145 spent on the roof in 1934. Repairs were, however, carried out to the fabric in 1961, 1963, 1968-71 and 1975, and to the organ in 1979. Further extensive repairs were needed in the mid-1980s, in particular to the south wall, chancel and north-eastern corner of the nave. Any kind of appeal that the church might make to the villagers based upon a notion of its own deficiency or need meets, for reasons

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 65

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

65

we have discussed, with a lack of response. The church indeed is supposed to be rich, and to be supported both by the wealth of the Diocese and by the wealthier parishioners. Those incomers who are involved with the church tend, however, to believe that the village as a community ought to support the church, and do not think that the community’s support should be dependent upon material reciprocity on the church’s part. The Parochial Church Council (PCC), which is very largely made up of incomers, in general looks to the village, and not simply to the congregation, to raise money for the church. The different styles of the incomers’ model shape views within the PCC as elsewhere in the village, and this is true too of methods of raising funds. The more conservative constituency supports and indeed instigates a social calendar of fund-raising events, which mesh in with other events of a charitable nature organised by the ‘old village’. These events constitute a yearly cycle, with the annual August bank-holiday fête as the crown. There is a rhythm of sales of work and produce, jumble sales, occasional coffee mornings and the Harvest Supper that makes up a good part of village life, each event being organised by a small number of key people who recruit their helpers and contributors from different parts of the village. The sales are well attended by the villagers, as is the fête. These events, after all, correspond to the wish that the church organise activities for the village, and it is through these sales that the villagers contribute to the maintenance of the church. The more conservative version of the community model apparently fits well enough with the villagers’ perspective, and this enables those who hold it to take on the mantle of expressing the village point of view; as we have seen, the socially powerful, wealthier village residents, including the farming families, exert considerable influence, often in the idiom of the voice of ‘the village’. In terms of the church, this group comprises a good proportion of the membership, and such people are active in the more traditional church activities – organising the choir, acting as sidesmen, reading the lesson, serving as PCC member and as churchwarden. In pursuing these activities, these people are participating in a traditional model of the church which, while it pays lip-service to what it perceives the villagers’ wishes to be, in fact differs greatly from the latter model. So, for instance, the ‘old village’ echoes the criticism made by the villagers that the vicar does not visit enough. But in this case, the model that the vicar is failing to live up to is quite different: the present criticism expresses the wish that the vicar should attend more of the ‘old village’s’ social calendar of events, and should recognise its social hierarchy. For the conservative constituency wants a vicar and a church that are made in its own image, and which participate in the patronage version of the community model. The vicar is supposed to

02-Part II

66

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 66

Religion in English Everyday Life

be a member of the ‘old village’ – on the criterion of residence, though not of course of wealth – and like its members, to share the values of the idealised country church. He is expected, for example, to be attached to the church building, the Prayer Book and Matins. Thus although conservative members on the PCC wish to be led by the vicar, in accordance with the ‘country parson’ model, in practice they can only be led in their own direction, and they oppose all attempts by the vicar to alter his stereotyped role or that of the church, whether his wish is imposed by his own tastes or by external necessities. The more conservative version of the community model has never achieved a hegemony, and its power within the church has been challenged by those incomers who hold the egalitarian version of the model, whose representation has grown as the new estates have been built. This challenge has been assisted by inflation, which has undermined in particular the cycle of fund-raising events. Between 1950 and 1972, the annual turnover of the church accounts (excluding restoration, which has always been subject to separate fund-raising) remained more or less constant. Between 1972 and 1983, the turnover increased tenfold, from £520 to £5,672. The principal items of expenditure have been the Diocesan Quota, heating and lighting, insurance, and the incumbent’s expenses. The Quota is by far the largest item at present. Whilst the contribution made by the congregation through collections and, latterly, covenants has increased in line with inflation, the income from fund-raising events has failed to maintain its proportion. The fête, which is the principal annual fund-raising event, used, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to raise a sum equal to between one-half and three-quarters of the parish account’s annual turnover. However, in the decade 1973 to 1982, although the sum raised by the fête increased, it did not even double the total of previous years, and so fell in proportion to a sum equal to between one-sixth and one-eighth of the annual turnover. While the fête formerly was a way of raising substantial funds, it is no longer such. For the same effort each year, the return is proportionately smaller. This is particularly significant with respect to the demands of restoration which, as we have seen, are a recurrent fact of church life. The sums required periodically for restoration vary from being approximately equal to the annual turnover, in the case of fairly minor repairs, to being five or six times this sum, in the case of major repairs. It may be seen that, while fund-raising efforts on the scale of the fête could have met restoration and repair bills in the past, they can no longer do so. To meet a repair bill of twice the annual turnover in 1971 would have demanded the income from three fêtes; in 1981 it would have demanded fourteen fêtes to meet the bill. Thus the model

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 67

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

67

of church life that the ‘old village’ participate in, that consists of a cycle of events, both big and small, has ceased to be a viable way of life, or at least it fails to respond to contemporary constraints. The egalitarian version of the community model is therefore gaining ground in the church and on the PCC as elsewhere in the village, and it implies quite a different idea of the church. The people who hold this version see participation in the church in a nonhierarchical perspective, and see lay involvement in quite different terms to the conservative view outlined above. For instance, they seek to change the financing of the church from a basis of collections and fund-raising to that of covenanting, so that the church’s members, rather than the village as a whole, maintain the church by regular subscription, and so seek to put an end to time-consuming and inefficient fund-raising. For they see the purpose of the church to lie elsewhere. They would like to see a time when the church does not simply make ends meet, but has money in the bank, and they see the demand for solvency as a first step on a path to better things, rather than as a central and permanent feature of the church’s continuing life. This group see the purpose of the church to lie in the religious life of its members. They take as primary the overtly religious aspect of the church, and see religious commitment in personal terms, including a personal commitment to the life of the church. The idiom of ‘stewardship of time and talents’ makes good sense to them. In this view, the church should not be involved in organising secular events, but rather should organise activities that include a distinct element of personal religion. It is this group who support the Bible study meetings, for they are interested in matters of theology and spirituality, and it is from among this group that come forward such candidates as there are for lay ministry training. This group is in some ways the most congenial to the vicar, for its members are on the whole articulate and some are theologically literate; they are far less bound by tradition, and do not on the whole criticise the vicar for failing to meet an impossible secular model. On the other hand, they may well criticise his theology, and blame him for the lack of a sufficient ‘religious’ component to church life. Unlike the conservative group, this egalitarian group attaches no particular value to the church building as such; its members tend to regard it as an obstacle because it is a constant source of financial anxiety. Nor do they have any strong sense of the church as a symbol of the village; indeed, they have no specific model of the church as a rural church, but rather want a suburban church in a rural setting, that corresponds to the status of Comberton as a commuter village, a church with an intensive church-oriented life for those families involved, and a freedom of movement and flexibility that is inherent in

02-Part II

68

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 68

Religion in English Everyday Life

a high turnover of population and recent settlement patterns. Thus they tend to combine the community model which views the village as a homogeneous whole with a view of the church as a sect, as a gathering of the Christians in the community. In contrast,15 the conservative model may be described as viewing the church as ‘the godward expression of the natural community’. Conflicts that arise between these two models of the church often seem to concern clashes of style and priorities rather than raising fundamental differences, and they are by their nature usually trivial. Two examples which illustrate the incompatibility of the models concern the practice of taking a collection in the Communion service, and the creation of a Sunday school. In both cases, it is money that causes the differences to emerge. In the debate over whether or not a collection should be taken during the service, the egalitarian position (which prevailed) was that there should be none, but simply a plate placed by the door into which contributions could be put. The giving of money should be unobtrusive, and hence in practice done only by those who know the ropes. Various reasons were given in support of this position: that a collection undermined covenanting, that a collection was embarrassing for those who did not want to contribute, that it was ‘nicer’ to keep asking for money out of the service. Whatever the reasons, the decision emphasised the character of the church as a sect or in-group, and it also fitted with the desire for a greater emphasis upon the spiritual and less upon the mundane (however ill-conceived such an opposition may be in theory). The conservative position was that a plate should be passed round in the service, so that all present had a chance to contribute, whether or not they were regular attenders and familiar with current practice. The villagers shared the latter view, for it fitted with their view of the legitimate demands of the church. Differences of a congruent kind emerged over the setting-up of a Sunday school, in the atmosphere of financial constraint engendered by an impending restoration. In the view of the conservative element – whose children were on the whole older or had grown up – sufficient provision had already been made for the children in the more traditional activities associated with the church, the Bible class, the choir and the uniformed organisations. The Sunday school, however, was set up by members of the egalitarian tendency with a twofold aim, of giving religious education to the children of church members, and of evangelism, through the incorporation of the non-church-going parents of Sunday school members. Any financial requests that were made on behalf of the Sunday school to the PCC were met with hostility by the conservative element. Although this hostility was largely unfocused, it was expressed in terms of priorities of spending: the PCC ought to be spend-

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 69

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

69

ing money on the church building and its environment, the church car park and the churchyard walls, because this would be money spent ‘for the village’. The two views are mutually incomprehending: the one sees the church’s work for the village in terms of involving as many as are willing in the life of the church, while the other sees the church’s work in terms of the facilities (and events) it provides for the village. Both see the church as having a role with respect to the village conceived as a community, but the egalitarian view demands participation, while the conservative view offers patronage.

X The life of the country church is at once a function of the complex phenomenon, ‘the village’, and a locus of the transmission of both its possibility and constraints. At present, there is a balance of forces: there is an optimistic vision (which is principally of urban origin) which portrays the village – and parish – as a natural community, and yet the different competing versions of this community model lead to an impasse, in which a more pessimistic vision of the church (this time largely of rural origin) comes to the fore, giving a content to the divisions that are felt rather than perceived. In this situation, no party can make a move that will be construed as neutral or innocent; everything is interpreted in advance, in terms of the dynamic of the stereotype outlined. This example serves to illustrate a number of general points, which will be developed in the Kingswood case study which follows. First, it indicates the enduring importance of family and kin in organising a sense of place, however sophisticated the manner of its invocation. Second, it demonstrates the existence the past has in the present: tradition exists not as a survival, in opposition to the present and to progress, but within the present and as part of it. The optimistic urban vision of the countryside is influenced by a rural perception which, in its turn, has developed out of a history of growing dominance of the town over the countryside. The relationship of urban to rural, or of modern to traditional, or, indeed, of incomer to villager, is less one of opposition than of complementarity. They participate in a complex economy of interests and projections, an economy that is flexible and capable of development, resilient and long-lived: a structure in which change is interpreted and given shape. And third, the example shows the organising power of moral accounts of self and world, both at the level of collective self-definition and the classification of others within that definitional framework, and at the higher social level of the interactions of these accounts. These three points result from an approach that should be distinguished from the positivistic tendency of some sociology (and sociology

02-Part II

70

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 70

Religion in English Everyday Life

of religion), which knows in advance how to divide up the social phenomena that it finds, and so sets forth a number of common-sense categories, each with its own characteristics, views, needs and so forth, into which people can be allotted (and, ideally, counted). There is no attempt made to say from where these categories and divisions come, nor to justify them; indeed, the categories are treated not as historical, human creations, but as natural, in this way disguising their origin and motivation. In the case of a religious sociology, the sphere of the sacred (however defined) is taken as being universally distinct from that of the profane or everyday. Yet the category of religion (whether in sociology of religion or implicit religion or folk religion) is not a good one for sociological purposes, for there is no homogeneous bounded phenomenon that can be so labelled a priori and thus isolated for analysis. Furthermore, to claim that there is, is to adopt one of the stereotyped positions (in the case in hand, that of the modern, democratic version in particular); it is, unconsciously, to take up a position within the field under consideration, to adopt certain tactics and stakes. The approach adopted here, in contrast, seeks to base itself upon the actors’ self-definitions, upon their assumptions, their categories and the uses they make of them. In so doing, it allows that categories shift, so that a person is not a villager (for example) by essence, once and for all, but according to context, as people actively make sense of who they are with respect to one another. And it acknowledges that the separation of sacred from profane is far from obvious, and indeed that what we term the religious sphere has to be considered in and as part of the wider context of human activity. What is proposed is not a simple idealism, to replace what are claimed to be the ‘theory-free’ facts of positivist sociology, for the reality that defines the country church is not located in people’s minds, in their opinions, ideas and wishes, but in the assumptions and collective categories they (often unreflectingly) call upon and, moreover, in the interactions of these categories and assumptions. This last point is crucial: the reality that constrains and determines what is the country church is of a different order to the minds and to the persons that make it up; it is to be found in the mutual interaction and interpretation of the often mutually incomprehending actors, in what I have called an ‘economy of fantasies’, which does not belong to any party or understanding. The country church only exists at this level, in a compendium of experiences, behaviours, misunderstandings and so forth that is quite separate both from the ‘objective’ categorisations of the sociologically-minded and from the ‘subjective’ opinions of the participants. The life of the country church in Comberton is, therefore, an illustration of a social fact, being at the same time complex and intangible. The social fact, although obscure, is both more real and enduring than

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 71

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

71

either the hard facts (which can be counted) or the recordable opinions which together form its temporary realisations, and to mistake either for that reality is frequently to join in at the level of and as a participant in the economy of fantasies. The case of Comberton and its church may then serve as a prelude to the more detailed and nuanced study that follows, raising in their broad forms the issues at stake; there are as well a number of specific topics in the Kingswood materials (kin and place, the forms of existence of the past, moral accounts of the person) that recall and develop in a new context aspects of this earlier research.

Notes 1. Leslie Paul, The Deployment and Payment of the Clergy, London 1964: 82-8. 2. Such as Paul, Deployment and Payment, and Anthony Russell, The Clerical Profession, Oxford 1980: 94. 3. The Times 14/4/1960. 4. Anthropological studies of English rural life form an intermittent tradition. Williams’s studies of Gosforth in Cumberland and Ashworthy in Devon (W. Williams, The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth, London 1956, and A West Country Village: Ashworthy, London 1963) constitute the only examples from the generation of community studies, the others being concerned with rural communities in Scotland or Wales or, if English, with mining or market towns, or urban studies. See the summaries in R. Frankenberg, Communities in Britain, Harmondsworth 1966, and C. Bell and H. Newby, Community Studies, London 1971; (cf. the discussion in part III, below). Two criticisms have been made of the community studies approach. First, that it is sternly synchronic in perspective. A way forward was signalled by Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, London 1969, but it remained without direct descendants; in practice, social historians have provided more fruitful examples. Second, community studies take ‘kinship’ as an unproblematic category, characteristic of ‘traditional’ societies (or of their remnants). Little else appeared until Robin’s and Strathern’s studies of Elmdon in Essex (Jean Robin, Elmdon, Cambridge 1980; Marilyn Strathern, Kinship at the Core, Cambridge 1981). Here one encounters a very different approach. There is a strong historical perspective, compensating in part for a move away from the peripheral or transitory status of the object, permitting consideration of the modern context and contemporary forces at work. At the same time, kinship is reconsidered, as a resource employed by the actors to conceptualise social life and interactions, organising such categories as ‘the village’ and ‘class’ (in this respect paralleling Robin Fox’s study, The Tory Islanders, Cambridge 1978). The brief study presented here, of a village not far from Elmdon, is intended as a contribution in the same spirit, drawing upon Strathern’s approach. Strathern’s study is based upon materials collected in 1964. This account of Comberton draws upon materials collected a generation later, in 1980-2, (although contact has been maintained) and demonstrates how categories such as those identified by Strathern persist, despite enormous demographic and other change, by taking on new forms. In this way, attention is focused upon the continuity of local identity in a local apprehension of time, as distinct from local chronicles. It is also worth remarking two other small-scale studies of nearby villages: Polly Hill, The History of Isleham Fen in the 1930s, Cambridge 1990, and Akbar Ahmed and James Mynors, ‘Fowlmere:

02-Part II

1/21/09

72

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

4:28 PM

Page 72

Religion in English Everyday Life Roundheads, Rambo and rivalry in an English village today’, Anthropology Today 10 (no.5), 1994: 3-8; taken together, these studies create a potential for comparison. For the sake of completeness, mention should be made of C. Harris, Hennage, New York 1974, but it is written in an earlier spirit. Anthropological studies of rural communities have the capacity to focus upon initiative and autonomy within complex populations, and the potential to appraise the small scale manipulations of definitions of self and other that constitute a micro-politics encompassing insider and incomer alike. This is in distinction from, for example, Newby’s account of ‘the deferential worker’, which subscribes to the notion that outside categories define the potential of local populations, and that local categories reflect dominant economic relations (Howard Newby, The Deferential Worker, London 1977). Yet these possibilities have only been exploited fitfully. The intellectual stimulus towards studies in self-definition and continuity has been developed in a series of accounts written or edited by Anthony P. Cohen (Anthropological Studies of Rural Britain, 1963-1983: A Position Paper, London 1983; Whalsay: Symbol, Segment and Boundary in a Shetland Island Community, Manchester 1987; (ed.) Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures, Manchester 1982; (ed.) Symbolising Boundaries: Identity and Diversity in British Cultures, Manchester 1986). These were, however, limited by a concentration upon remote, dialect or otherwise fringe areas, as marginality has been a crucial – and largely unexamined – category in the creation of an anthropological ‘other’, constituted as an object for observation, and stripped of any ‘self ’ or power of initiative. Cohen recognises these criticisms – see A.P. Cohen, ‘The British anthropological tradition, otherness and rural studies’, in P. Lowe and M. Bodiguel (eds), Rural Studies in Britain and France, London 1990: 203-21. Recent developments by M. Strathern, After Nature, Cambridge 1992, and Mary Bouquet, Reclaiming English Kinship, Manchester 1993, have concentrated at a general level upon developing the idea of the use of kinship as a code for making sense of English life. These kind of approaches have not had any clear impact, however, upon the most recent village studies, notably Nigel Rapport, Diverse World-Views in an English Village, Edinburgh 1993, and M. Bell, Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village, Chicago 1994, which resort to a mixture of psychological narrative and positivist sociology, anecdote and simple chronology. General sources: A.P.M. Wright, ‘Comberton’, in The Victoria County History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely (VCH), Vol. 5, Oxford 1973: 175-89; Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, An Inventory of Historical Monuments in the County of Cambridgeshire. Vol.1, West Cambridgeshire, London 1968: 48-55 (RCHM); Censuses 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991; for Population Tables 1801-1931: see VCH. In the Cambridge Collection, City Library, Cambridge, see: Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely County Council Planning Department, Comberton Village Plan (draft), 1971; South Cambridgeshire District Council, ‘Comberton’, in Local Plan 1993, vol. 2: 53-5; Comberton Village Handbook, duplicated, compiled by R. Foreman, B. Barker and S. Stephenson, 1981. See P. Gardner-Smith, Comberton Parish Church: a descriptive and historical account, [Cambridge] 1929; N. Pevsner, Cambridgeshire, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth 1970: 323-4; RCHM: 48-55. Pevsner, Cambridgeshire: 324. Frances Oxford, ‘Epilogue’ to Strathern, Kinship at the Core. In the Comberton Village Plan, 1971. Anthony Russell (ed.), Groups and Teams in the Countryside, London 1975, and A.Russell, The Clerical Profession, Oxford 1980. See also the relevant essays in Sheridan Gilley and W.J.Sheils (eds), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from pre-Roman Times to the Present, Oxford 1994.

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 73

The Country Church – St Mary’s, Comberton

73

11. Russell, Groups and Teams: 82. 12. This account, because it seeks to generate the elements deployed in the stereotype, oversimplifies: rural dioceses have long employed rural officers, chaplains to agriculture, Bishop’s advisors on rural society, and so forth; and there have been a number of national institutions and initiatives, most notably the Archbishops’ Commission on Rural Areas, Faith in the Countryside, London 1990. 13. There is also a Methodist chapel in the next village (Toft). 14. For the earlier history, see the Victoria County History. For this section, parish registers, records, accounts and magazines were consulted both at the church and in the County Archives. 15. See the distinction made by Martin Down, ‘The shape of the rural Church’, Theology 1984: 164-72.

02-Part II

1/21/09

4:28 PM

Page 74

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 75

PART III: THE KINGSWOOD WHIT WALK

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 76

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 77

1

INTRODUCTORY I It is easy to assume that values, perceptions and ways of doing things are sufficiently shared within English culture that all participants’ behaviour and reasoning will be mutually transparent. Yet there are exceptions to such an assumption, and many of these fall under the heading of what I will call ‘local particularity’. There are local ways of doing things and of thinking, ways of organising continuity and coping with misfortune which, while they are not in fact unique to any particular locality, are tied in the actors’ perceptions to the experience of that locality. In this way, ‘local particularity’ is irreducible, because these ways of life create a sense of identity which relates to a particular place: certain aspects of life are mapped out on the ground and cannot be separated from it. These local ways of doing things and of thinking cannot be anticipated or perceived intuitively from the outside, but can only be comprehended by paying careful attention: by choosing possible models of understanding, applying protocols of behaviour upon the basis of these models, and checking these protocols through participation; in short, by the construction of an understanding. Usually, anomalies – or the lack of fit between the local way of life and the outsider’s assumptions – either pass unremarked or are experienced as stereotypic features of the local people, their quaintness, stubbornness and so forth. Yet recourse to such stereotypes explains nothing. It is a form of blindness to the perceptions and motivations that are expressed in everyday life, and which emerge in certain events. One example of such an event is the Whit Walk held by the churches in Kingswood, a district of East Bristol. The Walk is important locally, and people come in considerable numbers either to march or to watch. Moreover, it is entirely a product of the area, it is autochthonous; it is not promoted by commercial or civic interests, it has not been preserved as an example of folklore for tourism, and it is

03-Part III

78

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 78

Religion in English Everyday Life

generally unremarked in the city press. So it raises this question – why should so many people be involved? The event must make sense to the participants, and in fact it points to local values and ways of doing things, especially as they relate to attachment to territory and local identity. The purpose of this essay is to ask, beginning from the Whit Walk, what it means to live in Kingswood. The material that the Whit Walk presents is peculiarly complex. For convenience, three topics are distinguished in the analysis, although they are best considered as dimensions or aspects of a single phenomenon. (In the essay they are treated in a different order to the one in which they are introduced now.) First, there is the matter of ‘personality’, or what it means to be a person and how people relate to one another. There is, in the local perception of the self, something that permits and encourages both marching and watching the procession: it is appropriate to local people and makes sense to them to be there and to be part of the event. Being present at the Walk is an aspect of being who you are in Kingswood, it forms part of specification of ‘personhood’, a specification that must include the opposition of those who bear witness to those who watch on the one hand and, on the other, that of the respectable to the rowdy. The second level or dimension of the analysis concerns the question of ‘territoriality’, or the definition of the place and how people relate to it. The Walk goes through the centre of Kingswood, and runs the length of it, and sums up a notion of belonging or of occupancy that is experienced through participation in local families, and is organised by the continuity of the household. The experience of locality cannot be distinguished from belonging to a (local) family. Third, there is the topic of ‘local history’, or what has happened in the past and how people relate to that past. The Walk not only measures the dimensions of Kingswood, but also traverses a cross-section of its history, a history which brings to our attention the divisions that are still present, revealed at the same time as the display of unity by the churches and chapels. There is a history present, a history of conflicts within the ranks of the respectable, the memory of which is repressed and yet returns. I will make two comments at this stage, though the points are developed later in the essay. On the one hand, ‘respectability’, which is the key to a description of personality, is not a strictly individual quality, but rather expresses a collective morality, a desire to be a full or complete person in the terms of the local society. The reader should, if possible, suspend judgement, and not fill in this term with its accustomed individualistic and slightly pejorative connotations, for the complex of values organised around the notion of respectability is embodied by a particular group that together seeks and achieves a degree of inde-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 79

79

pendence, while at the same time subscribing to the collective ideals of equality and of universal brotherhood. On the other hand, the reader may be puzzled by the lack of reported direct speech in this account. This is because we are concerned with ‘all that goes without saying’, with ‘systems of schemes of perception and thought’ which exist in practice only in their expression with respect to particular cases, and which are, for reasons that will emerge, ‘denatured’ when raised to the level of an informant’s utterance.1 In the case of the values of respectability, since discretion and restraint are crucial in the ordering of local life, there is a lack of local terms expressing indigenous perceptions concerning these notions. A person willing to talk openly of these values could not embody them, so verbal expressions of such perceptions are rare, trivial in content, and misleading as to the truth of the situation. We shall return to the significance of banality later in this introduction. Together, these three ‘dimensions’ of personality, territoriality and local history form what we might call a definitional ‘space’, mapped out onto a particular place or site. There is, however, an additional complication. I have called this definitional space local particularity in order to draw attention to a ‘fourth dimension’ that is present in any definition of ‘the local’: the influence and perception of outsiders. To engage for a moment in naïve autobiography, my original starting point for this work was what can best be called a sense of pleasure that I experienced, after several months, at being in Kingswood, a pleasure concerned with the place and with the inhabitants. Upon reflection, this pleasure was occasioned by a mismatch of categories, by the fact that I did not understand local life and could not read matters ‘at sight’, and by my increasing sense of that distance and the ‘otherness’ of Kingswood. The ‘object’ of my pleasure, this ‘otherness’, I termed local particularity, and this essay is the result of my subsequent attempts to understand more precisely what it was that caused my pleasure. The point at issue here is that the notion of local particularity contains two elements inextricably mixed: on the one hand, what it is like to live in Kingswood, or the indigenous perception, and on the other, my experience of this experience. This inextricable mixture of elements points to a more general problem. Firstly, we are concerned with the various dimensions of selfdefinition of a population, its identity. ‘Among the many things that society is or is like, it is or is like identity … The social is, in virtue of its categorising and classifying structures, a space that ‘identifies’’.2 This space is made up of human beings: ‘our heads are full of categories generated by the social, which we project back upon the social’. In the normal course of events, this reflexivity is not perceived, for our social space is not problematic; we act automatically or unreflectively and, as

03-Part III

80

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 80

Religion in English Everyday Life

it were, grammatically. However, secondly, reflexivity and social space are a problem for the outsider, and especially for the anthropologist, for we then neither act unreflectively nor grammatically. There is instead an experience of interacting with the (alien) social space; I have called this encounter one with local particularity, and it is made up of the daily experience of misunderstanding, which is the raw material for any account of another society. The broader implications of this situation for ethnography and anthropological theory have received a good deal of attention in recent discussions. Among the most fruitful results of this has been a focusing upon the way in which particular intellectual interests of the investigating community – discoveries of problems and formulations of theories – have been localised in particular regions, so that ‘the apprehension of the character of particular regions through concrete features that seem to ‘belong’ intrinsically to them has to be understood in relation to the prior organisation of anthropological ideas that enable such features to become a focus for new conceptualisations’.3 In this perspective, the agenda of ethnography is to an extent set by the metropolitan community within which the discipline arises, and writers from this community – to put matters crudely – project questions concerning their culture, and find answers to these questions, in other regions of the world. There is an as yet largely unmonitored process whereby a range of key (anthropological) ideas appear and a number of regions with a well-defined character are constituted; at the same time, by the same process, other regions appear to be without such a prominent character at all.4 The latter consideration is of importance with respect to ethnographic studies in Britain, such as this essay attempts, for Britain appears broadly to be a region without any prominent anthropological characteristics, and the (re)importation of anthropological techniques learnt elsewhere has proved difficult to achieve. Several ‘community studies’ were produced in the 1950s and early 1960s, but they remained without progeny.5 A number of reasons, both institutional and theoretical, may be suggested for this infertility, which are relevant to the construction of this essay. The early monographs were produced at a time when sociology was ill-represented and precarious in British universities, and the method of intensive fieldwork was borrowed from the established practices of social anthropology. As sociology in the universities gained strength, the methods of social anthropology were abandoned in British empirical studies, as sociologists sought to establish the intellectual credentials of their subject, and to show that sociology was a distinctive discipline: that it had its own body of theory, used strictly scientific and objective methods and contributed fundamental (and not merely useful) knowledge.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 81

81

The subject also established de facto regional limits, defining its territory as complex societies, as distinct from social anthropology, whose field was primitive or simple societies. Sociology in this period of professionalisation has been characterised by a tendency to rely upon quantitative methods and by the development of sophisticated general social theory, by an insistence upon exactness and impersonality.6 In retrospect, then, personal and qualitative studies in Britain were marginal to the concerns of the developing academic profession.7 Moreover, the intellectual climate changed, undermining the political presuppositions that had underlain community studies in the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, confidence that the interests of all groups in society were reconcilable, and that reform and education had the ability to rectify inequalities, collapsed, and the intellectual mood changed to a more radical criticism of class and other interests. This change fitted with the emphasis upon theory in sociology, and community studies (broadly defined) were criticised for treating problems in a fragmentary way, whilst distracting attention from more fundamental structural issues.8 There were also limitations internal to the methods employed. Fieldwork was made possible by two presumptions, that of the exotic, and that of coherence. The key anthropological idea was that of kinship,9 imported from African studies. Kinship had been defined as a characteristic of non-European social organisation, and the impact of its ‘discovery’ among our own population allowed a reordering of ideas about British society. At the same time, the assumption was made that the technique of participant observation, associated with the study of kinship, was best suited to a bounded, stable, small-scale community. As a result, studies were concentrated upon communities that could be defined as coherent and exotic: rural villages or small towns, or traditional groups in an urban setting. In every case, the presumption was of a particular way of life that was under threat of passing away under the pressures generated by the wider ‘modern’ society. Thus the rediscovery of the specificity of certain areas was always portrayed in terms of a survival: the distance between the subjects of the study and ourselves was maintained in terms of time, for the importance accorded to the family was perceived as the survival of the past in the present.10 The impact of community studies was then bound to be limited. On the one hand, the procedure of ‘making strange’ our own society was quickly restricted by a strategy of longstanding, whereby metropolitan areas, which are supposed to hold the future, are without culture, whereas peripheral areas, which have only a past, possess a culture and can teach us about what we have lost. On the other hand, upon acquaintance, so much of everyday life in these peripheral areas appeared indistinguishable from the practices already familiar to the metropolitan outsider, that British ethnography inevitably appeared

03-Part III

82

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 82

Religion in English Everyday Life

unexciting and banal. If an account was given of what was said, for example, it appeared dull and meaningless. It proved very hard to maintain that local life was difficult to understand. The choice then seemed to lie between exoticising one’s fellow countrymen by special pleading, or making them banal. The ‘solution’ in practice has been to hand over to the social historian, who has constructed the English working man as a fellow with a culture prior to the Industrial Revolution, who becomes increasingly culturally attenuated or invisible the closer one gets to the present. Studies then concentrate upon aspects of the independent culture of the working man and give an account of the conflict between this and the developing (non)culture of capitalism. More recently, two steps have been taken which have the potential to reinvigorate local ethnography. In the late 1970s, the expansion of the oil industry in Scotland prompted a return to community studies, but this work, under the influence of discussions outside the discipline, rejected the framework of the impact of the new upon the traditional, and instead brought out the structuring role played by the wider society over a long period in determining which areas are ‘peripheral’ and which are ‘core’.11 Hence the question was raised of the place of ‘peripheral’ areas in the overall economy of Western self-imagining, a question with implications both for the distribution of places where fieldwork seems ‘appropriate’ and, within such places, for the selection of the ‘authentic’ subjects who are of interest to the study, and the rejection of the rest – often the majority of the population – as being without anthropological interest. The other step, expressing the continuing empirical strand in British ethnographic studies, was to pay attention to the responses of the communities in question to their setting in a wider context, asking how local identities are constructed in a constant negotiation with the wider society, looking at the local perception of what it is to be local.12 For in the case of a ‘local’ society, self-definition of necessity includes the knowledge that such a society is part of and yet separate from the ‘wider’ society; in such a situation, definition must in part be by opposition. Outside perceptions and misunderstandings, such as the gaze I brought to bear in Kingswood, are part of the experience of living in the place and, what is more, always have been. An important component of the experience of local particularity is then what we might call13 ‘counter specification’: the local society’s registration of outside definitions of itself, and rejection or manipulation of them. Therefore what I have called local particularity, starting from personal experience, in fact points to a general principle: that a society is only local with respect to a wider society, and that built into any experience of particularity is the interaction with outside interpretations. There is, then, a complex process operating between the wider and the local society, of self-recognition on the part of each party in the recogni-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 83

83

tion of the other. There is a ‘fitting together’ of what in fact are not identical conceptions or world views, which disguises the real differences between them; each view ‘lends’ part of itself to the other’s interpretation. So we have to take account of the various components that play a part in the construction of the peripheral; they are part of the material on the ground. As we have noted, in Britain, the marginal society is perceived almost contingently as either exotic – unlike us, they have a culture – or else banal – like us, they are without culture. In the specific case of Kingswood, the two conditions are given a temporal dimension, as past lawlessness and present respectability, though, as we shall see, the two conditions can also be given contemporary expression. This ability of the indigenous categories to match up to the outside gaze prevents to a great degree the problematising of given concepts, and begins to explain why it is so difficult to write ethnography concerning Britain that is interesting. One cannot, then, in a description of local particularity, take for granted the meaning and limits of even the most familiar terms, such as ‘the individual’ or ‘the family’, and such notions as respectability and fecklessness have to be discovered and sketched out more or less from scratch. There is one last important point to make. Reflexivity, or a degree of self-awareness in ethnography, is in this light a particular example of what is more generally the case in society, and need not lead to a total relativism, by which all we can do is meet ourselves, being in the end free only to create meaning – for whatever motive, therapeutic, artistic or ironic14 – out of elements drawn from other cultures. Rather, ‘certain native concepts “appear” as the eliciting trigger of a contrast internal to the analysis’;15 though we can only see through our own eyes, we do not solipsistically provide what causes us to think. Instead, signs evoke discernment in us. The investigated community thereby plays a large part in determining the terms in which it is viewed; I attempt to show this process in detail in the chapter on local history. To offer a review of my argument: this essay is a description of local particularity that attempts to steer between exoticism and bathos, between heightening difference and its minimising. Though we are concerned in this description with such ‘obvious’ topics as the family, local history and notions of personality, it also has to be kept in mind that the process of indigenous self-definition takes into account a continuing if intermittent outside ‘gaze’. One cannot then offer a description of local particularity without to a degree engaging with the accounts already given of such ‘societies’ or ‘cultures’, both academic and popular, recent and more distant in time. The accounts are part of the empirical material. Only in this way is it possible to construct an account with sufficient understanding to make sense of what is going on. In making such a construction, I am reproducing or imitating the procedures I am describing. There is no ‘social structure’ in Kings-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 84

84

Religion in English Everyday Life

wood, no coherent way of life that one can learn to see. Rather, there are local strategies employed to make sense of life, including how one makes sense of and to outsiders. People do not have social maps, or norms, but rather basic ways of making sense, and they make (social) life as they make sense of things, of what is the case. In this perspective, social life, like social anthropology, is a process of interpretation.

II In spite of what I have said, I shall conclude this introduction in a straightforwardly realistic idiom, by mapping out some of the dimensions of Kingswood in geological, geographical and administrative terms, for these have a part to play in the account that follows. Kingswood is situated on a hill about five miles due east from the centre of Bristol. It lies on the Upper London Road (the A 420), which passes through Marshfield and Chippenham. The road rises gradually and steadily from Bristol to Kingswood (to a height of 373 feet above sea level), before dipping down towards Warmley Brook. Kingswood forms part of the Bristol–Somerset coal field, which was laid down over a vast area in the Lower Carboniferous (Palaeozoic) period between the arms of the Lower Severn axis and the Bath axis.16 A wide belt of the lower coal series is exposed in the Kingswood anticline, which strikes mainly east–west. It forms Kingswood Hill, along the crest of which the Whit Walk processes. Although the structures are complicated by additional faults and folds, the measures, which are said to contain some twenty-five seams ranging from one foot to six feet in thickness, have been extensively worked, from the thirteenth century to the twentieth. The present district of Kingswood forms only part of the former area of the forest of Kingswood, which covered about two hundred square miles in South Gloucestershire. A ‘forest’ was an area with defined boundaries, administered by special officials and reserved for royal hunting; because the forests were outside the normal county administrative system, records are few. The extent of the forest is known from the charter of disafforestation (Kingswood forest came to an end when it was disafforested in 1228). The forest covered an area17 defined in the west by the river Severn, from Avonmouth to the Little Avon river (which runs into the Berkeley Pill); in the south by the river Avon, from Avonmouth at least as far as Weston (now incorporated in the outskirts of Bath); in the north by the Little Avon river, from the river Severn at least as far as the confluence with the Alderley Brook (south of Wootenunder-Edge); and in the east by a line following either the modern A 46 or the minor road following the crest of the Cotswolds from Starveall

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 85

The Kingswood Whit Walk

85

through Hawkesbury Upton to Little Sodbury Camp, as far south as Oldfield Gate, and then along the road to Landsdown (see Map 3.1). This area of South Gloucestershire may long have had a separate identity. There is evidence18 that a royal forest existed before the Conquest, in eighth and tenth century charters, and also in place names. The area of forest may have been a pre-feudal unit – ‘the seven hundreds of Grumbald’s Ash’ – which covers virtually the same area; it may have been an old ‘province’, a tribal district or territory. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the dialect of South Gloucestershire is basically West Saxon, in contrast to the Midlands dialect of the rest of Gloucestershire. Kingswood Chase is quite distinct from the forest: a chase was a private hunting reserve, not necessarily of royal ownership, distinguished from a park only by its size and the operation of forest law within its boundaries. Although Kingswood forest came to an end with disafforestation, Kingswood Chase – which was a much smaller unit of between three thousand and five thousand acres, east and south-east of Bristol – continued into the eighteenth century. The Chase in the eighBerkeley Pill Pill Berkeley Ham L itt

le

Av

on

Riv

er

Wooten-UnderWooten-underEdge

Lasborough

Es

tu

ar

y

Starveall

ve

rn

Hawkesbury Upton

Se

03-Part III

Old Sodbury Camp Westerleigh Avonmouth R iv

Stapleton

e

rA

v on

Mangotsfield

Roeyate Kingswood Easton Redfield Chase

Oldfield Gate Bridge Yate Doynton

Hanham

Oldland Bitton

Tog Hill

Marshfield

Landsdown

Miles 0

1

2

3

Weston

Map 3.1 Kingswood forest as disafforested in May 1228 (from Moore)

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 86

86

Religion in English Everyday Life

teenth century was an area of 3,400 acres, including parts of four parishes directly to the east of Bristol: Saints Philip and Jacob (later to become the parish of St. George), Bitton, Stapleton and Mangotsfield.19 A map of 161020 shows the limits of the Chase: the southern limit lies along a line drawn from where the Warmley Brook crosses the London Road (now the A 420) to Conham on the river Avon; the western limit runs from Conham to Troopers’ Hill and then through Don John’s Cross in St. George, where the London and Bath roads separate, on to the area known as Ridgeway; the northern limit is marked by the present A 432, from Ridgeway to approximately where the present A 4174 crosses it; and the eastern limit runs from here south between Charn Hill and Mangotsfield Church and along Warmley Brook to the London Road. On the east side of this area there was a network of greens and commons: Siston Common, Rodway Hill and Oldland Common (see Map 3.2). The present ‘town’ of Kingswood, which covers almost all the former Chase, is the product of eighteenth century and subsequent development.21 In the medieval Chase there was some scattered settlement around the fringes of greens and commons, and only to the east of the Chase, in the parishes of Bitton and Doynton, were there any village centres of any size. A certain number of manor houses from before 1700 survive – the Grange at Bitton, Tracey Park at Doynton, Hanham Court, Hanham Hall, Rodway Manor at Mangotsfield, Siston Court, Wick Court and (now disappeared) Barr’s Court at Oldham. But now the former villages and hamlets of Kingswood, Hanham, Downend A

32 A4

41 74

Mangotsfield Staplehill Charn Hill Rodway Hill Soundwell

Fishponds

Eastville Ridgeway Speedwell

New Cheltenham

Don John's Cross Easton

Redfield

R iv

Longwell Green

er

Warmley Bridge Yate

A 420

Wick

Cadbury Heath Oldland Common Willsbridge

A

vo

Kingswood Chase

31

Siston

Siston Common

Kingswood St. George Potterswood Crew's Hole Cock Road Troopers' Hill Conham Hanham A 4

Pucklechurch

n

Bitton

Map 3.2 The extent of Kingswood Chase in 1610, mapped onto contemporary East Bristol

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 87

The Kingswood Whit Walk

87

d

Soundwell, Downend, Warmley, Staple Hill, Mangotsfield, Siston, Oldland, Willsbridge and Bitton have grown together and joined up with Bristol as it has developed eastwards (see Map 3.3). The initial impetus to develop came through the expansion of mining.22 The earliest coal workings in the area would have been on outcrops, with low yield. In the sixteenth century, there was growing demand for coal in local industrial processes, and output increased rapidly. By the 1670s, there were over seventy coal pits in and around Kingswood. Some of the earliest areas to be worked were Bitton, Hanham, Stapleton and Westerleigh, and Mangotsfield. The expansion of mining in the seventeenth century was accompanied by the building of squatters’ cottages around coal exploitations, spread over the Chase in a haphazard manner. This manner of development is still reflected in the irregular street pattern of the modern town. An account in 189123 stated that Kingswood was ‘a labyrinth of lanes – turning, winding, Ro

a

Ba

dmi

on nt

We dR

oad

Ro

ad

Mangotsfield

Staple Hill Broad Street

l Road

Sta ti

R on

S oun d w el

oa d

Shortwood Hill

H ill

New Cheltenham

Siston Common

e

Regent

Street

Lon do n

Ha n

an t 's

Hill

d Co c k R oa

R oad

A4 2

0

Bry

Kingswood

T ower Road North

ham

R

St. George

Warmley

High S treet

o ad

Hill Tw o M ile

Sh or

tw

S peedwell Road

Rodw a y

Staple Hill Road

La n

n en

igh rle ste

oo d

Dow

n

ill mH ha

Co

Cadbury Heath

Oldland Common

Hanham Longwell Green Willsbridge

y ns ham

oa

d

Ba Ke

03-Part III

Map 3.3 Kingswood

R

th R oad A4 31

Bitton

03-Part III

88

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 88

Religion in English Everyday Life

intersecting, and branching in all directions’. At the end of the nineteenth century, a newspaper article24 described the area in these terms: Beyond the municipal boundary of Bristol, at Lawrence Hill Station, there stretches a long unlovely road, divided at St. George’s Church in to two sections, the one to the right passing through Hanham, the other to the left passing through Kingswood, and each road for miles is almost entirely urban. Streets branch off the main thorough-fares, there are innumerable boot factories, and many signs of a thriving industrial community. A visitor from Clifton, who may happen to be acquainted with some Lancashire or West Riding districts, would fancy himself back in the North, but for the unmistakable Gloucestershire dialect.

Apart from the two main roads, the district is still marked by narrow streets and small houses, many with outworking workshops and storage places attached, a mosaic of Victorian terraces and later suburban roads of semi-detached houses, inter- and postwar council estates built by the Urban District Council and its successor, the District Council, infilling and more recent speculative building and modern private estates, very largely carried out by local builders. This residential accommodation is interspersed with factories, chapels and pubs. The infilling of wasteland, common ground, market gardens and so forth is now almost complete. There are also a few larger houses, built by local businessmen and industrialists who have made good, sometimes with houses adjacent for their married children. Despite its proximity to Bristol, Kingswood has never been a part of that city; until 1974, it was part of Gloucestershire. Because of the influence of Bristol, through links of commerce and communication, and because it lies at the extreme south-west border of the county which administered it, Kingswood has developed as a place apart, held as it were in a balance of forces. This separation from Bristol despite its proximity is reflected in Kingswood’s local government status. The early development of the area was unregulated and largely unmonitored. Although there is census material from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is impossible to be exact concerning the growth of the population of the area, for the units of local government and hence of census taking altered several times (see Table 3.1). The census of 1801 divides the ancient parish of Bitton into three parts, Bitton, Hanham and Oldham. Kingswood was a hamlet in the ancient parish of Bitton, but was recorded as a separate ecclesiastical parish from 1821. This pattern was maintained until 1891. In 1894, Kingswood became a civil parish, formed from the parts of Hanham civil parish, Mangotsfield ancient parish and Oldland civil parish that came within Kingswood Urban District, the council of which first met on 31 December 1894.

Kingswood DC (created 1974) Kingswood CP 31,562

84,495

1981

1971 (77,808) (est.)

11,961

(9,114) (est.)

1901

1891 12,700

1911

7,171 3,692

1821

12,951

1921

8,703

1831

13,286

1931

9,338

1841

—

1941

9,452

1851

18,921

1951

9,627

1861

25,417

1961

10,320 5,209

1871

—

1971

10,662 5,952

1881

13,785 7,885

1891

4:29 PM

Kingswood UDC (created 1894)

6,061

1811

4,992

1801

1/21/09

Bitton parish Kingswood eccl. parish

Table 3.1 Kingswood: Population

03-Part III Page 89

The Kingswood Whit Walk 89

03-Part III

90

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 90

Religion in English Everyday Life

The background to the formation of Kingswood UDC was the fragmentation of the administration of South Gloucestershire.25 The modern districts of Kingswood, Mangotsfield (to the north) and Warmley (to the east) all fell within the Keynsham Poor Law Union. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the local Sanitary Boards were set up, fragmenting the Keynsham PLU. Mangotsfield parish became separated from the Keynsham Sanitary Authority, and the St. George Local Board (to the west of Kingswood) was absorbed into Bristol, but the city declined to take on the Kingswood Local Board. The setting up of Kingswood Urban District Council consecrated a major separation from Warmley Rural District. In the twentieth century, several abortive attempts were made either by Kingswood or by Bristol, to absorb Kingswood into the city, notably in 1903, 1917 and 1923. By 1900, the undeveloped land between the city and Kingswood (and Mangotsfield to the north) was being filled in by private development. In 1926, Mangotsfield parish, until then within Warmley Rural District, achieved the status of an Urban District. A 1947 Parliamentary Boundary Commission Report recommended that Kingswood and Mangotsfield, together with other areas, should be transferred to Bristol, but these recommendations died when the Commission was dissolved in 1949. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the possibility of a merger between Kingswood and Mangotsfield UDCs was canvassed, in order to resist a perceived threat from Bristol. Warmley Rural District stood apart from these discussions. In 1966, the civil boundary was changed, with parts of Kingswood being exchanged with Bristol County Borough and civil parish. In 1974, Kingswood District was formed by the amalgamation of the former Kingswood and Mangotsfield Urban Districts with the former Warmley Rural District. At the same time, the district was transferred from the County of Gloucestershire to the new County of Avon. Kingswood therefore has retained an administrative identity; the District Council coincides roughly with the eastern half of the area of the former Chase. In administrative terms, then, Kingswood in the past lacked strong definition. It has been a place apart, effectively un- or under-administered, at the edge of the County, outside the jurisdiction of the city. Even in recent history, there has been a continual redrawing of lines. The redefinition of local boundaries presents problems with statistics and maps, and the administrative units correspond only roughly to local geographical perceptions. Similarly, the transfer of the district from Gloucestershire to Avon creates problems with respect to archives. Kingswood has not yet been recorded in the Victoria County History. Yet despite this lack of official focus, Kingswood has a strong sense of identity, or air of local particularity.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 91

The Kingswood Whit Walk

91

Notes 1. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge 1977: 18-19. 2. Edwin Ardener, The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays, Oxford 1989: 212. 3. ‘Recent discussions’ stem from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York 1973, and centre around James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley 1986. ‘Among the most fruitful results’ – see Richard Farndon (ed.), Localising Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing, Edinburgh and Washington 1990. The quotation is taken from Marilyn Strathern, ‘Negative strategies in Melanesia’ in Farndon, op.cit.: 205. 4. See Strathern, ‘Negative strategies’. 5. ‘Community studies’ applies both to the early works produced by the Institute of Community Studies (established 1953) and more widely to studies of British communities that drew upon anthropological techniques and insights. A conventional list would include: Alwyn Rees, Life in a Welsh Countryside, Cardiff 1950, W.M. Williams, The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth, London 1956, and A West Country Village: Ashworthy, London 1963, Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Clifford Slaughter, Coal is Our Life, London 1956, Raymond Firth (ed.), Two Studies of Kinship in London, London 1957, Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, London 1957, Ronald Frankenberg, Village on the Border, London 1957, Margaret Stacey, Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury, Oxford 1960, Elwyn Davies and Alwyn Rees, Welsh Rural Communities, Cardiff 1960, Isabel Emmett, A North Wales Parish, London 1964, and J. Littlejohn, Westrigg: the Sociology of a Cheviot Parish, London 1964. R. Frankenberg, Communities in Britain: Social Life in Town and Country, Harmondsworth 1966, provides an overview and summary of this ethnographic ‘moment’ and, as it happens, its obituary notice, for there are no further studies of the kind. 6. A.H. Halsey, ‘Provincials and Professionals: the British post-war sociologists’, in Martin Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, Cambridge 1985: 151-64; Peter Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, in Bulmer, op.cit.: 137-50; Philip Abrams, ‘The uses of British sociology, 1831-1981’, in Bulmer op.cit.: 181-205; John Rex, ‘British sociology 1960-1980 – An essay’, Social Forces 61(4) (1983): 999-1009. Cf. the broader analyses in Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the present crisis’ (1964), and ‘Components of the national culture’ (1968), both in P. Anderson, English Questions, London 1992; and C. Bell and H. Newby, Community Studies, London 1971. 7. A number of features of the Institute of Community Studies (ICS) confirm this marginal status, apart from the use of the intensive fieldwork method: the authors were largely without formal sociological qualifications, their initial institutional links were outside the universities, their aim was to influence (indirectly) public policy rather than to advance theory, and they gave a high priority to being widely read beyond the academic community – using ordinary language, seeking vitality in the text, and devoting a large proportion of time to writing up (see Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’). It is interesting to note that other writers on the British working class who emerged at the same time, and who have exerted considerable influence subsequently in the areas of social history and cultural studies – Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall – shared many of these characteristics with the ICS researchers: they began work outside the university institutions, often in adult education, they aimed at the indirect influencing of policy (all were associated with the Universities and Left Review, later the New Left Review), and all wrote with a wider audience in mind than the narrowly academic. The principal works produced during

03-Part III

92

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 92

Religion in English Everyday Life the ‘period’ of community studies were Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth 1958, Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, London 1958, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London 1963, and Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts, London 1964. On ‘cultural studies’ and its moment, see S. Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and the Centre: some problematics and problems’, in Hall et al. (eds), Culture, Media, Language, London 1980:15-47, and C. Critcher, ‘Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class’, in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds), Working Class Culture: Studies in History of Theory, London 1979:13-40. Contemporary cultural studies has moved away from the sustained, holistic fieldwork practised by the authors of the early community studies, and has become fragmented; it juxtaposes media analysis, ethnography of institutions, deconstruction of public discourses and professional practices, psychoanalytic readings of public events, and reflexive autobiography, without offering any mediating framework. Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, notes a third factor in the abandonment of community studies: the pursuit of policy-related issues, which was linked to questions of funding, led to the selection of topics that could not be studied appropriately in a single community, in part because of the difficulty of generalising reliably from one intensive study. The key text is Firth, Two Studies; see Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’: 147: ‘… Raymond Firth, whose Two Studies of Kinship in London (1957) was the pioneering work on kinship in modern society’. Audrey Richards’s remarks are instructive concerning the size of community considered appropriate for anthropological study: ‘I had lived in a number of small African villages … and I had often wondered whether it would be possible to do the same kind of work in an English village of roughly the same size … We were interested in the degree to which kinship ties and even kinship groups continued to survive in the 1960s in an English village … ’ A. Richards, ‘Introduction’ to M. Strathern, Kinship at the Core, Cambridge 1981: xi. See also M. Bouquet’s extended analysis (Reclaiming English Kinship, Manchester 1993) of the blindnesses and insights of British social anthropology’s preoccupation with kinship, and their implications for ethnographic study in England, and for a different perspective, M. Strathern, After Nature, Cambridge 1992. J. Fabian, Time and the Other, New York 1983, calls this process the denial of coevalness. Edward Condry, Scottish Ethnography, Edinburgh 1983: 29-56. Notable anthropological accounts are Judith Ennew, The Western Isles Today, Cambridge 1980, and Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture, London 1978. In particular, the work of Anthony Cohen (ed.), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures, Manchester 1982, and Symbolising Boundaries, Manchester 1986; Strathern, Kinship at the Core, and, in another idiom, Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, London 1977. After Ardener, The Voice of Prophecy: 221. Strathern, ‘Negative strategies’: 210. Ibid: 213. British Regional Geology, Survey of the Bristol and Gloucester District, 2nd edn, London 1948: 25ff. John S. Moore, ‘The Medieval Forest of Kingswood’, Avon Past 7, 1982. The evidence is given in Moore, ‘The Medieval Forest’. Moore claims ‘a continuing tradition of separate origins’ for the region. In connection with the dialectal facts, he cited three early dialectal studies – J.O. Halliwell, Historical Sketch of the Provincial Dialects of England, from Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 2 vols., London 1847, R.W. Huntley, A Glossary of the Cotswold (Gloucestershire) Dialect, London & Gloucester 1868, and J.K. Jennings, The Dialect of West England, particularly Somersetshire, 2nd edn, London 1869 – and two more recent onomas-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

Page 93

93

tic studies: A.D. Mills, A Linguistic Study of Gloucestershire Place Names, MA thesis, University of London 1960, and A.H. Smith, The Place Names of Gloucestershire, vol.4 (English Place Names Society), Cambridge 1964. Robert Malcolmson, ‘The Kingswood Colliers in the Eighteenth Century’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English and their law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, London 1980: 85-122. Reproduced in Abraham Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: including all the ancient manors and villages in the neighbourhood, London & Bristol 1891; reprinted Bath 1969. James Russsell, ‘The Archaeology of the Kingswood Area – A Survey to A.D. 1700’, Avon Past 7 (1982): 17-25. A brief account of the evolution of the exploitation of coal in the area is to be found in John Cornwell, Collieries of Kingswood and South Gloucestershire, Cowbridge 1983. Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: 276. Western Daily Press 19/3/1892, quoted in Myrna Trustram, ‘Pin making in Bristol in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in Bristol Broadsides Co-op., Placards and Pin Money, Bristol 1986: 27-8. Following I.H. Dearnley, Kingsfield: Design for a Borough, duplicated, [Bristol] 1962.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 94

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 95

2

THE WHIT WALK I The Whit Walk appears to be a feature of longstanding in Kingswood. An East Bristol local historian, William Saniger, writing in 1939 on the origin of the procession,1 suggested that the first Walk may have been held in 1786, and claimed the festival was established by 1793. He connected the procession with the founding of Sunday schools in East Bristol and Kingswood; a Sunday school funded by a Bristol committee was opened in 1785 in St. George, which lies to the west of Kingswood on the road to Bristol. It is well to be cautious on matters of origins and continuity. Saniger offers no evidence for his assertions concerning the Walk. The first account that I have found of the Walk is more or less contemporary with Saniger: another local author, Fred Moss, in giving a description of his life as a coalminer in the 1920s, refers to the Whitsun procession and states that it was a Temperance occasion, organised by chapel people.2 ‘Each chapel would have its own banner carried in the procession’. He remembers Zion Chapel (now Kingswood Methodist) as having the best turnout, both as to banners and numbers. Fourteen or fifteen bands played, and the procession ended up in a field for all kinds of sport and a tea. With the moving of the public holiday, the procession now takes place annually on the morning of the Whit Bank Holiday. Since 1945, the Walk has been organised by an independent body, the Kingswood and District Christian Council Children’s Committee, which gathers two representatives, clerical and lay, from each of the local churches and chapels and two representatives from each of their Sunday schools. The Committee decides upon a theme, coordinates preparations and sees to the practicalities of the day, organising stewards and liaising with the police. The day begins early at each chapel with the decoration of the lorry that is going to carry the float in the procession. The lorry is usually

03-Part III

96

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 96

Religion in English Everyday Life

borrowed, not hired; lent and often driven by a local businessman. The decoration is done by a number of the mothers, under the direction of one or two older women, assisted by various of their husbands and older children. The younger children are dressed up and placed in the lorry, the older children costumed and assembled to march in front. The children come from a wider range of families than just those involved in organising the float. The process is then, at first sight, a Sunday school event, and therefore particularly to do with mothers and children. Every church and chapel Sunday school mounts a float upon a lorry illustrating the agreed theme; in recent years, the themes have included ‘Good News’, ‘God’s Servants’, ‘the Miracles of Jesus’ and ‘Episodes from the life of Jesus’. Each Sunday school develops the theme in its own fashion; in the case of ‘God’s Servants’ (1988), there were tableaux representing biblical figures: Noah, Elijah, Jonah, St. Paul and Jesus (twice); there were more recent figures portrayed, from Nonconformist history, sometimes with a local connection: John Wesley (three times), George Muller, William Wilberforce, ‘Nine men with a mission’ and James Hudson Taylor; and there were contemporary references or slogans, some with evangelistic intent: Jackie Pullenger, Mother Theresa, ‘Nurses and Doctors’, ‘God’s servants past and present’, and ‘We are God’s servants today’. Varying degrees of care and imagination are put into the depiction of the theme, the decoration of the lorry and the dressing up of the participants. However, the procession is far from being simply a Sunday school event. Behind the float, the clergy of the church or chapel march (some in their cassocks or gowns), flanked by the wardens or elders, and together leading the congregation, members of which carry a banner representing the church or chapel, as well as smaller banners representing church organisations. Elderly members of the congregation are transported in cars, adding to the procession. Some congregations – the Salvation Army and two of the chapels – have their own mission band to accompany them. The congregation is followed by the uniformed organisations attached to that church – the Boys’ Brigade, Scouts, Guides and so forth – each with their own flags and led by a band, if they rise to one. Each church and chapel contributes any number between forty and three hundred people to the procession. Each congregation, large or small, sets off in formation from its building to march to the assembly point for the procession, watched by small groups of neighbours and relations. It has an almost organic life of its own, and also a representative function wider than itself: it stands for the small district from which it comes, the name of which it often bears: a collection of streets, a unit of local geography. At the end of the procession, likewise the congregation returns to its original sta-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 97

97

tion. The Walk therefore has a broader rhythm or pattern of movement, as the various districts assemble, and later disperse. Over twenty churches and chapels took part in 1988, including six Methodist, four Church of England, two United Reformed Church, two Congregational, and one each of Roman Catholic, Moravian, Salvation Army, Independent Methodist, Church of Christ, Pentecostal and House Church (Harvest Time). Seven bands played. The whole procession was led by a mounted police escort, and may have totalled three thousand people. During the procession, some people sing hymns and choruses, and others hand out tracts, but most talk to one another, and wave to or shake hands with and talk to those on the pavements. The pavements are crowded along the length of the route and, at certain points, are packed; people come from all over the district to watch. Some of the children watching are decked out in new clothes. Parents and relatives, friends and neighbours continually greet each other. The occasion is far more than a Sunday school parade: all Kingswood is there. A sizeable proportion of the local population is involved: the local newspaper estimated that ten thousand watched in the rain in 1985, claiming this was half the number who had attended the previous year. The participants, by and large, do not think about the existence of the Walk and the form that it takes: the occasion is experienced in terms of emotional warmth, or appropriateness. It is a family event, both in the sense that people meet up with relatives and in that it repeats a pattern, for people can remember being bought new clothes and being brought as children, and now do the same for their offspring. It is also a local event, in that the participants are immersed in the crowd, and through this in the history of the area. Yet from an outsider’s perspective, the event is not one that can be taken for granted, as if it were natural. It is legitimate to ask why it happens, rather than not, and why it takes the particular form that it has. The question might be put in this way: what is the discernment that so many people share and that is evident in their commitment – in their presence and in their actions? A great many people are mobilised and considerable energies are deployed, both in preparation and in the realisation of the event; moreover, a continuity is established, for the form of activity is repeated from year to year. The banners being carried, that represent the churches, the Sunday schools and the church organisations, are evidence of both this continuity and effort, the repeated employment of an investment of time and skill. The banners range in size and complexity from the small to the large, from the simple to the ornate. The big banners are often beautifully made, recalling trade union banners in appearance; some are old, dating back to the 1920s, and highly decorated, made with

03-Part III

98

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 98

Religion in English Everyday Life

good materials, with pictures and texts painted or embroidered upon cloth. The smaller banners are sometimes similarly old and carefully made, though others are more flimsy and temporary. The motifs they bear are a mixture of the strictly local and the religious: some show pictures of the church or chapel, or local scenes; others portray biblical stories or Christian symbols. They also display the names of the chapels, together with religious texts (‘to God be the glory’), slogans of solidarity (‘One in Unity’) or moral messages (‘a refuge for sinners, not a club for saints’). The Walk might indeed be considered as a parading of these banners, with hymns and music: the men who carry the big banners display their dedication in their strength and skill, holding the poles placed in brass cups resting on their chests, held by a leather harness round their shoulders; and the leaders of the chapels walk beneath these symbols of the locality and its history, leading the band and the men and women of each subdistrict. Values which need to be elucidated, but which include discipline, continuity and pride, are combined in their display, and in their display the banners are emblematic of the event as a whole. In order to begin to describe the values at work on this occasion and, at the same time, to give a fuller account of the Walk, I shall consider in turn what kind of people make up the march, including those who watch; what kind of models or patterns of behaviour they are drawing upon; and what kind of activity the participants suppose themselves to be engaged in: the sources of their motives and legitimacy, and the accounts they give of their actions.3 One might assume that the kind of people who take part in the Walk are ‘religious’ people, principally Nonconformists and Methodists. But that is not an indigenous perception: they are rather a certain sort of person, chapel people and those who associate with them. The congregations that process are made up largely of the families of skilled or semi-skilled workers, self-employed or waged, foremen, draughtsmen, clerks (including local government employees) and shopkeepers. Newer trades and skills tend in particular to be represented. The very poor and the marginal do not march. Each group is led by notables, who most often come from outside the district, the clergy, and a few school teachers, doctors and managers who have a prominent role in the congregation. The group, however, spreads more widely than simply the regular worshipping congregation, to include families and individuals associated with the chapel or church through the affiliated organisations or through personal links, usually made through baptism, a marriage or a funeral. Within the group making up the march, women and children are prominent. Indeed, women take the lead in creating the event which, as we have seen, at first sight appears to be organised around the children; women initiate and, to a great extent,

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 99

99

plan the procession, despite the lead taken on the day by the (largely male) notables, elders and clergy. Not everyone who might participates in the march; many watch from the pavement who are drawn from the same strata and indeed from the same families. But the rougher element is also present on the pavement: the red-eyed occupants of one of the cider houses stand to watch outside the pub, opposite the Salvation Army Citadel; and groups of youths move through the crowd, enjoying the occasion. There are the poor and, among them, the potentially criminal and violent; disordered youth, strident women, feckless men. All Kingswood is present, the respectable and the rowdy, in a celebration of local identity, but one might suppose the occasion has different meanings for the various members of the community, and even for there to be possible conflict between their interpretations. The participants may then draw upon different models or patterns of behaviour. The procession is not simply spontaneous in form; although it does not demand a high degree of organisation, it needs some kind of consensus of support and well-established patterns of action with their own objectives and limits. In this case, it is possible to identify four sources or models that contribute to the form of the Walk, which receive differing emphasis in the perceptions of the various actors. First, there is the common experience of the local groups that make up the elements of the procession: the participants worship together, or take part together in the uniformed organisations and Sunday schools and other formal and informal associations of the chapel; in addition, they know one another through family and neighbourhood ties, work and other activities. Second, there are parades on other occasions, somewhat resembling military displays or musterings. The Salvation Army marches, as do the Scouts, Guides and Boys’ Brigade, displaying their discipline with flags and uniforms, their precision and their music. Furthermore, various working men’s organisations have a tradition of marching: Friendly Societies, which appear at members’ funerals and at an annual church service; the British Legion, which marches on Remembrance Sunday; and trade unions. Third, a different source for the display is scriptural: Pentecost or Whitsun is the occasion of the coming of the Spirit, when the disciples speak in tongues and go out and proclaim the Christian faith in Jerusalem to all hearers (Acts 2: 2-11). There is no evidence, however, that the local Protestant churches have a tradition of processions other than this one; the Walk is not an extension of liturgy or religious ritual, but is rather assimilable to working-class displays of the kind remarked above. Fourth, this conclusion is confirmed by the aspect of the Walk as a popular festival or celebration. There used to be competitive games

03-Part III

100

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 100

Religion in English Everyday Life

after the Walk, and there still is a fête at the parish church. The event as a whole contrasts with a municipal celebration, where the entertainment is provided and outside ‘celebrities’ are brought in to open the proceedings and to perform. On this occasion, local personalities come to the fore as leaders, stewards, banner bearers and so forth, and the entertainments afterwards are participatory rather than a spectacle, involving skill and luck. There is a holiday atmosphere, made evident by the new clothes for the children and the treats provided for them, and the drinking that goes on in the pubs. The day provides a release from hard work and the common round for everyone, not simply the marchers, and so points to a certain coherent culture, with its own values. In considering the accounts participants give of their actions, and the sources of their motives and legitimations, it is important to note that different people will offer different descriptions and, indeed, that most will find no reasons to give at all, or at best will say that the Walk has existed for so long that people have forgotten why it began; this view is usually expressed in a minimal form, such as ‘we always come’ or ‘we’ve always done this’. Further, the people most ready with an account are frequently outsiders. The clergy, for example, have views as to the purpose of the Walk that may not coincide with those of their congregation, or of all the congregation, let alone those who watch. They do not organise the march, nor its rationale; they join in, as it is expected of them, but often uncomprehendingly, and occasionally under protest. The marchers, however, can give the following account: the Walk is at once a demonstration of unity by the local churches and an act of Christian witness. The flyer given out during the march in 1988 described the event as ‘A United Procession of Christian Witness’ and, indeed, this is how the procession is spoken of by the local church members, as the Witness Walk, rather than the Whit Walk. The people in the procession at this level see themselves as quite separate from those on the pavement, hence the idea of ‘witnessing’: the Walk has an evangelistic purpose. But one has to be careful as to what values are being proclaimed. The march is both a proclamation of the truth, which is illustrated by the theme chosen, the banners and the songs and, at the same time, a demonstration of distinctiveness, a setting apart of the respectable and a display of orderliness and discipline. Underlying the proclamation of truth, therefore, there is another sort of proclamation, as to respectability and the kind of person involved, a truth that is drawn attention to by the uniforms, the bands, the badges of office and so forth. There are present, then, distinct perceptions held in tension. On the one hand, it is no exaggeration to claim that the Walk has a function of

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 101

101

purification, of the marking of (categorical) boundaries, and that in it we are concerned with a ritual that controls and shapes experience.4 There is a contrast between the collective value expressed by those marching, of control, sobriety, continence and thrift, and the anti-values represented by some on the pavements, of disorder, drunkenness, sexuality and prodigality. The ritual aspect of the Walk may be seen as ridding the community of pollution, reestablishing boundaries, recognising disorder, wrong behaviour, sexuality, criminality and drunkenness for what they are (in one perception), and restoring the social body. On the other hand, this proclamation of truth is at the same time the expression of a common morality. At the least, those announcing their separateness are at the same time dependent upon the spectators for recognition; indeed, nobody present would recognise themselves as the ‘object’ of a divisive message of the sort outlined above. The separation is not an absolute one; rather, certain groups express values that all present subscribe to, but would not claim to embody to the same degree. The marchers in this sense have a representative function. The route of the march is noteworthy in this respect; the procession marches the length of the main shopping street, Regent Street, which runs along the crest of Kingswood Hill, and begins the descent towards Bristol down Two Mile Hill; it crosses the boundary of the modern Kingswood District Council and turns at the Kingsway, which marks the edge of the district of St. George, to retrace its steps (see Map 3.4). The route travelled covers the length of Kingswood as popularly – though not administratively – conceived. It marks out the territory. There is no ‘official’ support for this definition of a popular territory, in the sense that the Walk is neither a municipal event, nor is it precisely a religious event, despite its relation to Whit Sunday. Nevertheless, officials, councillors and clergy lend an official presence by marching with their congregations, or by watching, and thereby endorse the ‘theories’ expressed by the crowd; their role is in this respect a significant – though minor – one. The marchers therefore take on certain aspects of authority normally invested in civic authority, the Law and the Church. They defend and proclaim a certain view of social values and obligations and of the constitution of local society, of the groups and parts that make it up; they occupy public space and proclaim a public identity, and they both feel able to do so and are backed up by the wider populace. In this sense, the Walk contains the hint of a threat – of an alternative legitimacy which, under very different circumstances, might look, to official eyes, like the behaviour of a mob. The organising principle to which the Walk as a whole points, then, is an assertion of local identity: the declaration of a kind of person, of a particular history and of a territory. Yet within that assertion, there are clearly different perspectives that do not necessarily add up into a

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 102

102

Religion in English Everyday Life

coherent picture. From the description, different interests and perceptions may be identified: between men and women, notables and congregations, marchers and spectators, respectable and feckless. There is a multiplicity of voices present, and it is this essay’s task to distinguish them and describe their bearing upon each other. The differences, however, are more subtle than this bare enumeration might suggest: the categories are not straightforwardly descriptive, but dynamic, and contain their own fissile principle. Even within the ranks of the respectable, there are divisions. Although the Walk is taken to be a demonstration of unity, it is equally a manifestation of disunity; the route the Walk takes illustrates this fact in an extraordinarily complete fashion. The examination that follows of the route taken by the march points to the interiority of the relation between schism and unity in local thinking. We are concerned not with simple, external oppositions – such as that of respectability to fecklessness – but with the simultaneous generation and denial of division as a structuring principle of local experience over a long period. An analysis of the route of the march brings out both the complexity of the topics glimpsed in the Walk, and their historical depth.

II The Walk proceeds along the length of the principal axis of Kingswood. On or close to the route there are eleven churches or chapels. To begin at the eastern end, there is Holy Trinity parish church (marked 1 on Map 3.4), built in 1821, a plain building of Bath stone with a square tower, set in large grounds with its own halls, a graveyard and a vicarage. Setting off westward, a little way down the Hanham road stands Kingswood Congregational Church (2), built in 1868, with later halls at rear and side. Whitefield Tabernacle (3), set back on the right from Regent Street, was built in 1741, and enlarged in 1802 and 1830; a new Tabernacle in Gothic style built in 1854 stands on adjoining land. Almost opposite, again set back from the street, is the Moravian church (4), founded in the 1740s, with the present building dating from 1856-7. Then comes a cluster of three Methodist chapels, all two-storey buildings in the Italianate style. The earliest, set back from the main road along Blackhorse Road and now glimpsed behind shops, is Wesley Chapel (6), built in 1843, which stands in its own extensive burial ground, with a two-storey block of rooms behind, and a separate schoolhouse, built in 1850, and other rooms of a similar design to the chapel standing along the side road. The whole complex is now redundant. Back on Regent Street, there stands Kingswood Methodist

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 103

The Kingswood Whit Walk

103 N

Mile 0

1

Soundwell Road 5 9

Hill Mile Two 8

7

Re ge nt

6

10

3 Street

High Stree

4 Blackhorse Road

2

t

1

Kingsway Hanham Road

11 Britannia Road 1 2 3 4 5 6

Holy Trinity Church Kingswood Congregational Church Whitefield Tabernacle Moravian Church Kingswood Methodist Church Wesley Chapel

7 8 9 10 11

Bourne Chapel Salvation Army Citadel Evangel Mission St. Michael and All Angels Kingswood School

Map 3.4 The route of the Walk

Church (5), former Zion Free Methodist Chapel, built in 1854-5 for the Reformed, later United Free, Methodists. Almost opposite stands Bourne Chapel (7), built in 1873 for the Primitive Methodists and now, like Wesley, closed. Bourne is now part of a factory. Further down Two Mile Hill, on the left, there is the Salvation Army Citadel (8), formerly a Primitive Methodist chapel, built in 1841 and remodelled in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (the date on the building is 1879). The end of the route is marked by the Anglican parish church of St. Michael and All Angels, Two Mile Hill (10), which was consecrated in 1848, and slightly further down the hill, tucked down a side street, stands the Evangel Mission (Church of Christ) (9), which was founded in 1888. A few hundred yards away, out of sight but important to the story, lies the site of the Kingswood School (11), founded in 1739. There are fifty-five active or former chapels listed in the Kingswood Chapel Survey, and in its density of Methodist and Nonconformist buildings the route is simply typical of the area. The particular interest of this route through the centre of Kingswood lies in the common history that links all the chapels, and also in the importance of the early part of that history to the wider history of Methodism. This common history is worth recalling in bare outline,5 for it begins to give some depth to the question of living in Kingswood. The story may be said to begin in 1739, when George Whitefield invited John Wesley to join him in preaching in the open air in East Bristol and Kingswood. Whitefield began to raise subscriptions to provide a

03-Part III

104

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 104

Religion in English Everyday Life

school for the children of the colliers of Kingswood, and a chapel-school was built in that year, a quarter of a mile south of the present Regent Street in what is now Britannia Road (11). John Cennick was appointed as a master to this school, and licensed as a preacher by Wesley. However, Whitefield and Wesley came to differ upon matters of doctrine, and at Whitefield’s instigation, in 1741 Cennick laid the foundations of the New Society Room in Kingswood, which was to become the Tabernacle (3). Cennick followed Whitefield in embracing Calvinist teaching, and led a secession of fifty-two members from the Kingswood band of Methodists (out of a total membership of 142). Wesley denied that any doctrinal difference lay at the root of the split, but pointed instead to the defectors’ ‘scoffing at the Word and Ministers of God; … their tale-bearing, backbiting, and evil-speaking; … their dissembling, lying and slandering’; he referred too to the ‘continual disputes, divisions and offences’ of the Bristol and Kingswood band members. The original Tabernacle therefore was in the hands of the followers of Cennick, under allegiance to Whitefield, while the School remained with the followers of Wesley. However, in 1745, Cennick transferred allegiance to the Moravian Church; there was dispute over the occupancy of the building, and although it appears that the Calvinistic Methodists experienced difficulties in maintaining their rights, Cennick and his followers were dispossessed of the Tabernacle in 1748. They removed to temporary premises until they built a new chapel, almost opposite, in 1756-7 (4). The present Moravian church on the same site dates from a hundred years later. The original Tabernacle remained in the hands of the Calvinistic Methodists, and was expanded in 1802 and 1830. In 1854 a new Tabernacle was erected next to the old, under the leadership of the pastor John Glanville; it was (and remains) the largest place of worship in Kingswood. Upon the departure of Glanville, the larger part of the membership seceded to form Kingswood Hill Congregational Church in Hanham Road, following a dispute that resulted from the Trustees overruling a members’ majority decision to call a certain minister. A local shoe manufacturer, Abraham Fussell, contributed largely to the new church which was built in 1868 (2); the church was enlarged in 1888 with extensions for the Sunday school and bible class, and a gallery was further added after a great evangelistic mission in 1905. In 1906, Whitefield Tabernacle joined the Congregational Union of England and Wales, and in 1974 joined the United Reformed Church which was formed from the Union of the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches in England. Kingswood Congregational Church, in contrast, remained independent and did not join the URC in 1974. In the late 1970s, Whitefield Tabernacle, the Moravian church, Kingswood Congregational Church and the parish church of Holy

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 105

105

Trinity (1) explored the possibility of becoming an ‘Area of Ecumenical Experiment’, under the initial title of ‘the Churches at the Crossroads’. Although the project got as far as the preparation in 1980 of a draft constitution (excluding the Moravian church, which had backed down), the ‘Kingswood Joint Churches’ experiment, as it was then known, foundered. A short distance to the west lie the three imposing Methodist chapels, Wesley (6), Zion (5) and Bourne (7), within a few hundred feet of each other. Wesley was built in 1843 by the Society which had met in the original chapel-school. Alongside the school for colliers’ children, Wesley had established in 1748 a school for the sons of itinerant preachers. The move to build a new chapel was associated with plans to move this latter school, which was transferred to Landsdown Hill in Bath in 1851. These changes offended local sentiments in two respects, first removing the Kingswood school from the vicinity (the colliers’ school had long since closed), and second abandoning the colliers’ chapel, a hallowed site. The school and chapel were sold in 1853, and demolished in 1917. The driving force behind the move and the building was Samuel Budget, a successful local grocer and retailer, assisted by Daniel Flook, the owner of a local boot business and a brickworks, who had a hand in building five chapels in the area. Wesley chapel seated nine hundred; a schoolroom was added in 1850 in the same style, and a further schoolroom added later. Kingswood circuit had been unaffected by the Kilhamite split after Wesley’s death, unlike Bristol, and the Methodist New Connection, which was founded in 1797, had no chapels in Kingswood. However, the national dissentions of 1849-50 in Methodism split the troubled local church. There had been a national history of agitation for reform, secessions and expulsions for almost three decades. The ‘Leeds Organ Case’ of 1827-9 led to the secession of the Protestant Methodists; in 1836 the Wesleyan Methodist Association was formed, absorbing the Protestant Methodists and the Arminian Methodists, which had been founded in 1833. In answer to the continuing agitation for reform, Conference expelled three ministers for refusing to deny authorship of the anonymous Flysheets in 1849, and the Wesleyan Church then proceeded to a great purge of reformers in 1850-1, when over one hundred thousand members nationally were expelled or forced to resign. This expulsion gave rise to the Wesleyan Reformers (founded in 1850) and then, upon the union of this body with the Wesleyan Methodist Association, to the United Methodist Free Churches in 1857. The issues raised by the reformers were constitutional and ecclesiastical questions: the agitation was a struggle against centralism and autocracy in the government of Methodism, a claim made on behalf of church members to participate locally in decisions and, through repre-

03-Part III

106

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 106

Religion in English Everyday Life

sentation, to participate in higher courts, in legislation and in administration. It thus concerned at best local lay élites and ministers, and the issues raised had to feed upon local chapel differences and disputes in order to take hold. Many local leaders were expelled in the purges without charges or trial, and rights were taken from many local preachers. Those expelled carried the majority of the congregations with them: in the Kingswood Wesleyan circuit membership numbers dropped from 1,246 in 1850 to 270 in 1851. The leaders of the ‘reformers’ formed a new circuit, agreeing a plan and arranging preachers, teachers and preaching places. The new circuit aligned itself with the Wesleyan Reformers. As its members were excluded from their former places of worship, the new circuit built new chapels, and opposite Wesley erected Zion, greatest of the local United Methodist Free chapels and the pride of the new circuit. The Chapel was opened in 1855, with a seating capacity of 750. A school was built in 1912. The UMFC was the single most important denomination in Kingswood, in terms of chapels and membership, and had a notable period of evangelism and conversions in 1871-3. The Primitive Methodists also developed a strong presence in Kingswood. There were a number of early nineteenth century offshoots from Wesleyan Methodism, led by revivalist preachers who developed personal followings and built independent chapels, being expelled from the main body for ‘irregular’ worship. Hugh Bourne, a carpenter, was expelled in 1808 for such a reason. He was associated with other ‘irregular’ Methodists, first Peter Phillips, leader of the Independent Methodists, then James Crawfoot, leader of the ‘Magic Methodists’ (who experienced states of trance), before forming an alliance with William Clowes, another preacher with a personal following who had been expelled in 1810 for irregular evangelism. Together Clowes and Bourne formed the Primitive Methodists. Primitive Methodism successfully recruited from the poorer classes. It was first introduced into Kingswood from Bristol in 1833, in a period of agitation, coal strikes and poverty. The first Primitive Methodist chapel was opened in 1841 on Two Mile Hill. Kingswood never formed a separate circuit in the Primitive Methodist Church, but was divided over three Bristol circuits, and this fact may be associated with the relative lack of impact on the area of the Primitive Methodist compared with the Wesleyan and the United Free Churches. Nevertheless, they prospered, and in 1873 the IVth Bristol Circuit moved from the original chapel on Two Mile Hill to build Bourne Chapel, in imitation of Zion and almost facing it, the largest chapel on the circuit, seating 600. The original Primitive Methodist chapel on Two Mile Hill, a classical single-storied building, became the Salvation Army Citadel (8); it was remodelled in 1879, and still stands. The Salvation Army has been in

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 107

The Kingswood Whit Walk

107

Kingswood from the early days of its formation. The Evangel Mission in King Street (9) was formed as an offshoot or secession from the Salvation Army in 1888. In 1907, the United Methodist Free Churches joined with the Methodist New Connection (formed in 1797) and the Bible Christians (an offshoot of 1819) to form the United Methodist Church. In 1932, this body joined together with the Primitive Methodists and the Wesleyans to form the Methodist Church. Even after Union, the three great chapels continued their separate existences, with steadily falling memberships, until in 1957 Bourne closed. Most of the remaining members of that congregation went not to Zion nor to Wesley, but to the more distant Hebron. Wesley and Zion combined in 1978, after almost twenty years of discussion. As a symbol of separate identities – or of mutual respect – the Communion sacrament is received alternately at the rail and in the pews. Locally regret is still felt acutely over the closing of Wesley. The buildings along the route are, then, landmarks in at least three senses. They are the product of repeated periods of intensity – both of devoutness and of quarrelsomeness – in the local population; they say something about (if the term is an acceptable one) the local ‘character’. They also mark the interplay of local events and the wider context, or the scansion of local history. And, at the same time, they help organise a symbolic geography, an ordering of inhabited space and experience with its own pattern of loyalties and distribution of energies: a landscape in which local people live. These landmarks suggest therefore that the focus of the essay should move outwards, away from the event as such, so that we take a long detour, investigating the topics indicated both by the earlier description of the Walk and by the consideration of the route: the forms taken by, respectively, local character, the scansions of local history and, the immediate concern, the habitation of local space.

Notes 1. William Saniger, article on the Kingswood Whit Walk, in Western Daily Press, 15/6/1939. 2. Fred Moss, City Pit, Bristol 1986: 25-6. 3. In asking these questions, I have been helped by reading Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford 1975, E.P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136, and H. Beynon and T. Austrin, Masters and Servants: Class and Patronage in the Making of a Labour Organisation, London 1994. See also the discussion and development of the first two of these in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley 1989. 4. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, London 1966: 83.

03-Part III

108

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 108

Religion in English Everyday Life

5. Sources for this part: Robert Currie, Methodism Divided, London 1968, George Eayrs, Wesley and Kingswood and its Free Churches: with an account of the Wesley Memorial Church, Bryant’s Hill, Bristol by W.J. Clarke, Bristol 1911, Michael Feast, A History of Methodism in Kingswood 1739-1920, duplicated, [Bristol n.d.], Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, Nonconformist Chapels and Meeting-Houses – Gloucestershire, London 1986, and Jeffrey Spittal and David Dawson, The Kingswood Chapels Survey, duplicated, [Bristol] 1983.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 109

3

FAMILY AND LOCALITY I The first topic raised by the account of the Walk concerns notions of territory, or how certain perceptions relate to a particular place. In Kingswood, the sense of local identity or of ‘belonging to the place’ is experienced in large part through the family, and it is through the family that we must approach the question of territory. The idea of the family is strong locally, and acts as the focus of a set of values that orders much of social life and the perception thereof. Men and women value their family perhaps above all else, and through their family, their neighbourhood. In this sense, Kingwood is made up of families, and much of the social fabric and many of the continuities of the area are established through the families that live there. Because of this high value set upon the family, the area is characterised by a cultural homogeneity and a certain air of immobility, despite its history of industrial development, social change and migrations of population. In this respect, Kingswood resembles other stable plebeian areas1 where family structure is an important organising factor in a large, densely populated urban context. It is my aim in this chapter first to describe the organisation and values of the family, then to show the links between family and locality, and last to outline certain characteristics or features of ‘local society’ that follow from the importance of the family. A certain preliminary caution is necessary, however: it may not be assumed that the indigenous sense of ‘the family’ can be read at sight. It is easy to project a basic pattern concerning the structure of the family and the household, the relations between the sexes and the division of work. Most postwar writings on areas bearing similarities to Kingswood note the central place of the family, but the discussion of family life in these works tends to start from the husband–wife bond, and thereby concentrate upon the relationship between the sexes. Moreover, in this literature, the idea of conflict is frequently central:

03-Part III

110

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 110

Religion in English Everyday Life

conflict between classes, between generations and, of course, between the sexes. Yet in Kingswood, neither the husband–wife bond nor conflict are keys with respect to the perceptions and concerns of informants. If their concerns with regard to the family are ignored, this is because another framework of interpretation has been introduced. The influential study of Ashton,2 a Yorkshire mining community, offers a clear case of the interpretation of family structure in terms of the husband–wife bond, and of conflict therein. It is an example that is of particular interest because Kingswood is a former mining area, and may offer parallels. The authors suggest that relations between the sexes in some sense reflect relations in the coalmining industry. At a first level, the close relationship and interdependence of the men at work leads to a male solidarity outside work, in social activities and leisure; men find their values, acceptance and pleasure in an all-male culture. At the least, this gives rise to conflict between the demands made by a man’s friends and those made by his family in terms of time and money. The authors also point to a fundamental incompatibility of perspective between the men’s search for short-term gratification and the needs of the family for longer-term continuity and planning.3 They, however, go further and suggest that the relation between man and wife reproduces that between manager and worker, with parallel notions of a contract, of limited claims and rights, and a state of conflict of interests which permits trickery and exploitation. This analysis makes at least three assumptions. First, it divides the domestic from the productive sphere, and attributes the one to women (and children) and the other to men. Family life and work are separated, and each is seen to have little or nothing to do with the other. Second, despite this, the productive sphere is seen to dominate the domestic, for relations in the latter reproduce or reflect those in the former. There is a strong element of economic determinism, for cultural and gender relations reflect rather than influence relations of production. Third, economic relations – and therefore cultural and gender relations – are dominated by conflict, in this case, conflict between labour and management. Under these circumstances, the authors argue, a marriage cannot develop. After courtship, which relates largely to obtaining sexual gratification, men and women continue to live separate lives, with the man paying the woman ‘wages’ in return for a ‘contract’ fulfilled; the obligations on the woman’s side concern sexual favours, child rearing and domestic labour. Husband and wife have little in common and do little together. Sexuality is marred by connections with pit-talk and an absence of tenderness, and relations between the sexes are marked more generally by a lack of give and take, a contractual view of all relations and a rigid (sexual) division of labour in the home and out of

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 111

111

it. In the discussion of life in Bethnal Green,4 essentially the same picture is drawn upon, but it is placed in the past. Much is made of the improvement in the recent generation of men’s relations with their wives, suggesting that a change in male mores, coupled with less overcrowding, less poverty and fewer offspring, has led to the man spending more time at home, to his being more involved with the children and to his having more affection for his wife. The present state is defined in terms of a contrast with an unsatisfactory past. Both these accounts present a picture of working-class life in which marriage is characterised by brutal, callous and irresponsible behaviour on the part of the men, which is in turn matched by a passive acceptance and an ignorance of anything better on the women’s part. It draws upon a stereotype that also appears in the literary vision of the working-class man (epitomised by the miner) as the dark side of the British psyche, portraying a world of active male sexuality, solidarity and violence. As we shall see, such a description echoes in broad terms that made by missionaries in earlier times of the ‘savage’ colliers of Kingswood, which played upon their violence and depravity, their simplicity and emotional directness and, implicitly, their blamelessness because uncivilised. The authors of both the modern works cited also have ‘civilising’ aims, though their salvation is secular, and – especially in the Ashton case – these aims may underlie a tendency to oversimplify their perceptions of local practices. It is possible to suggest this because the latter work provides evidence which points to a more complicated and nuanced picture, wherein the domestic and productive spheres are not completely separated, where local values shape behaviour both at home and at work, and there are possible modes of relationship other than conflict. There is, for example, material on swearing, which suggests that men swear in male groups, at work in particular, but not at home and, in particular, not in front of their own children.5 This hints both at a sense of discipline and of responsible or appropriate behaviour, and at an integrated ordering of the whole of social life: swearing marks boundaries, separating off male places from female, and the divide between generations; within a male group, swearing marks familiarity, while to an outsider, it denotes offensive behaviour. The authors also present material upon the change in the division of labour that occurs upon a man’s being made redundant, disabled or retired, when he may take on domestic tasks and responsibilities, and his wife may go out to work. They write also of the place of women in the pub and club at weekends, and of the involvement of both parents in the daughter’s marriage. The concentration upon a stereotype which evaluates the working class in terms of conflict and instant gratification (even with the latent prospect of conversion) introduces a double distortion: such an

03-Part III

112

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 112

Religion in English Everyday Life

approach on the one hand undervalues local knowledge and practices, and on the other fails to recognise the variation and coherence in variation inherent in local values. In contemporary writing, these distortions are seen as sometimes concealing what might broadly be termed a ‘political’ stake. So, to offer a parallel case, it has been noted6 that in discussions of the causes of infant mortality in the early years of this century, the factors invoked to explain child deaths – working-class ignorance of hygiene and apathy, the use of baby-minders and bottle feeding – both disparaged the working class, who were assumed not to care about their offspring, and devalued local knowledge and practices. These discussions were linked with the question of whether women should go out to work, and effectively both promoted the ideal of the woman in the home, and backed trade union opposition to working women, who were perceived as cheap labour, at the same time ruining men and family life. The stereotype in this case is used both negatively, to undervalue local knowledge and practices, and positively, to promote the separation of the spheres of home and work, in accordance with a series of congruent interests and ideologies. In the light of this example, it is worth expressing caution with respect to the contention concerning the fertility of working-class women which appears in both the accounts of Ashton and of Bethnal Green, according to which – at least until this generation – working-class women produced babies through a mixture of ignorance and apathy, combined with male indifference. It is improbable – and in other contexts there is counter-evidence – that local populations have ever been ignorant of how to control their fertility and, moreover, that they have not evolved strategies of reproduction and work. These accounts are not necessarily false, but they are partial. Local values certainly contain the possibility of ignorance, of brutal behaviour, of conflict and so forth, but, on the other hand, they are not exhausted by them. For this reason, writers who explain local society solely in terms of conflict, either between classes or between sexes, or between generations, are distorting the picture. There may be a range of local views about the matter of conflict. A study of the effects of Methodism on a Durham mining area7 points out that within the working class there have been different models of relations between employers and workers, in particular contrasting the ‘old liberal’ view of the ultimate compatibility of interest between labour and capital with the ‘socialist’ perspective of class conflict, which were both to be found in one community. And in the Ashton study, the authors hint at the existence of more serious, longer-term perspectives and activities in the male community, although they concentrate upon the values of instant gratification.8 To return to Kingswood, it is clear that while the topics of conflict or violence and the relations between the sexes are important issues in a

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 113

The Kingswood Whit Walk

113

consideration of the family, they have to be located with care with respect to local values and practices. In particular, undue concentration upon the callous and irresponsible plebeian male first may disguise the primary organising role of the family in such a society and the place of women in it, and second tends to ignore the local scale of respectability and fecklessness, of responsible and irresponsible behaviour as locally defined. The first topic is the concern of this chapter, the second of chapters five and six.

II Rather than take the individual or the couple as the primary unit out of which the social fabric is made, it is helpful in considering Kingswood to adopt some of the insights of those who write of ‘family strategies’9 and to view social life from the perspective of the family. The family operates as the basic social and economic unit in this sense: the functioning and survival of the family is a primary aim and value of its members, to the extent that the various possible fates and roles open to individuals may be seen as part of a ‘family strategy’. The family may be considered therefore as the unit that has the potential to adapt to variations in circumstances, and so to manage continuity both through individual experiences of hardship and misfortune, illness and death, and through periods of social change. Work is performed not for individual gain but rather for the benefit of the family; in this respect, the pattern of labour shows a possible continuity with past practices. Kingswood has been shaped by the exploitation of coal, and by the development of the related industries of brass smelting and engineering. But it has also been notable in the past for a variety of manufacturing based upon small factories and the practice of outworking; in particular, the manufacture of pins, shoes and boots, and clothing. These industries created a great deal of employment for women – and children – both in the manufactories and more particularly in outworking, at home. Kingswood was noted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for pin-making. Wire was drawn and cut at the brass foundry mills; the shanks were then headed and pointed by outworkers – paupers or women and girls – and returned to the factory for washing and tinning, drying and polishing; the pins were finally sent back to outworkers for papering.10 The sites of ten pin manufactories are known in the Kingswood area. The importance of pin making declined in the mid-nineteenth century (the last manufactory closed in 1896), but was replaced as a source of local employment by the growth of industrial shoe and boot making. Riveted boots, which revolutionised the trade, were developed in the

03-Part III

114

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 114

Religion in English Everyday Life

1840s by Fussell and Flook. Again, outworking was an essential feature of this trade. Cutting was done at the factory; uppers and bottoms were issued to outdoor workers who lasted the uppers and attached and finished the bottoms by hand in their own houses. The introduction of mechanical lasting in 1929 spelt the end of outworking, just as the invention of the solid-headed pin made from a single piece of metal in the 1840s closed down many workshops. Other local industries were also characterised by outworking, in particular, the textile and clothing trade. Through the practice of outworking, several members of a household could be involved in earning; in addition to the married couple, older offspring, unmarried siblings and parents might also contribute to the family income. The family worked as a unit. There is anecdotal evidence – in Kingswood, in the case of the Quaker philanthropist Robert Charleton – that an employer might treat a household as a unit, and adjust an individual’s pay to compensate for variations – through childbirth, sickness or injury – in the earning capacity of other members of the family. It is possible to conclude11 that industrialisation did not, therefore, entirely destroy an earlier pattern of family labour. This approach, which emphasises the functional role of the family, does not deny relations of affection and respect within the family, but rather underlines the fact that in these circumstances familial relations intermesh with employment and labour. Indeed, warmth and intensity of feeling may be related to the fact that relations are ‘economic’ in nature and therefore critical to mutual survival. It has been suggested that in particular in working-class culture women tended to maintain ‘pre-industrial’ values by working for the sake of the family12, and that there was for women compatibility rather than opposition between the demands of work and family. For by their labour women provided the flexibility that allowed the family to adapt to circumstances and to survive contingencies, including the birth of children and the loss of the man’s earnings, through injury or illness, absence or death. Children too shared in the adult world of work and were a source of income. The individual’s fate was determined within the logic of the family’s pattern; the individual’s possibilities, the limits placed upon him or her and the demands made by the family, varied according to the person’s place within the family, their sex and age, as well as the family’s activities and the household’s wider social and economic context. In this light, such factors as migration, the length of residence with parents, the duration of schooling, the age of participation in the labour force, the age of marriage and fertility – the number of offspring and the intervals between them – may all be ‘functions’ of the position of the individual within the family, and the household’s activities and situation.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 115

115

This approach is still valid in contributing to an understanding of the situation at Kingswood, despite important changes. These changes have been considerable: in particular, wages are relatively higher and many contingencies (for example, illness and unemployment) are better controlled, and these factors have had an effect upon relations within the family. Indeed, the most notable effect has been the introduction of ‘individualistic’ values, which at first sight would appear to undermine the dominant ‘family’ ethos that I suggest exists. So it is suggested13 that higher wages separate the interests both of the generations, of parents and children, and within a generation, of husband and wife. On the one hand, the state of childhood is prolonged, and offspring no longer contribute to the maintenance of their family of origin. Couples tend to have fewer children, to space them out more and to educate them better. Children are consumers, not producers, from the family point of view. They live at home until they marry, and tend to marry later, but while living at home they work and earn for themselves. They pay little of their earnings to their parents, while the mother often continues to work in order to support this prolonged non-adult state. Considerable tension may develop between parents and adolescents, for there is no obvious community of interest. On the other hand, as higher pay has made it possible in some cases for the family to live on the man’s wage alone, women’s paid work may be reduced to marginal importance, to buying luxuries for the children. In this situation, women become isolated from the world of work; the woman’s economic role is reduced and her social and domestic role – as wife and mother – becomes central. At the same time, it is suggested that while the husband and the children adopt individualistic values, the wife and mother does not. Husband and children acquire an ‘instrumental orientation’ in that they require some return on their contribution in the short term, a quid pro quo, while the wife and mother continues to work for the sake of the family, without the demand of short-term reciprocation. Yet if the distribution of the possibility of adopting individualistic values is itself a function of position in the family, it is clear that the family still dominates individual choices and possibilities. None of the participants are freed from the demands of the family. I will consider in turn the power of ‘familial’ values in the lives of women, of children and of men. My remarks are based upon more than sixty family histories, as well as other observations. Examples are interspersed in the text for purposes of illustration. The opinions recorded are the conventionally expressed views of the family concerned. (i) Women work for wages before marriage, and most continue in some sort of paid work after marriage. Women’s work plays a vital

03-Part III

116

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 116

Religion in English Everyday Life

role in the local economy. After marriage, women do not work for themselves but for the family. This is clear enough in the case of the self-employed worker aiming to create a business, who relies upon his wife as a partner. But it is more generally true: women work for the interests of the family as a whole. The pattern of women’s paid work reflects the needs and contributions of the other members of the family. Many wives have to work when the children are young, for that is a period of increasing expense, and they may go on working later in order to buy extras for the family, in particular to ‘spoil’ the children. Ann Pedley is exemplary in this respect: aged thirty-six, she worked in an East Bristol factory before her marriage twelve years ago; upon the birth of her children, she took various temporary local and part-time jobs, cleaning in a local school and stacking supermarket shelves, to supplement the household income, whilst relying upon her mother and her sister, who also has young children, for child-minding. Once all her children were at school, she took on the job of dinner lady at another local school to pay for holidays and the like. Many women only give up paid work upon the birth of their first grandchild, in order to allow their daughter to continue working. Ann’s mother worked as a waitress in Bristol until the birth of her first grandchild, when she took up more local work, first in a tobacconist in Hanham, then doing part-time cleaning in a pub. She has now ceased paid work. Mary Williams was employed before her marriage at a local engineering works (where her father also worked); she has continued to work fulltime after marriage in a series of jobs, in a sweet factory, in a Bristol shop and in the accounts department of a big Bristol engineering works (where her husband is employed), while her mother looks after their two daughters every day. A woman may also work to supplement her husband’s wages; she therefore works in hard times, when his wages are insufficient, or when he is absent, ill or unemployed. Ivy Ferris’s husband has an ill-paid unskilled job with a local paint manufacturer; she acts as a part-time secretary and receptionist at an East Bristol medical practice. Olive Barrett is the chief wage earner in her family; she has a full-time job at a clothing factory, while her husband suffers from ill health and depression and only works fitfully. Women may find employment more readily than men in such times, often working part-time, at odd hours and for low wages. The paid work that women take on not only fits with the demands of the family life cycle, but also in daily terms with the other demands of their domestic role. Much of married women’s work is part-time, on a casual basis, and often based upon the

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 117

117

home. It also frequently relates to the work they perform in the domestic sphere, for women work as baby-minders, hairdressers, cleaners and cooks (for local authority homes and schools); they are also employed locally as clerks, nurses, shop staff, shelf packers in supermarkets, and workers in garment and shoe factories. There is no opposition perceived locally between the values of work and home, or conflict between a woman’s economic and domestic roles; rather, the values of the family and of work intermesh. The pattern followed in Kingswood is that a woman works when she has young children, but on the whole decreases her commitment to paid work as the children grow up, begin to earn and get married. Nevertheless, it should be made clear that there is a range of ‘options’, a range that relates – although not in any linear way – to the indigenous scale of ‘respectability’ (the subject of later chapters). So, for example, the wives of skilled workers, who earn high wages, have less need to earn, and may not return to work after the birth of children. This was the case with Louise Bolton, who married a self-employed painter; similarly, Rose Britton, who also married a painter, gave up work at marriage. Such women too may take up a different kind of work, working at home or in the shop as part of their husband’s business. Elsie Miles worked for an insurance company during the war, married a local man and together they bought a grocery business in New Cheltenham, which was later taken over by their daughter and son-inlaw. Kitty Bell married at eighteen and never worked, except for ten years when her husband gave up his job at an engineering works to buy an ironmongers, which they ran together. Such work is considered a good sort of job; going out to work clearly involves a woman in a wide acquaintance, which may be undesirable: upon marriage, a woman’s circle is generally reduced, and ‘respectability’ is related to control of who you know. It is worth emphasising that the local practice of women’s work fits ill with two externally held ideals, both of which oppose the values of home and work. On the one hand, there is the ideal of the woman as housewife, confined to the sphere of home and family; on the other, there is the ideal of the woman working in order to express herself, her needs and her aspirations, in a career. These ideals are promoted by a variety of concerns (some of them underlain by salvific interests), but they do not conform with locally-held perceptions. (ii) Children reside at home as members of the family group until marriage, with few exceptions. They are not, however, confined to the family. From early adolescence, they gather in small groups, made up of between three and six members of the same sex. They

03-Part III

118

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 118

Religion in English Everyday Life

meet through school, the neighbourhood and local recreational activities, youth and sports clubs, Scouts and Guides, and so forth. They spend most evenings together, either hanging about or pursuing some activity, sport or otherwise. They associate with groups of the opposite sex, but relate largely through endless teasing and apparent hostility. As the members grow older, leave school and begin to work and earn, their activities take them further afield, to clubs and pubs as well as to sports and youth clubs, and there is more mixing of the sexes, and courting. These peer groups do not offer freedom from the family order:14 they do not offer an alternative code of behaviour, nor do they support a struggle for individual self-expression. Rather, despite appearances, they serve to establish and maintain the local social values in the inevitably awkward transition between generations. The power of these values is seen most clearly in the way that courtship dominates young people’s lives. Children of both sexes have a short period at school when they are socially active, and then leave school and start work. Neither sex enjoys a long period of being an unattached wage earner, for growing up and moral seriousness are demonstrated by taking the business of courtship seriously, by getting engaged and by marrying ‘properly’. During this whole period, from early adolescence to marriage, children remain dependent upon their parents. This is true even after leaving school and beginning work. The parents, and the mother in particular, subsidise the children. Although working children may pay a contribution towards their board, they spend most of their money upon themselves. Working children do not help much in the house; their mother waits on them, and may still work in order to buy extras for them: ‘spoiling’ children, keeping them close rather than making them stand on their own feet, keeps them within the sway of the family.15 The power of the family may be seen at work in at least three aspects of courtship and marriage. First, with respect to marriage partners, who are found in general locally, through repeated contacts, at work or through the social life of the peer group. Parents do not choose partners for their children, but they exercise approval or disapproval through the support they offer. Young people intending to marry depend upon their parents, and in particular upon the mother, for their support both moral and financial. Parents can support a proposed marriage in many ways. Becoming engaged entails saving to pay both for the wedding and for a house deposit. Once they are saving towards getting married, working children frequently cease to contribute towards their board. Parents may also help financially in buying a house,

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 119

119

paying for the wedding and the costs of setting up a home. And after marriage, a mother may continue to subsidise her married daughter, both through gifts and through services such as babyminding. Dependence upon parental approval and support is not then an arbitrary matter: a hurried courtship, setting up a home in poverty and without family support, will adversely affect the future chances of the marriage. Second, the importance of the family may be seen in the matter of residence after marriage. In the postwar housing shortage a generation ago, many married couples remained in one or other parents’ house, moving as soon as possible, especially after the birth of a first child. Frederick Noble married in 1948, at the age of twenty-five; he and his brother took over their father’s grocery delivery business after the war, and Frederick, his wife and their two sons continued to live with his parents until the parents’ deaths, leaving the house when he gave up the business at the age of fifty-two. More typically, Archie Teague rented rooms from his mother-in-law for two years after marrying in 1956, moving after the birth of two children. In such cases, the influence of the family was manifest. The possibility of remaining was constrained by the presence of other, unmarried siblings; for preference, the couple lived with the wife’s mother. This was both for positive reasons – because of the mother–daughter affinity – and for negative ones – to avoid tension between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law over the stove and over the son/husband. If co-residence was impossible, the couple lived in rented rooms, frequently obtained through family contacts. In the case of Wallace and Doreen Kington, the couple rented two rooms in his grandparents’ house upon marriage in 1948, moved out, and subsequently returned after his grandmother’s death to look after the old man, in due course inheriting the tenancy. Now there is enough housing (in 1988), and far less privately rented accommodation, most couples move out upon marriage and set up a new household; indeed, not having somewhere to move to is usually adequate cause to block a marriage. Co-residence of a married couple with the parents of one or other seems to be an option only for the very poor, usually young unskilled people, sometimes unemployed, who marry and have one or more children quickly, and thereupon move with sufficient ‘points’ into council accommodation. For the rest, the young couple buy their own house; in many cases, that has to be some distance from Kingswood owing to house prices. They go to new developments in Yate or – closer to home – in Longwell Green; others buy renovated terrace houses in

03-Part III

120

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 120

Religion in English Everyday Life

East Bristol. Yet they aim to move back into the area upon the birth of a first child, in order to be near the wife’s mother and family. The Tanner family show a characteristic pattern, over three generations. Mollie Tanner (née Roberts) was born in Syston, moved to Warmley upon marriage, and moved back (only a short distance) to the east side of Kingswood in 1931 to bring up two sons. The elder son went to university, and now lives abroad. The younger, however, married in 1951, moving to St. George and then returning after two years to east Kingswood with a daughter. His wife became very close to her parents-in-law. Their daughter, too, moved away upon marriage in 1980, returning upon the birth of a son. A couple may move several times locally early in marriage, to suit their needs, but once they have children beyond the infant stage they stay put. Most often, a child lives in the same house from birth to marriage, with family in the streets around. A couple may indeed move back into one or other’s house of birth, in order to look after an elderly surviving parent (more often the father). In this way they can ‘inherit’ the parents’ tenancy, and it is not uncommon for a person to die in the house in which he or she was born, without necessarily having lived there continuously. This may also happen after a divorce: Betty Nason, who was divorced with a young daughter, moved back into her house of birth upon the death of her mother at the relatively early age of sixty-one, to look after her father and younger brother. Third, the non-marriage of offspring might also be considered as a function of the family, as an option or fate opened up by the individual’s place within the family and the family’s situation. The same might also be true of the ‘options’ of illegitimacy and divorce. In each of these cases, however, I lack sufficient evidence. Non-marriage is perceived locally in three possible ways: first, it may be the result of an over-strong or selfish parent (usually the mother); second, some offspring need to remain in their parents’ care, being unable to fend for themselves; and third, in other cases there is no evidence either of coercion or of lack, but simply some sort of choice or ‘vocation’ to non-marriage. A child who does not marry usually continues to live with his or her parents. Sometimes, an unmarried person moves away and later returns to the parents’ house, just as after a divorce. Edward and Frank Gurney moved in the 1920s as very young children to the house in Soundwell they still occupy, where their sister was born. Edward, the elder, left home only for the duration of the war; he has never married and is a solitary, undemonstrative man. Frank married, moving to another house in Soundwell, and had four children. He subsequently divorced in 1961 and went to live

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 121

121

for two years with his sister, who had married and lived less than a mile away. After his father died in 1963, he moved back with his mother and elder brother. After the mother’s death in 1977, the sister took over washing and cooking for the two brothers. Eventually, then, the unmarried offspring looks after the parents in their old age. In the case of bachelors in particular, the unmarried person can have an important role with respect to their neighbours, becoming assimilated to an extent into the parents’ generation, and looking after the old around them. Upon the parents’ death, the unmarried (or divorced) offspring ‘inherits’ the tenancy. Clive Harris has lived all his life in the house where he was born, in 1926, and has never married. Once his father died in 1962, he looked after his mother until her death in 1980. He also looks after his parents’ generation of neighbours, checking on them, sharing food he has prepared and digging their gardens. He visits his sister once a week to take a meal with her. There are many households of an elderly bachelor or spinster living alone; more rarely, a pair of unmarried siblings, or even three, live together. Florence and Joe Hawkins, sister and brother, lived together in the house in Hanham where he was born in 1911; she was the elder by thirteen years. They were the two children never to marry out of a family of eight. Their mother lived with them until her death at the age of ninetynine in 1974; Florence died in 1985. A married sister or niece living nearby usually keeps an eye on such a household and takes care of its members in their old age. (iii) The place of men is best considered in the light of sexual differentiation of role within the family structure. Social continuity is organised through the women: married women direct the household, they act as the accountant, and they make decisions affecting its functioning and survival. Daughters in turn are initiated early into the responsibilities of family and work, learning the relevant skills. Women are central to the survival of the family, while men are, relatively speaking, peripheral. Because continuity is organised through the women, the family structure can survive a wide range of male behaviour, including fecklessness and indeed absence, through work, illness or abandonment. The marked differentiation between the sexes, in expectation and in behaviour, does not therefore point unambiguously to the subordination of women. The power of women is to be seen in their ability to supplement family income, in their control within the family and in their central place in wider family and social networks. Women are the major source of authority, standards and so forth in the bringing up of children, and women are paramount in the field of reputation, which controls many local matters.

03-Part III

122

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 122

Religion in English Everyday Life

Differentiation between the behaviour of the sexes is, then, a function of local values as much as a reflection of the labour relations of capital. The ‘space’ or freedom allowed to either sex is permitted by a shared value system, in this case an acceptance of what I have broadly termed ‘the values of the family’. In this perspective, the greater range of activity open to men, including what may be perceived as thoughtless or selfish behaviour with respect to women and the family, is a function of their peripheral – or, at least, differentiated – position. The values of the family appear in bas-relief, as it were, in the freedom permitted. Men’s behaviour, therefore, shows a far wider variety than does that of women. That variation ranges from conflict to compromise, from responsible to selfish, from quiet to noisy, from childlike to mature – and so forth. This variation does not pass unremarked or unevaluated, for behaviour is always judged upon the local scale of respectability and fecklessness. But a man’s behaviour can vary in this way without necessarily provoking disaster. Women, on the other hand, occupy a far more responsible, tightly ordered place, with far less freedom to vary behaviour. Fecklessness in a woman commonly spells disaster for the family. The relative control upon women swearing may be taken as a case in point, as may be the fact that there appears to be a greater homogeneity in women’s character: judgements may be elicited about men, but the properties of a woman’s character are assumed to be known, as to be broadly much the same in each case. So it is too simple to suggest that men are largely independent of the home, and that their social context is provided by the workplace. In Kingswood, in any case, married men and their wives share in a number of activities, particularly those concerning their children. They spend time together at the weekends, in recreation, and both parents take a considerable interest in the care and education of their children. Men too, conforming to more responsible modes of behaviour, play a considerable part in the home, though the values of differentiation are reproduced in the strict division of tasks within the house. Men tend to perform repairs, clean windows and decorate, while women clean, cook, care for the children, especially babies, look after the elderly, wash dishes and clothes, and iron. The forms of participation of the parents and their roles within the household inform the children of the values of the family and the possibilities allotted to each sex within those values. Two observations may be made in the light of these remarks. First, it is possible to glimpse what might lie behind the stereotype of ‘working class’ sexuality, which emerged in the work of D.H.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 123

The Kingswood Whit Walk

123

Lawrence and which is present, contemporary to the period of Community Studies, in the writings of, among others, Alan Sillitoe and Clancy Sigal.16 In this stereotype, male behaviour is typically libertine, and may either be celebrated as masculine nature or condemned as irresponsible. Correspondingly, women are portrayed as victims, as vulnerable and apathetic – although they are occasionally attributed the contrary quality of being sexually active. All these traits may be read off from the central position of women and the relatively peripheral place of men. Second, it is possible to make sense of the apparent fact that the male life cycle is far less smooth in its transition from generation to generation than is the female. There are striking contrasts in behaviour, and apparent conflicts in values, between the adolescent and his father, between the unmarried and the married man and, to a lesser extent, between the older and the younger married man. On the other hand, it is possible to perceive a continuity for women from youth to old age. Daughters are brought up by their mothers and taught standards of work and behaviour from an early age, sharing in family and domestic responsibilities. In the same way, daughters turn into mothers, and mothers into grandmothers, the older generation helping the younger with the transition, with advice and aid. Though clearly conflict is not always absent, it is not the dominant characteristic, which is rather continuity. So mapping out the values of the family leads to a consideration of the central importance of the mother–daughter relationship.

III So far, it has been suggested that, in the local order of values, the family – rather than its component individuals – is the basic unit of Kingswood social life and, as such, it has considerable control over the lives of its members. Further, within the family, order and continuity are organised and transmitted through the women, with the mother being the focus of the family. In extreme cases, men may be absent from the picture. Louisa Adams was born in 1945 in Cadbury Heath, the first of two illegitimate daughters born to different fathers. Her mother is an epileptic and has never worked; her sister is mentally handicapped. Her maternal grandmother looked after all three until her death in 1968, whereupon Louisa took over caring for her mother and sister, and moved to a flat in Kingswood. Her resources are slender. She has an aunt, a sister of her mother, in Cadbury Heath, but there is little contact. She works in a local shoe company, relying upon Local Authority day care for her mother and sister, and the assistance of a neighbour

03-Part III

124

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 124

Religion in English Everyday Life

in the evenings. She also had a friend from work, a woman who died in 1985 at the age of forty-one. Louisa continues to see the friend’s father on a more or less daily basis, to look after him, and to see the friend’s sister each week, for advice. Between Louisa and her grandmother, with a little help, an ordered life has been maintained despite the unpropitious circumstances. An equivalent account featuring men would be locally inconceivable. In the discussion of the central place of women in Bethnal Green society, two particular, interlocking characteristics of family life are identified: the importance of the mother–daughter tie, and the three-generational structure of the family. In practice, these features cannot be fully separated, for both express the fact that a succession of women, from generation to generation, constitutes the backbone of the family, its core and its continuity. Both these features are to be found in Kingswood, and shall now be discussed in turn.17 (i) Although the typical household is made up of a married couple with children, effectively households merge, for a married daughter links up with her mother on a daily, or almost daily, basis. The frequency of meeting is influenced by such factors as proximity of residence, work commitments and the state of personal relations, but usually a daughter will visit her mother on a regular basis once or twice during the week and again at the weekend, and they meet informally far more often, through dropping in, going shopping together and baby-sitting, in some cases three or four times a day. Mary Hayes was born in Kingswood in 1927. She married after the war, living first in St. George (immediately to the west of Kingswood), but moved back in 1952 into the same street to be near her parents. She saw a lot of her mother. She, her mother and her daughter used to go on holiday together, leaving her husband at home. After her father died, she would call regularly three times a day, in the morning, around lunch-time and in the early evening, fitting in her visits around work. The daughter relies upon her mother, whose advice is sought and whose authority is respected. Mother’s experience counts for more than advice from any kind of ‘official’, be it a teacher or a doctor, a social service or local government worker; these in turn tend to interpret this resorting to ‘local knowledge’ as apathy or as stubborn resistance to enlightenment. The daughter turns to her mother in any context of change or in an emergency such as moving house, or having a baby; she relies upon her too in the day-today, sharing with her the business of child rearing and accepting her help in the home. The mother supports the daughter’s household, offering practical help especially from the birth of the first child onwards. This

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 125

125

help includes advice and child-minding, but it can go much further. The mother may assist with household chores, including cooking for the family, and offer financial aid in the form of gifts. Moreover, the mother may give up her own paid employment upon the birth of a grandchild, in order to baby-mind during the day, collect the child from school and so forth, and in this way allow the daughter to continue to go out to work. She offers therefore considerable economic as well as moral support. In return, mother is highly regarded. She is held in great respect by her daughter, for whom she has done so much, and in great affection by her grandchildren. Indeed, the maternal grandparents – and the grandmother in particular – enjoy a close relationship with their grandchildren, a compound of authority, respect and affection, which holds firm even during adolescence, when there is often conflict between the children and the parents’ generation. The attitude of the son-in-law contains more ambiguity. He can either compete with his mother-in-law for the loyalties of her daughter, or else he can be drawn into his wife’s mother’s circle. If he declines to be drawn in, it makes for conflict within the marriage and real unhappiness, because of the wife’s divided loyalties, split between her mother and her husband. This potential for conflict appears at the stage of courtship: either the boyfriend is accepted by the girl’s mother, and she ‘spoils’ him, looks after him, cooks for him and so forth – or else he is rejected. Conflict at this stage leads either to the couple separating, or potentially to lasting bitterness in the marriage, if opposition is maintained. The same tension may be observed at every wedding, where there is usually little mixing between the families. Yet in general, the husband recognises and indeed positively affirms the claims of the wife’s family. He has a certain life apart, through work, the pub and the club, but he also recognises the rightness of the wife’s mother’s role and acknowledges her value. Often a real affection develops between son-in-law and mother-in-law. Once a husband has been accepted by the wife’s family, reciprocal services and help are exchanged, between, in particular, father-in-law and son-in-law, in such matters as repairs to house and car, and a man often finds a job through his wife’s family. When Frederick Noble gave up his own business, he went to work until retirement at his brother-inlaw’s furniture warehouse. Businesses, in particular, are often transmitted through an only daughter, the case of a grocery store being mentioned above. Stan Hendry worked in a variety of trades after the war, including shoe manufacture and long-distance lorry driving, until at the age of forty-three he married the only daughter of the proprietor of a local garage. (He made a success of the

03-Part III

126

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 126

Religion in English Everyday Life

business and, having no children of his own, took into partnership his sister’s son, who eventually took over the garage.) The son-in-law usually accepts the responsibility of the care of his parents-in-law in their old age without demur, whether this involves simply visiting them daily, to keep an eye on them, or taking in an elderly relative. Len Woolway moved house so that his wife’s mother and increasingly senile father could move in with them and their two young sons. Lil Dolby went to live with her daughter and son-in-law upon the death of her husband, moving out again six years later and going to nearby protected accommodation when her son-in-law fell seriously, indeed fatally, ill. A man will keep in touch with his own mother, and call in regularly, often visiting with his family on a Sunday. He may well continue to pass money on to his mother. But the family’s chief loyalty is to the mother’s mother, and the husband will see his mother-inlaw more often than his wife sees his mother. However, under certain circumstances, the couple may be drawn to his mother rather than to hers. These circumstances are worth listing, for they confirm the structural importance of the mother–daughter tie. They fall under three headings. First, rarely, the wife may have quarrelled with her mother, or her mother’s behaviour may in some sense be ‘inappropriate’, as when the mother contracts a second marriage, or is still bearing children. In such cases, the behaviour of one or other party fails to meet locally approved standards of proper conduct. The understated local term is that such a family is ‘not close’. Doris Williams’s mother Mavis left her father with three children and never regained contact. Doris was absorbed into her husband’s family, losing all contact not only with her parents and their families on both sides, but also with her own brother and sister. Second, most often, the wife’s mother has died and she has no close female kin to take her place, or alternatively, marriage has taken her a long way from her family. The daughter-in-law is then ‘adopted’ as a daughter, and the younger woman may articulate her gratitude towards her mother-in-law in such terms as ‘she has been like a mother to me’. Harry Tanner, whose wife had ‘adopted’ their daughter-in-law in this way, was looked after in his old age, when his wife had died, by her and her son-in-law – neither of them blood relations. Third, on occasion, when the wife comes from a family with several daughters and has married a man with no sisters, there may be a quite conscious transfer, for the benefit of the mother-in-law, so that she is ‘adopted’ as mother. In such cases, the older woman may express her feelings in some form such as ‘she has been a true daughter’. This sort of arrangement,

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 127

127

though not frequent, is agreed to by all parties as a good and right thing. Grace Thomas illustrates both the last two points, for she comes from a Bristol family of eight sisters, who remain on good terms, and her mother died when she was young: she married the only son of a couple in Kingswood, where she has settled, living first round the corner and then sharing her house with her now widowed mother-in-law, to whom she is devoted. (ii) The basic social group is therefore a three-generation extended family, with the mother as head and focus. Mother’s house is the meeting place for that family, where her daughters bring their children, to call, to talk or to go shopping together. The whole day may be organised with mother’s and daughters’ activities interlocking, with three generations providing different patterns and clusters of mothers and children. The example cited earlier of Ann Pedley’s family is typical in this respect. Mother is the focus of the family, and it is through her that the family meets, not only informally, during the week, but also at weekends and on anniversaries. Married sisters keep in touch through her, meeting casually at her house. They also visit one another; visiting is more or less confined to the family. Sisters therefore see more of their brothers-in-law than they do of their married brothers, whose allegiances are to the family into which they married. Their children grow up seeing a good deal of their cousins, and brothers-in-law see more of each other than do adult brothers: they may work together, and drink together, being joined in this by their wives at weekends. The Nash family exemplifies these points. Lorna Nash, an only daughter, lives in Cadbury Heath, a mile away from her mother, Mrs Haynes, a widow who has lived in Hanham all her life. The Nashes have three daughters, two of whom are now married and have families of their own, the youngest still living at home. One of the married daughters lives in Cadbury Heath, the other in Willsbridge, just to the south. Both the married daughters and their families organise on a daily basis around the Nash household, but not only they; the brothers-in-law and the father are close, and various young, unmarried members of their three families also gather there, around this core of women. Their incorporation is symbolised in a quasi-formal fashion by their standing as godparents to cousins and nephews and nieces by marriage. The whole group, more than twenty persons, also meets at Mrs Haynes’ house every weekend and on anniversaries. Mother is the emotional centre of the whole family, a ‘tower of strength’ upon whom the family relies, the person who is looked to for help and advice; she is also respected for the work she has done in

03-Part III

128

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 128

Religion in English Everyday Life

providing a home and caring for her family. Her children look after her in return in her old age; even then, she rarely loses her authority. In these circumstances, it is possible to understand the sense of desolation that is felt upon her death. The feeling of being bereft that daughters in particular experience is not due simply to personal affection, but to the loss of the pivotal person in their world. After mother’s death, day-to-day contact between sisters is lost. Sometimes, one married sister, often the eldest, takes on aspects of the mother’s role, gathering the family on occasions, particularly on the anniversary of mother’s death, or birthday; she may also take on the care of a widowed father and any unmarried siblings. In the case of the mother’s premature death, the burden to be taken up may be considerable, and a daughter may refuse to accept the task, recognising rather the claims of her own family. This was the case with Sharon Biggs, who gave up work when her mother died and moved back in to look after her father. At the time, she was divorced. She found the task impossible, for her father has a difficult character, and she soon moved out. Her father then moved in with one of his sisters, and not long afterwards married a widow in the same street. Upon the latter’s death, ten years later, he moved in permanently with his daughter, who had remarried. When mother dies, each sister takes on the task of becoming the focus of her own extended family. There is a life cycle of the family, and the individual’s stage of life determines his or her position in the pattern. While mother is alive, her daughters remain members of an extended family that focuses upon her. The offspring of these married sisters know their uncles and their aunts and their cousins through their maternal grandparents. After mother’s death, all this changes. Her children see less of each other, for the focus is lacking. Mother’s memory may bring them together, and undischarged duties, such as the care of unmarried siblings, are carried on, but regular contact is far less. So as the grandchildren grow up, they tend to lose sight of their uncles, aunts and cousins. They maintain contact, of course, with their own parents and siblings. When, in turn, their parents die, they see most of their own children and grandchildren. An individual rarely knows kin beyond two generations, and the family he or she knows is defined from the apex of the grandparental generation. This pattern appears in formal family gatherings, at christenings, weddings and funerals. Attendance of these events is to all effects obligatory, for here if anywhere the value of the family is clearly expressed. At a christening, the couple invite their parents, their siblings and families, and their grandparents if they are still alive. Godparents usually include a sibling from each side and, often, the

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 129

The Kingswood Whit Walk

129

mother’s best friend. Weddings gather in the wider family, including the parents’ siblings and their offspring, as well as friends and neighbours. The bride’s mother is in charge of the event, and the bride’s family is usually the better represented in the congregation and reception. On both these occasions, guests are defined from the grandparental generation of the baby or of the bride, with a bias towards the maternal side – and the single most important guest is usually without question the maternal grandmother. The same pattern is seen at a funeral as at a wedding, making allowance for the change of focus with respect to generation. In addition to friends, neighbours and work-mates, the dead person’s descendants attend the funeral, as do his or her surviving siblings, usually accompanied by their adult children and the siblings of the dead person’s spouse. Children do not go to funerals; nor, in some families, do the women, though this is rare.

IV In sum, local society is family-based and women-centred: the family, organised around successive generations of women and focused upon the mother, is the primary framework of continuity and response to misfortune; it is the context of mutual aid, of help, advice and services on the one hand, and of visiting, recreation and leisure on the other. It is also through the family that people relate to territory in time,18 for there is an interaction between length of residence and kinship, an interaction which in large part creates the particular character of the locality. Kingswood is marked by a strong sense of stability. It is not unusual for four generations of a family to live within half a mile of one another. Typically, people are life-long residents. They usually marry within the parish, or an adjacent parish, and marry partners with the same cultural and class values; although it can be argued that local marriage is a matter of opportunity rather than preference, local perceptions – in which family values play a large part – help to determine whether a prospective partner is accepted. Upon marriage, people settle in the area, with their family close by; in particular, daughters live near their mothers. Many of these features are exemplified in Mavis Wise, who was born in Hanham in 1912. She met her husband when she was fifteen, while both were working at a local factory. He was two years older than her. They were married in the Methodist Chapel in Hanham High Street in 1932. They lived close by her parents for twenty years in a cottage just south of the High Street, where their four children were born, then in a house on the High Street for more than a dozen years, and finally in a house a few hundred yards north of the High Street for the

03-Part III

130

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 130

Religion in English Everyday Life

last twenty-one years of their marriage. Her husband died in 1987. All their children married; three still live in Hanham (two on the High Street) and one in Bitton, a mile or so down the road in the direction of Bath. Mavis has a brother and a sister living locally, and a cousin across the road from the last house. Of their neighbours there, one couple have lived in the same house for forty years. The unquestioned importance of the family to some extent keeps non-kin at a distance. People meet non-family outside the home, in the street, at the shops, in work and in the pub, and so forth. They scarcely visit people who are not family, especially after marriage and child bearing, when the circle of friends is greatly restricted. A partial exception to this may be the parents’ immediate neighbours, whom the children may have known all their lives. Neighbours’ daughters are often ‘best friends’, and may act as bridesmaids for each other and as godmother to each other’s children. In their old age, the neighbours of parents may become an offspring’s concern. So it is possible for neighbours to take on a quasi-family role, but in general, family ties – through blood and marriage – are the ones that count. Nevertheless, these strong family ties do not exclude non-kin from an individual’s life. Rather, friends and acquaintances are organised through this ‘grid’ of long residence and family. First, through long residence, each person has a range of acquaintances and friends gained from childhood onwards, from the street, from school and from work, through the neighbourhood, gang, club, pub, church or chapel, and so on. ‘He has plenty of friends’, his sister said of Frank Gurney, ‘from childhood, from his courting days, from work and from the pub’. Second, he shares in the friends and acquaintances of the other members of his family: he knows his brother’s friends, his father’s workmates, his grandfather’s neighbours and so forth. Kindred acts as a bridge between the individual and the wider community: each person has a range of contacts through relatives to many others and, more importantly, he knows who they are, he can place them, which family they come from and in which district they live. In short, each person is an element in a human mosaic made up of kinship and long residence. This is true both for men and for women: the existence of strong family ties does not inhibit but rather enables the forming of links outside the family. In accordance with the strict spirit of differentiation we have already noted within the family, these links are formed between members of the same sex. They need not be confined to individual contacts. Both men and women find friendship and emotional satisfaction in groups of non-kin. These groups of friends offer loyalty, support and help outside the family circle, and they may offer relief from it, although the values of these groups in no way undermine or contest the fundamental values of the family. These groups are a feature of

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 131

131

local society; they range from short-lived teenage gangs to Methodist classes that have met weekly for fifty years, and encompass, for example, groups of pub regulars, sewing groups, church and chapel organisations, friendly societies, branches of political organisations, the British Legion and the Masons. This complex mosaic of kinship and acquaintance, based upon long residence, gives the area its intensely personal feeling, its ‘local particularity’. Kingswood is not a small face-to-face society; it is far too large for everyone to know everyone else, but it is a community made up of innumerable overlapping networks of kin and acquaintance, patterns of personal contacts within which the individual is located. Such a local society has a number of characteristics which strike an outsider, and which I list here in no particular order, both as a conclusion to this account of the family and locality, and as an introduction to a discussion of local moral values. First, local society is a ‘gerontocracy’. The older people embody the values and skills of the local society, and these are essentially conservative and to do with continuity. There is a generational cycle, for as people grow to the age to embody these conservative values they come to internalise them, and so older people are markedly more closed to innovation and to outside influence than are younger people. There are two points to be made in this connection. On the one hand, because Kingswood values are most clearly embodied in the older generation, it is easy to believe that this generation will be the last to hold these values, and that the latter are threatened with extinction as this generation dies out. Yet this is wrong; the structure is more stable than it appears. Individuals are recruited to fill the empty ranks, as it were; they take on the appropriate characteristics and status in their late fifties or early sixties. On the other hand, all generations subscribe to the authority of the older generation, and until they cease to do so, the impression of the imminent disappearance of the system of local values is an illusion. This authority is clear not only in the family, but in local organisations of all sorts: it is locally perceived as inappropriate for a younger person to take public office or exercise leadership. Any such attempt will not be supported, and the person in question will be frustrated in whatever he or she undertakes in that capacity. They will lack that acceptance that is crucial for the exercise of authority. Second, there are aspects of communication that are typical. The Bethnal Green study suggests that local society is marked by a lack of forward planning, few phones or cars, everything done by word of mouth, and no strong sense of time.19 All these are features of Kingswood society, although informants comment adversely upon the first and the last characteristics. It is worth remarking, however, that there are cycles of local events that may be used to orientate with respect to

03-Part III

132

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 132

Religion in English Everyday Life

time. Thus, something may be said by a chapel member to have happened before the Fête, or the Christmas Fair, or the Whit Walk. There is a certain local definition of time and, as we shall see below, of space. A third characteristic is what might be called an ‘algebra of implication’ or ‘a can of worms’. Because each individual is an element in a calculus of kinship and acquaintance, it is impossible to deal with a person in isolation; rather, a whole range of family and relations, neighbours and friends are implicated. No negotiation, agreement or disagreement is simple, therefore, nor can its consequences easily be anticipated. How people line up in any given matter depends upon a number of factors, including relatedness and length of acquaintance, and upon relative degrees of ‘embeddedness’ – for a person may be counted as an ‘insider’ or as an ‘outsider’ according to context. A further characteristic is the importance of reputation. To put it another way round, all local knowledge has a moral dimension. People are known as characters, for the things they have done in the past, for their moral character and for that of the family they belong to. Each person can be placed, by enquiry if necessary. It is this sort of ‘placing’ that determines, for example, whether or not a family accepts a daughter’s boyfriend. Each person is concerned therefore to create and defend their reputation. It is in the criteria of reputation that gender differences take on stereotypic form, for men define their reputation in particular through their work and through the groups to which they belong, while women do so primarily through their home and family. There are local markers of character, including the masculine virtues of strength and reliability, and the feminine virtues of the good wife and mother. It is worth noting that other, even powerful, values are subsumed to an extent under that of reputation, so that, for instance, the values of consumption – while not absent – are not dominant; the possession of consumer items may contribute to status, as making for a good home, or detract from it, as evidence of fecklessness. Many issues are perceived locally as including a moral dimension that affects reputation. Two examples would be poverty, and hereditary illness, such as epilepsy. The code of reputation also includes a strongly egalitarian aspect, for improvement in status and class may be seen as entailing a falling-down on local obligations. In the simplest case, a change in status usually involves leaving the area, with the associated problems of care for the elderly and the young, and even when such a family does not move away geographically, it may withdraw from local society and its reciprocities, including the intimate force of reputation. The pressure of reputation is to keep people on a mean. A fifth characteristic of local society, which connects with what has already been said, is that gossip has a real power, and that there is everpresent an anxiety about gossip. Kingswood is not such a closed soci-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 133

133

ety that gossip can be said to control people’s behaviour; there are no effective sanctions that follow the breaking of local convention. Nevertheless, talk can affect reputation, as – for example – in remarks about the appearance of someone’s children, or about the state of somebody’s house, or about the behaviour of some person’s brother. On the other hand, because talk has its effects, it also has a price. One cannot criticise an individual, however indirectly, without opening a can of worms, for all that person’s kin and acquaintance are potentially involved. There is a lot at stake. On the whole, local people are very well aware of what can be said about whom; there is a latent anxiety, both about being the object and being the agent of gossip. Once gossip begins, it has an uncontrolled and compulsive aspect: things cannot be unsaid, and situations cannot readily be recovered. For these sorts of reason, talk on the whole is not much used for communication, but rather for concealment. Much public conversation is banal and conventional, and direct questions are rarely used or, if used, answered. Public debate is not therefore an acceptable way of reaching decisions with a common mind. This muting is by choice, for most people can express themselves on occasion with clarity and indeed, beauty, and with a force that derives from an appreciation of the power of words. But this is rarely in public. It should be noted, in this connection, that outsiders, who have neither family in the area nor long residence, are completely excluded from the field of gossip, and are free to say what they think: for there is nothing at stake in either what they do or what they say. A sixth characteristic is a strong sense of local geography. For the individual, the area is mapped out in terms of family and acquaintance, and of what we might call positive and negative moral intensity, depending upon where loyalties lie. But the distance within which one’s knowledge and influence fade is very small, and this sense of local geography is buttressed by another, a set of shared stereotypes of local areas. Hanham, Kingswood, Warmley, St. George, Downend, Fishponds, Longwell Green and so forth formerly were separate settlements, and have only relatively recently been joined in a continuous urban sprawl; they are still considered to be quite distinct districts, each with their own characteristics. For example, Hanham and Warmley are considered to be rural and gentler, whilst Kingswood is urban, with a harder way of life; Downend is rich and snobbish, whilst Kingswood is plain and straightforward. There are also smaller areas distinguished within these districts: for example, Mounthill, between Hanham and Kingswood, and New Cheltenham in the north of Kingswood. These stereotypes are made up of heterogeneous elements, including anecdote and dialectal differences, and all have a moral component, allowing people to be placed and differences to be classified.

03-Part III

134

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 134

Religion in English Everyday Life

Given these characteristics, if a couple move even a small distance, they become relative outsiders. If they move too far from their family, as we have seen, it can impose a strain upon the marriage: the day-today support of the family is missing, including help in caring for the young, and it is impossible to maintain reciprocal obligations, including looking after the elderly. Moreover, without the mediating presence of kin, it is often impossible to find support from neighbours. Such displaced persons may have a strong sense of being vulnerable to gossip, for they know the rules but lack any integration into local networks which would give them weight. So couples who have moved even to an adjacent district frequently do not settle and never integrate, and view their new neighbourhood as unfriendly and snobbish, contrasting it unfavourably with the one they left behind, sometimes twenty or thirty years before. Frederick Noble left the house he was born in when he was fifty-two, moving with his wife and an unmarried son two miles, to a house his sister sold him. He regards the move as a mistake, claiming his wife and son persuaded him against his better judgement. His wife finds the people unfriendly, and knows hardly any of the neighbours. Moving away is often associated with problems of ‘personality’: unresolved family rows and resentments, or a jealous and possessive husband, or personal ambition overriding integration. All these involve a failure to live up to family values. Alfred Bell married at eighteen a wife to whom he has been devoted. Indeed, he gave up his trade for some years in order to buy a shop, so that they would work together. Apart from the period of the shop, she has never worked, and has been isolated. Socially, they keep themselves to themselves, even to the extent of moving to a house in one of the better roads in Hanham, a mile or so from the area they both come from. He is a convivial character in public, she silent. This pattern repeats itself: James Francis is a locally well-known, jovial figure from a large family, with whom he has quarrelled. In private, he is strict, a ‘family man’, who both dominates and depends upon his wife. She does not go out and ‘is quite unlike him, with no sense of humour’, as her family says. A notable feature of the area – one that demonstrates its present stability – is that, in old age, such a couple (or, more often, a surviving spouse) can move back, to take up old relationships and reintegrate into former networks. Dora Neil was such a case: she was born and grew up in Hanham, married in 1931, and lived successively in Fishponds and St. George, before settling in a good street on the northern edge of Kingswood, well away from family and friends. Her husband had a well paid job as an engineer. She stayed at home and displayed little confidence and little personality. After his death in 1981, she returned to Hanham and began to flourish; she mixed with some companions from her childhood, and was quickly reintegrated.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 135

135

Because even a small geographical displacement causes such disruption, there is a spectrum of family behaviour, a spectrum with two poles which have been identified as ‘street’ behaviour and ‘estate’ behaviour.20 On the one hand, there is the ‘typical’ local family such as I have been at pains to describe, with segregated conjugal roles, a three-generational structure, kin living close by, and full integration into various small groups – almost secret societies. On the other hand, there are relatively unstable, two-generational families with none of these characteristics, suffering from isolation. These are extreme types; between them, there is a range of possibilities which includes more or less isolated local individuals and couples, and incomers who, having relatives in the area, settle quickly when they buy into one of the new estates. Looking at the outline of life histories demonstrates not only the importance of having ‘resources’ at one’s disposal, meaning such heterogeneous – though interdependent – factors as kin, neighbours, employment and housing, but equally how significant is the use one makes of them. Whatever the resources available,21 each person displays a practical ability to live up or down to the potential in any given set of circumstances, to embody to advantage or disadvantage one mode or other of family life. One should be careful, therefore, in making too much of the contrast in family types; as we shall see, character is more prominent in the local appraisal of a person than the typicality of their family. There is, however, a possible tension between these two poles, for they may offer competing models of behaviour and, more importantly, the two-generation isolated family appears to reflect better the values of the wider society. In this wider perspective, the twogeneration family appears to have adopted, for example, the values of choice, consumption, joint conjugal roles, individual freedom and equality, while the three-generation family appears to be a survival, maintaining the values of reputation and the family as part of a ‘traditional’ society which is doomed, with the penetration of ‘progress’, to disappear. This approach underlies certain sociological and demographic accounts of local societies, which suggest that local society is in decline, and contrast the values and perspectives held by successive generations: the older embodying traditional ‘closed’ values, and the younger open to modern ideas and influences.22 They point to, as connected causes, the decline in local employment, the collapse of local (male) public society – organised around work, the pub and the bookie – and the penetration of individualist and consumerist values along with better wages and conditions. At the same time, the power of women, through the household and neighbourhood, is seen not only as a relatively persistent survival, owing to the comparatively unchanged nature of the domestic sphere, but also as a distortion, for

03-Part III

136

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 136

Religion in English Everyday Life

women’s society is no longer matched and held in check by men’s society, having, as it were, outlived it. Although many of the differences and changes adduced need not be contested, the framework of the interpretation should be questioned, for two reasons which appear earlier in this chapter. First, this account divides social life into two spheres, the productive and the domestic, and attributes one to men and the other to women. Second, it assumes that the productive sphere, or economic relations, determine (in the last instance) a working-class culture and its values, and that gender and marital relations are a reflection of the relations of production. These assumptions were contested earlier because they appear to ignore both local categories and local practices, in Kingswood at least. For the same reason, I doubt the anticipated decline of local society, certainly in the terms posed. Kingswood is not a protected reserve where an anachronistic way of life persists; far from it. It is an integrated part of South-West England, a fairly thriving region of the British economy, subject to the patterns and pressures of contemporary employment. Nevertheless, in this situation, local values continue to provide the context within which change is recognised and received. Further, while local values retain high status, they continue to define the periphery in which more cosmopolitan values may be adopted. Just as men’s apparent freedom may be interpreted as a function of their peripheral importance in the family, so may the freedom to embrace the values of the wider society be taken as a function of a peripheral or less integrated position with respect to the ‘core’ of local society. In other words, adoption of wider values is permitted by the local system in a fashion which does not seek to annul change, but which permits continuity of local values. In brief, the ‘immobile’ part of local society, which epitomises the values of family and residence, acts as the core which defines the periphery, and an individual subscribes more or less to these values depending upon his or her place in the total field (including age, sex, marital status, family position, family connections, length of residence, and so forth). Hence, any discussion of the ‘transition’ from local to modern – including such proposed factors as the separation of the domestic sphere from the productive, the isolation of women in the home, the growth of consumer and individualist values, and the decline of working-class organisations – has to continue to take into account local perceptions, practices and values. Families embodying these core values might indeed be in a small numerical minority, without the system being under threat: for this reason, descriptions relying upon statistics have to be treated with great caution. Such an approach may offer a basis upon which to begin to reconcile various historical studies in which the problem of the transition from one form of family to the other recurs, at different periods and in

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 137

The Kingswood Whit Walk

137

different circumstances.23 Diverse changes – ecological, demographic, economic, social, political and so forth – will be experienced in part at least as the disruption of what we might call a kin-centred ‘making sense’ of territory. Frequently, too, the perceived agents of change will be those who have been disrupted, and who are improvising solutions as best they can on the basis of what they know. Change therefore will be experienced recurrently in terms of a challenge to the values of kin, interpreted for example as fecklessness or lawlessness. In this way, kin remains a central idiom to the generation and interpretation of events, if only, by and large, as a structuring absence or loss. Moreover, the ‘memory’ of such a category, its persistence, will consist to an extent in the events generated, which will both be structured in part by the complex we might label ‘kin/loss of kin’, and will pass it on. For these reasons, it is worth confronting the question of value that has surfaced repeatedly in the course of this description of the family and locality, and we are brought to consider what it is in Kingswood to be a person, and how moral worth is assessed: in short, to the local values of respectability and fecklessness. Before doing so, in order to add depth to this analysis, we shall turn first to the historical materials that exist concerning the territory of Kingswood and the values attaching to it.

Notes 1. Such as that described in the classic study of Bethnal Green by Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, London 1957. Their study was not the first in the field; they cite R. Glass and M. Frenkel, ‘How they live at Bethnal Green’, in Britain Between East and West, London 1946, although they do not mention M. Paneth, Branch Street, London 1944, on Paddington. Contemporary work includes M. Kerr, The People of Ship Street, London 1958, on Liverpool docklands, and J.M. Mogey, Family and Neighbourhood: Two Studies in Oxford, Oxford 1956, on St. Ebbes. 2. Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Clifford Slaughter, Coal is Our Life, London 1956. The coalminer has been ‘the original and quintessential proletarian’ (R. Harrison (ed.), The Independent Collier: The Coal Miner as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered, Sussex 1978: 2) at least since Adam Smith contrasted the ‘independent workman’ (who can sell his skill) with the ‘collier’ (who has only his labour to sell) in the Wealth of Nations. Even acknowledging F. Zweig’s account of Men in the Pits, London 1948, Dennis et al., op.cit., was the first properly sociological study of this group, and provided David Lockwood (‘Sources of variation in working class images of society’, Sociological Review 14 (3), 1966: 249-67) with his model of the ‘traditional proletarian’ (cf. Robert Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics, Cambridge 1974: 15). 3. Dennis et al., Coal is Our Life: 130. 4. Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship. For harsh or unromantic views of working-class marriage contemporary to or preceding Young and Willmott, see E. Slater and M. Woodside, Patterns of Marriage: A Study of Marriage Relationships in the Urban Working Classes, London 1951, and M. Spring Rice, Working Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions, Harmondsworth 1939. The topic of the ‘transformation’ of – especially working-class – marital relations has remained a preoccupation of fam-

03-Part III

138

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 138

Religion in English Everyday Life ily sociology: see the survey in C.C. Harris, The Family and Industrial Society, London 1983: 223-237. Dennis et al., Coal is Our Life: 218. Carol Dyhouse, ‘Working class mothers and infant mortality in England 18951914’, Journal of Social History 12, 1978: 248-64; see also Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940, Cambridge 1996. Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics. Cf. R. Colls, The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield: Work, Culture and Protest, 1790-1850, Manchester 1987, who also discusses relations between the sexes; also J. Littlejohn, Westrigg: The Sociology of a Cheviot Parish, London 1964. Dennis et al., Coal is Our Life: 142, 169-70, on longer-term perspectives; 130, on instant gratification. In particular, the work of Louise Tilly; see L. Tilly, ‘Individual lives and family strategy in the French proletariat’, Journal of Family History 14, 1979: 137-52, and J. Scott and L. Tilly, ‘Women’s work and the family in nineteenth century Europe’, Comparative Studies in Social History 17, 1975: 36-64. Cf. T. Hareven and A. Plakans (eds), Family History at the Crossroads (Special Issue of the Journal of Family History) 1987, and Pier Paolo Viazzo, ‘Anthropology, Family History and the Concept of Strategy’, in R. Wall and D. Sato (eds), Economic and Social Aspects of the Family Life Cycle, Cambridge, forthcoming. See Myrna Trustram, ‘Pin making in Bristol in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ in Bristol Broadsides Co-op., Placards and Pin Money, Bristol 1986: 24-47, and Doreen Street, ‘Not Worth a Pin: Pin Making in the Kingswood Area’, pamphlet, Kingswood History Project, Avon County Community Environment Scheme, Kingswood 1986. Cf. Scott and Tilly, ‘Women’s work’. This claim touches upon a central debate both in the sociology and the history of the family in the West, concerning the importance or otherwise of kinship to social organisation, and about the emergence and significance of the ‘modern family’, perceived primarily in terms of a ‘decline in kinship’. Anderson, writing in 1980, put it thus: ‘twenty or even fifteen years ago most sociologists really did believe that many of the essential features of our family system – its restricted household size, its emphasis upon the conjugal bond as the structural keystone of the system, its intense concentration upon the socialisation of children – were somehow associated with the fact that we lived in a so-called advanced industrial society, and that this kind of family system was particularly compatible with the demands of the (dominant) economic order of such societies’ (Michael Anderson, ‘The relevance of family history’, in M.Anderson (ed.), Sociology of the Family, Harmondsworth 1980: 34). A view such as he describes has two component assumptions: first, that before the Industrial Revolution (broadly defined), social organisation was small-scale, face-to-face, kin-based, sensitive to status, and so forth; and second, that there is a transition associated with industrialisation to the ‘modern’ condition (defined as cosmopolitan, egalitarian, contractual, and so on). Such a view mobilises a familiar set of oppositions. The family is seen, correspondingly, to have changed from the extended kin group, serving as the basic unit of production, to the closed nuclear family, restricted to the function of consumption, with associated changes in ideology and authority. Among sociologists holding such views, N. Smelser, Social Change and the Industrial Revolution, London 1959, who follows T. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, London 1949, is an exemplary case; among social historians, one could cite authors as recent as E. Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family, London 1976, L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, London 1977, and J.-L. Flandrin, Families in Former Times, Cambridge 1979 (for a review, see Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transmission, Oxford 1978: chapters 1 and 2).

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Page 139

139

Both these assumptions have now been challenged by empirical studies, so that we cannot readily link a transition in the structure of the family with the processes of industrialisation (Anderson, ‘The relevance of family history’). On the one hand, the typical domestic group has been shown to have been small in structure before the Industrial Revolution (Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost – Further Explored, London 1983; P. Laslett and R. Wall (eds), Household and Family in Past Time, Cambridge 1972; Macfarlane, Origins of English Individualism). On the other hand, there is evidence that the methods of capital accumulation and labour recruitment put to work were largely extensions of preexisting social processes, which were thereby reproduced (M. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire, Cambridge 1971; Scott and Tilly, ‘Women’s work’). These findings may tend in opposite directions. In particular, the notion of the antiquity of the restricted family (following Laslett and Macfarlane) has been modified in its turn by detailed work on the rates of adult mortality, the mobility of adolescents, the family life cycle, and household composition (L. Stone, ‘Family history in the 1980s’ in T. Rabb and R. Rotberg (eds), The New History, Princeton 1982: 62-3). While there is a far greater sensitivity to matters of kinship in social history, no single clear picture has emerged in the last twenty years as an alternative to the older consensus. Two indications in recent work are of particular interest to this study. First, Anderson’s (M. Anderson: ‘Household structure and the Industrial Revolution’ in T. Hareven (ed.), Family and Kin in Urban Communities 1700-1930, New York 1977) hypothesis that kin increased in importance in the early stages of urbanisation and industrialisation, as a response to mobility. Second, the perception that concentration upon the antiquity of the ‘modern’ family has led to the relative neglect of the question posed by the supposed ‘survival’ of the ‘traditional’ forms. Wrightson notes in this regard: ‘Analyses of household structure in England have never denied that there was always a minority of more complex households, though little effort has been made to explore further the reasons for the presence of that minority’ (Keith Wrightson, ‘Household and kinship in sixteenth century England’, History Workshop Journal 12, 1981: 153). Scott and Tilly, ‘Women’s work’: 41. Ibid.:61ff., cf. M. Anderson, ‘What is new about the modern family: a historical perspective’ in The Family, British Society for Population Studies Occasional Paper 31, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, London 1983:1-16. See also discussion in Note 22. Cf. Diana Leonard’s account of marriage in working class Swansea: Sex and Generation: A Study of Courtship and Weddings, London 1980. Ibid.:44. Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, London 1958, Clancy Sigal, Weekend in Dinlock, London 1960; see also S. Laing’s discussion of Representations of Working-Class Life 1957-1962, London 1986. In the following account, I do little more than elaborate upon the findings of Young and Willmott, who anticipate that one ‘would expect to find the same kind of system, the same stressing of the mother–daughter tie, in other places, and especially in other working class districts’ (Family and Kinship: 194). As Young and Willmott point out (ibid.: 115). Ibid.: 157. Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship; cf. E. Bott, ‘Urban families: conjugal roles and social networks’, Human Relations 8, 1955; Family and Social Network, London 1971. Cf. S. Wallman, Eight London Households, London 1982. A sociological account: Martin Bulmer, Neighbours: the Work of Philip Abrams, Cambridge 1986: 88. A demographic explanation of the features of ‘modernisation’ on the basis of changes in mortality is to be found in Anderson, ‘What is new about the mod-

03-Part III

140

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 140

Religion in English Everyday Life

ern family’. Anderson couples this explanation with explicit criticism of community studies. He suggests that ‘traditional working class communities’ are best seen ‘as in part a function of a bogus stability produced by sampling without replacement and by relying too strongly on a few ‘key’ informants; and in part…the result of a particular combination of economic and demographic conditions which probably only really emerged even in limited areas of the country in the late nineteenth century and which were already disappearing when first ‘discovered’ by the sociologists of the 1950s’ (Anderson, ‘What is new about the modern family’: 3); he cites Michael Young and Peter Willmott, The Symmetrical Family, London 1973, in support of this conclusion. The economic conditions he refers to include rent restrictions and council housing, encouraging greater residential stability (Anderson, ‘What is new about the modern family’: 3). The demographic factors are a decline in both child and adult mortality, a decline in family size, and the clustering of children in the earliest years of marriage. Together, these factors have meant that adults have an increasing proportion of their lives after the birth of their last child. Only in the twentieth century have substantial numbers of grandparents lived to see all their grandchildren, creating for the first time the possibility of reciprocal care, first of grandchildren by the grandparents and then, later, of the elderly by their family. Moreover, Anderson does not believe this state of affairs to be stable: ‘Increasingly in the 1960s and 1970s women, freed of their own child care responsibilities by their forties, returned to work – and worked right through the period when their grandchildren were born. And now that they themselves are entering old age, with around twenty more years to live, they find that their own children have in turn had their families and returned to work. The possibility of reciprocity of the kind found in ‘traditional working class communities’, which were surely in part encouraged by early twentieth-century demography, have now disappeared’ (ibid.:9-10). The whole pattern of behaviour – a three-generational system of child and grandparental care – existed between, say, 1861 and 1961, to give notional limits. While this analysis is illuminating, I have two reservations. First, it may be misleading to derive an account of a local society from national statistics, for such an approach is bound to iron out any ‘anomalies’, or differences from the statistically derived norm. Second, one should not imagine that behaviour and categories of thought reflect demographic conditions in any simple way, and that they change correspondingly. Rather, the actors have to make sense of the new conditions and possibilities of life which they experience, and they tend to do so employing categories or strategies that are already in use. The Kingswood case offers evidence of this. The categories impose continuities upon varying conditions (as well as generating new ‘events’): account needs to be taken of the indigenous definition (or perception) of demographic change. As Ardener notes concisely, in considering comparable cases, a society’s ‘world structure’ ‘is built up by processes of naming – that is of labelling or categorising – rather than by numbering’ (Edwin Ardener, ‘Social anthropology and population’ (1974), reprinted in Ardener, The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays, Oxford 1989: 120). 23. Cf. note 11. See also Z. Razi on ‘The myth of the immutable English family’, Past and Present 140, 1993: 3-44, and A. Mitson on ‘dynastic families’: ‘The significance of kinship networks in the seventeenth century: south-west Nottinghamshire’, in C. Phythian-Adams (ed.) Societies, Cultures and Kinship 1580-1850, Leicester 1993: 24-76. On ecological aspects of matters raised in this paragraph see D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660, Oxford 1985, on ‘fielden’ and ‘forest’ (and N. Davie’s review: ‘Chalk and cheese? ‘Fielden’ and ‘forest’ communities in early modern England’, Journal of Historical Sociology 4, 1991: 1-31).

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 141

4

‘FIENDS TRANSFORMED’ A DISCUSSION OF LOCAL HISTORY

I The second topic raised by a consideration of the Whit Walk is that of ‘local history’. If we put together the evidence so far, it is clear that local space can be classified in various ways. The account of the family pointed out a number of levels at which the experience of the locality is organised. The earlier description of the route the Whit Walk follows revealed another ordering of space, a classification embodied in buildings. And before that, the mapping-out of the area also implied a series of definitions, some of which are very old. There is no unproblematic, ‘natural’ space, existing in a simple time. There are spatial classifications of different durations or, to express matters in a reversed perspective, certain events – be they familial, dissenting or administrative – imply definitions that have their own histories. This is one sense of the term ‘local history’: there are various local ‘dispositions’ – ways of classifying space and living in it which organise the experience of the locality – that have their own histories. But there is a second aspect to the term, which is our particular concern: how do these local histories contribute to the sense of local particularity that has been identified? For, at least in popular consciousness, these histories appear to be unperceived or, if glimpsed, fragmented, amalgamated and simplified, into a story which at once bears a certain resemblance to the originals and yet greatly differs from them. There is a local historical component to local knowledge1 which bears a problematic relation to the historical record. Identity, then, has a certain historical component: who we are can be described in terms of a past leading to the present. Yet, the other

03-Part III

1/21/09

142

4:29 PM

Page 142

Religion in English Everyday Life

way about, this account has to make sense in light of the present state of affairs: it is the past in the present. One may therefore be given a popular historical account that serves in the description or definition of a place; this is the temporal dimension to the social space. What is the status of this indigenous use of history? ‘Local history’ in this specialised sense appears in at least three guises – popular, official and erudite. In its popular form, it is met with in the versions of local history that are taught in local schools and Sunday schools, and in fragments in conversation, where it is offered in ‘explanation’ of aspects of local character or of local events. In its official form, the history is retold in a series of Guides to Kingswood,2 and is also commemorated in local monuments; both Guides and monuments are produced by local government bodies. In its erudite form, the history is reproduced and investigated in detail by local historians3 who, indeed, provide the material that is simplified in official Guides, and simplified again in popular accounts. ‘Local history’ is, therefore, the ‘locally accepted version’, although there is a variety of recensions. The immediate written source for most variants in the case of Kingswood is the unreliable but indispensable History of Kingswood Forest by Abraham Braine, published in 1891 (and reprinted in 1969).4 Braine was a local man. It is of interest in light of the distinction being made that his work has quite eclipsed the earlier and perhaps more scholarly work of the Reverend H.T. Ellacombe: The History of the Parish of Bitton (published in two volumes in 1881 and 1883, and not subsequently reprinted).5 This eclipse may be in part due to the rarity of Ellacombe’s work, for only 125 copies were published,6 but it is also in part because the latter’s account does not reflect the accepted version, this ‘local history’, to the extent that Braine succeeds in doing so. This is Braine’s account; he sums up the changes that the area has undergone as follows: Once … a Royal forest connected with other forests of miles in extent; then, more select, as a Royal Chase; then a bone of contention between lords of the manors and coal masters; and, lastly, a wilderness overrun with beings more like fiends than anything else, which no laws could subdue and no man could tame. But now we see it with a peaceful, law-abiding, industrious, and contented people; taking pleasure in labour, becoming more and more zealous in education, and mostly delighting in religious ordinances.7

In this passage, Braine employs a stereotype that has been current since the eighteenth century; even if it contains little historical detail, the stereotype itself has a history. The definition of the elements of the stereotype in the eighteenth century is important, for it is connected with a shift in the perception of the area. It will be argued that

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 143

143

Kingswood emerged as a place with an identity of its own in the eighteenth century. In the writings of this period there appears a definable entity, a people of Kingswood with a collective ‘mind of their own’, rather than an aggregation of anonymous people who happen to occupy an ill-defined area: the space of Kingswood somehow becomes populated and defined by that population. A change in definition and perception takes place. Eighteenth-century interest in the area focused upon two themes: on the one hand, persistent accusations of the lawlessness of the people, of their violence and indifference to authority; and on the other hand, accounts of the success of public preaching to these same people, of their religious enthusiasm and lasting conversion. These records will be discussed below. Contemporary writings about Kingswood concentrate upon these eighteenth-century documents, and likewise are concerned either with the issue of the colliers’ violence or with that of the origins and spread of Nonconformist and, in particular, Methodist religion. The subsequent history of the area is largely unwritten, and this neglect matches up with the stereotype that one meets on the ground, in which the history of Kingswood and its identity are summed up in the two aspects of lawlessness and conversion, which appear in the short account given by Braine in the form of ‘fiends transformed’. This material, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, written and unwritten, raises the broad question of the relationship of account to event: what, if anything, ‘historical’ remains in the retelling, be it popular, official or erudite? To put it another way, how do we tell the difference between possible (but nonexistent) past states and ‘real’ ones? As is well recognised, even accounts contemporary to events have their own interests, partialities, lacunae and so forth, and each subsequent account reorders the material according to its own ‘mode of registration’, apparently without remainder. We have to ask, is the effect of this restructuring total? Edwin Ardener, considering this matter from a social anthropological perspective, wrote that ‘real histories are, in the absence of total documentation (what would total documentation be like?), rearranged by changes in the infinite sequence of successive presents, producing … histories that did not happen’.8 Is it then the case that a local identity such as the one we are considering is completely arbitrary, lacking either historical necessity or continuity? In other words, the accounts of local history with which we are concerned have a mythic quality, as indeed does public knowledge in general. Two apparent solutions can be ruled out. On the one hand, we could look to historians, to investigate the sources and tell us what ‘really’ happened, in contradiction to the received opinion. This is one function of education. Yet popular opinion bearing the marks of schol-

03-Part III

144

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 144

Religion in English Everyday Life

arly correction has a lame feel, and fails to fulfil whatever is required of local historical knowledge. Moreover, apart from its practical inefficacy, such correction sometimes brings into view the scholar’s own contemporary agenda: such glimpses may offer evidence for the inevitability of the process of restructuring, referred to above as the absence of total documentation. Indeed, considerations of this kind underlie some contemporary reformulations and new approaches in the Humanities.9 On the other hand, some writers are happy to dismiss all reference to any real world, and to experiment with an idealism where there are only ‘possible’ worlds. Such a ‘high structuralist’ view is characterised by what we might call a flatness of vision, whereby all history is reduced to narrative elements and organised into texts. Furthermore, as in the case of the first proposed solution, this approach dismisses as irrelevant the concerns of the purveyors of the history, to whom it is important that the history be in some sense ‘true’. In either case, the effect of the approach is to dismiss the point of view of the informant as irrelevant or deluded, while at the same time losing any engagement with the object in question, the particular conception of ‘local history’. There are, therefore, both practical and theoretical reasons for asking whether there is anything that withstands the process of restructuring, that survives the ability that humans have to create accounts using the elements to hand, the ability to tell a story using past relationships, events and memories in ways that make sense here and now. For at first (structuralist) sight it is impossible, in a retrospective narrative, to distinguish between at least four separate levels. First, there is the self-definition of the person, and relations between persons which express contemporary categories and perceptions. Second, there is the process whereby certain interactions between persons are registered at the time as significant, or as constituting ‘events’. Third, there are structures of memory, which determine which significant interactions are memorable, and which events pass away unnoted. And fourth, there are processes of reordering of memories, so that – for example – some periods appear rich in events, and may be recounted in answer to the question ‘who are you?’ Each of these levels may be identified in this account of Kingswood. Historians, it may be remarked, work at every level of this analysis: historical interest has expanded from the narration of events and the study of memory to include both the study of indigenous categories and selfdefinitions, and the tracking of successive reorderings of ‘memory’. But the force of the question still remains: at a fifth level, that of ‘text’, how do we know whether what is recounted occurred – or can we? Because texts share certain structural or structuring qualities with ‘real life’, at what point is it possible to escape the reordering effects of texts, whereby all elements appear equally without history?

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 145

The Kingswood Whit Walk

145

One answer is that while structures or interpretations at every level are put together from ‘events’ of some kind, by the process Lévi-Strauss termed ‘bricolage’,10 certain significant features do not restructure easily or, in other words, ‘existing structural relationships of a strong kind are not lightly abandoned’. Ardener uses the term ‘historical density’ to describe these traces of the reality or materiality of previous interpretations or structurings of the social space and, against the flatness of vision characteristic of total restructuring, proposes that ‘a certain clustering of anomalous features will show the trace of the survival of a structure from “life”’. There are, therefore, certain features of the past which resist restructuring and stand out against the flatness in contemporary accounts, in the form of patterns of silences and clusters of anomalies. ‘The principle of destiny, Ardener argues, which reshaped our view of categorical sets by shadowing realities underlying the arbitrariness of classification, elicits … an area of structural silence … which is semantically dense, and potentially event-rich’.11 His examples of ‘historical density’ are drawn from the distant European past, from the Icelandic Sagas, the Niblungenlied and other sources. Let us look at the case of Kingswood and see whether such an approach may usefully be applied to material that appears less mythological in form, that is, closer in time to ourselves, more familiar in feel, and better documented.

II The history of conflict in Kingswood in the eighteenth century has recently been studied by Robert Malcolmson,12 who notes that forest regions were generally notorious for lawlessness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He remarks that, on the one hand, the formal institutions of power were not deeply rooted, nor widely respected. There was no economic basis for gentlemen, farmers and ecclesiastics to impose their imprint upon local society, for there was little settled arable culture. In Kingswood, such manors, farmsteads and churches as there were lay outside the area of the Chase. There was no immediate presence, therefore, of institutional authority, there were few relationships of clientage, and parochial authority was weak or nonexistent. On the other hand, the residents had their own modes of existence, with a distinctive culture and conduct, which from the outside was perceived (as we have already suggested) in terms of lawlessness – criminality, rowdiness and riotous behaviour – and nonconformity, neither one nor the other being considered as a virtue. This distinctiveness was heightened by the fact that the population was made up principally of colliers, a group noted for their independent

03-Part III

146

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 146

Religion in English Everyday Life

habits and strong sense of corporate identity; they lived and worked apart from other men, isolated physically and culturally, marked off by their mysterious underground work, the blackness of their skins, and their peculiar manners and accent, and united by their dangerous working environment. The isolation of Kingswood was related to a history of local interests frustrating more distant authority in order to exploit the Chase and in particular the coal. This pattern goes back at least to the fourteenth century. After disafforestation in 1228, the Chase remained under the authority of the Constable of Bristol Castle, a royal representative. Braine cites reports from the fourteenth century of the destruction of the forest and its livestock, implicating local dignitaries as well as lesser men. From the sixteenth century, leases for coal and slate were subject to lawsuits. In this period various local families divided up the Chase for the purposes of exploitation, setting up boundary marks and claiming the areas as ‘liberties’. Braine again refers to a number of trials at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which decided in favour of the King’s officials and patentees, confirming their rights in law to all the coal, stone, coke and slate in the Chase, but at the same time revealing the frustration they experienced in obtaining these rights from the local occupiers. Despite changes in the status of the Chase, lawsuits continued throughout the seventeenth century, showing that the ‘rightful’ owners of the liberties were defied by their de facto owners. Extant correspondence of 1718 concerning the lease of Kingswood Chase indicates the state of things. The writer refers to the ‘freeholders’, who will never part with right of common to the King; he states that no peer will ever be able to force them because the local lords are so related to several great families that they can withstand any pressure; and he refers to the destruction and waste of the woods, the many cottages built and enclosures made.13 It is possible to argue, therefore, that a continuing struggle between local notables and central authorities contributed to the creation of a ‘no man’s land’, a place apart. As the exploitation of coal was developed, the place was settled by squatters, attracted by the availability of land, de facto common rights for animals, and the possibility of industrial employment.14 A survey made in 1615 gives an account of the spoilage of the forest and its livestock, the presence of thieves and poachers, and the development of local pits and squatters’ cottages.15 By the late seventeenth century there were between 300 and 500 cottages built in Kingswood. As the population grew, so did disquiet concerning them. A petition of 166716 complains that a large number of cottagers had settled in the Chase ‘without leave … and generally live there without government or conformity in idleness and dissoluteness’. They were not ‘responsible to any Civil Officer or Minister for their behaviour or Reli-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 147

147

gion’. The people of Kingswood were represented as being lawless, drunken, pleasing themselves, irreligious and thieving. The Bristol to Bath road was considered insecure to travellers on that account, and goods and houses in the surrounding area were in danger. The area of Kingswood was both geographically and socially ‘obscure’,17 an area where ‘faces, habits, topography and social relations’ were not well known to the authorities, and this ‘obscurity’ was perceived and described in terms of the lawlessness of the inhabitants. As Malcolmson is concerned to point out, however, the colliers of Kingswood are not simply to be defined negatively, either as without law or as outside the law, but emerge as a group with a sense of identity, with their own notions of what is ‘right’ and ‘lawful’. Through their emergence, Kingswood ceases to be just a geographical locus, a site of mineral resources the practical ownership of which is disputed, and becomes a place defined by the group of people who live in that place. The colliers are glimpsed in fragmentary reports in the seventeenth century. There were riots in 1615 when attempts were made to prevent the colliers from taking and using certain quantities of coal, and making other encroachments on the forest.18 There were riots too in 1670 over attempts by the leasee to establish his authority. But the colliers emerge in clearer focus in a prolonged conflict with established authority which began in 1727, after the accession of George II, a conflict which demonstrates the colliers’ ideas about the law, its legitimacy and its operation. There are certain features of the accounts which echo the remarkable and detailed study of eighteenth-century forest deprivations in E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters.19 Thompson describes a declining local gentry or yeoman class confronted by incomers with far greater resources of political influence and money from outside the area, the incomers showing a callous disregard for customary usages and neighbourhood opinions. The riots in Kingswood were provoked by the passage in 1727 of two Turnpike Acts affecting the roads leading east out of Bristol. The colliers destroyed the turnpike gates, marched from Kingswood through Bristol in demonstration, threatened Bristol with a coal boycott, and attacked objectionable targets, including a magistrate’s house where some of their number were held under arrest. The colliers’ complaints, made in a letter to the Bristol Turnpike Trust, were couched in terms of ‘abuses’ by the local notables. They complained against encroachments upon their work and their common rights, for they saw the turnpike as an effective tax upon the transport of coal, and they objected to the ‘rights’ granted the trustees to deplete the common land for the purposes of road repairs. Further, they complained that the beneficiaries of the turnpike, the landowners and their tenants, were also the trustees of the scheme, and that the trustees, in their capacity as magistrates, had failed to enforce laws already in existence for the repair

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 148

148

Religion in English Everyday Life

of the roads. The colliers’ riots, therefore, were in response to this failure to act in a proper and responsible way, and to the turnpike as a dishonest result of this failure. They saw their own actions as correct, proper and reasonable, in response to the illegitimate and dishonourable initiatives of the turnpike promoters, and they affirmed their loyalty to the King, as the defender of justice and of moral authority. This episode is the product of the encounter of two groups, each with their own interests and criteria of interpretation. Malcolmson concludes that the colliers had a clear set of ideas about how local authority should properly be exercised, that they took direct action in defence of their conception of what was legitimate and lawful behaviour, employing a variety of tactics, and that they defended their own members from reprisals and persecutions. On the other side, as we have seen, their actions were interpreted as evidence of lawlessness, and their claims were not recognised. There are records of various collective actions – riots, strikes, protests and demonstrations – up to 1753, and a further riot in 1795. Though the collective actions of the colliers were episodic, the perception of Kingswood as a lawless area persisted. Indeed, the records show evidence of organised criminal activity in Kingswood throughout the eighteenth century and as far as the early nineteenth century. There are references to gangs in 1738, 1749 and 1786: gangs of thieves, coiners, burglars and protection racketeers. In 1811, an increase in crime led to the formation of the ‘Kingswood Association for the prosecution of thieves, housebreakers, etc.’; the prospectus issued by the Association referred to whole families being engaged in what was seen as a criminal society – training children, recruiting labourers, forming alliances with hucksters – and protected, through complicity and terror, by the society of colliers they lived among.20 In 1815, a raid led by the Bristol city watchmen arrested the entire male population of Cock Road. One family history from this period has been examined:21 the Caines family of Cock Road had eleven members transported and three hanged between 1804 and 1832. In the account, two women appear to be of central importance, organising the various members of the family through alliance and kinship. The perception of organised criminality in the area seems to disappear from the records by 1830.

III In the eighteenth-century records concerning Kingswood there was, as we have seen, a concern with criminality or lawlessness. There was also a second theme, which complemented the first, which was the religious conversion of savages.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 149

149

Kingswood is notable as the place where John Wesley first preached in the open air. When he preached, in 1739, Kingswood was an area neglected by the Anglican Church. At that time, the area was divided between four parishes, and the nearest churches were those of St. Philip and St. Jacob in Old Market, Bristol, and St. Mary’s, Bitton. The first Anglican churches to be built within the area of the Chase were St. George’s, consecrated in 1751, and Holy Trinity, Kingswood, built in 1821, when the parish of Kingswood was also defined. As well as being a safe area for outlaws, rough persons and so forth, Kingswood was also a refuge for dissenters and, later, an area of Nonconformist and Methodist strength. The Baptists first sent missionaries and evangelists to Kingswood in 1658; they suffered repeated persecutions, both by the authorities and through the indifference of the colliers, over the following twenty-five years. In 1714, they built the first meeting house in Hanham, on the site of a house licensed for Baptist worship in 1709. The Moravians were first recorded in the area in 1670, and later built a small chapel.22 George Whitefield was the first Anglican minister to pay serious attention to the inhabitants of Kingswood (though23 a Reverend William Morgan sometimes preached to the colliers in the fields in 1738). A document cited in Braine tells the story as follows: ‘When on a visit to Bristol Whitefield spoke of converting the savages of America, to which place he was about to go, many of his friends said to him “What need of going abroad for this? Have we not Indians enough at home? If you have a mind to convert Indians there are colliers enough at Kingswood?”’24 Whitefield began preaching in the open air, to vast crowds of up to 20,000 people, producing a deep effect upon them: in Whitefield’s own words – ‘at times all affected and drenched in tears together’. There are testimonies, too, to the lasting effect of Whitefield’s preaching; Braine quotes the Reverend Mark Wilkes, writing twenty-seven years after Whitefield’s death: ‘No colliery equalled that of Kingswood in civility and genuine Christianity since Whitefield had preached there, whereas before that period a stranger could not pass without the grossest insults’.25 There is a clear pattern to the tale as told: the likening of the colliers to Indians or savages (no doubt helped by the coal dust on their skins), their gross manners and behaviour, the emotionality of their conversion upon hearing the Gospel preached, and the lasting effect of that conversion and the consequent improvement in the behaviour of the whole area. John Wesley pointed in identical terms to the social transformation that he observed to have taken place. In 1768, he observed that ‘no Indians are more savage than were the colliers in Kingswood; many of whom are now a humane, hospitable people full of love to God and man; quiet, diligent in business; in every state content; every way

03-Part III

1/21/09

150

4:29 PM

Page 150

Religion in English Everyday Life

adorning the Gospel of God their Saviour’.26 Wesley was invited to preach in Kingswood by Whitefield; by December 1739 he could write: To this people Mr Whitefield last spring began to preach the gospel of Christ … When he was called away, others (came) … And by the grace of God their labour was not in vain. The scene was entirely changed. Kingswood does not now, as a year ago, resound with cursing and blasphemy. It is no longer the seat of drunkenness, uncleanness, and all idle diversions that lead thereto. It is no longer filled with wars and fightings, with clamour and bitterness, with strife and envying. Peace and love are now there: the people in general are become mild, gentle, and easy to be entreated: they do not cry, neither strive, and hardly is their voice heard in the streets, or indeed in their own wood, unless when they are at their usual evening diversions, singing praise unto God their Saviour.27

Wesley’s brother Charles wrote a hymn for the Kingswood Colliers in 1740 which speaks of the transformation in equally decided terms: ‘Glory to God, whose sovereign grace/Hath animated senseless stones./The people that in darkness lay,/In sin and error’s deadly shade,/Have seen a glorious gospel day/In Jesus’ lovely face display’d’.28 The same broad picture appears in 1794 when, linking pronunciation, morals and civilisation in a fashion characteristic of the period, a local author29 describes the colliers of the forest: they were 40 or 50 years ago, so barbarous and savage, that they were a terror to the City of Bristol, which they several times invaded; it was dangerous to go among them, and their dialect was the roughest and rudest in the Nation; but by the labours of Mess. Whitefield and Wesley, by the erection of a parish Church and some meeting-houses, and the establishment of several Sunday and daily schools, they are much civilised and improved in principles, morals and pronunciation.

Yet the dark side of the colliers’ character persisted as well. As we have seen, Wesley had some harsh words to say concerning the split in the Kingswood Society in 1741, holding that the root of the problem was not any doctrinal difference, but the members ‘scoffing at the word and Ministers of God; … their tale-bearing, backbiting and evil speaking; … their dissembling, lying and slandering’.30 So it is not surprising that the rhetoric of barbarism conquered can be repeated eighty years after Whitefield first used it. The Tent Methodists, an offshoot led by George Pocock, in 1820 produced a handbill in Hanham which in part reads: ‘… many of the poor Colliers, and others, by the Mighty Power of God, have been lately brought out of the horrible Pit of Sin, and out of the Miry Clay of the vilest Practices. These lately reformed Sabbath-breakers and Thieves, till now, ignorant as the

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 151

151

“Untaught Indian’s Brood”, are in the Act of Building, for themselves and Children, a Place for a School and for Religious Services’.31 This rhetoric is remarkably constant, then, for eighty years between 1740 and 1820. After 1820, the ambiguous savage, with his combination of violence and openness of heart, loses his prime place in the records, and becomes a thing of the past, being maintained in the contrast with the present condition of industry and piety (as in the quotation from Braine with which we began). In both the case of the riotous-cum-criminal population and that of the conversion of Indians, the accounts cease to have a contemporary referent around 1820/30. It is fair to say that the subsequent history of Kingswood has not been investigated in a systematic way. The bare record of the nineteenth century indicates the development of local industries and the multiplication of chapels. The two are connected, for self-made men feature largely in the accounts of chapel life and in the commissioning of new buildings. Throughout the nineteenth century, there were waves of religious activity as the initiative passed from one denomination or group to another. It is worthwhile giving an outline of this process in a paragraph in order to indicate the intensity and scale of the phenomenon that is usually passed over in silence. Between 1804 and 1815, there was an expansion of Sunday schools through the work of the Bristol Methodist Sunday School Society. Between 1810 and 1850, various denominations built churches and chapels: there were six independent chapels, five Wesleyan chapels, four Anglican churches and one Presbyterian chapel built in the area defined by the Kingswood Chapel Survey32 in these forty years. Between 1850 and 1870, following the split of the Reformers from the Wesleyan Methodists, there was an intense burst of chapel building: there were nine Reformed or United Methodist Free Church (UMFC) chapels built, three chapels built or rebuilt by the Presbyterians and the Moravians, and one chapel opened by the Wesleyans. The UMFC became a major force in the area, and was associated with a revival in 1871-3 when more than 800 persons professed conversion. In the 1870s, the Primitive Methodist Church expanded, building six chapels, while the UMFC opened one, as did the Christian Brethren. There was no building in the following decade, but between 1890 and 1910 there was another burst of construction, led by the Christian Brethren and Independent Missions who built five chapels, the UMFC who built three, the Presbyterians and Congregationalists two, and the Wesleyans one. In 1905, there was a revival centred upon Kingswood Hill Congregational Church when over 1,000 people professed conversion. Since 1910, this pattern of activity, at least as evinced by building, has ceased.33 This chronicle of events raises many questions which we cannot pursue directly. Its interest to us is to indicate how much material is

03-Part III

152

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 152

Religion in English Everyday Life

excluded from popular historical accounts. Although Kingwood bears the mark of the nineteenth century in terms of buildings, businesses, street layout and so forth, in local perceptions its nineteenth century is singularly lacking in ‘richness of events’. Reference is made to the eighteenth century as to the origin of the social space: there are monuments to the Baptist preachers, to the Evangelical Revival and to John Wesley, and this period is remembered and recounted. On the other hand, the later period is effectively invisible or, if it is remarked, it is made a function of the origin so that the nineteenth-century chapels (and, more obscurely, the businesses and the street layout) bear witness to the effectiveness of the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield.34 The eighteenth-century ‘stereotype’ (for want of a better word), which was born out of the clash of a local population with a local élite, and in which Kingswood was portrayed in terms of savages ripe for conversion, still in some sense shapes later perceptions, or is reproduced in them. Conversion may have done its work, and the emphasis lie upon piety, thrift and, in particular, respectability, but violence is still there too, repressed, underlying these values as their counterpart, both in their past and as a present threat, the possibility of falling back. When Malcolmson at the end of his paper suggests that the rise of Methodism played its part in reducing Kingswood to a quiescent state, he is adopting uncritically the values of the stereotype. He claims that ‘Methodism tended to have its greatest impact in areas where patriarchal structures of authority were weakest’35 (by patriarchal structures, he means the control of landlords, proprietors, magistrates and so forth). And he postulates ‘something of a psychological vacuum to be filled’, which corresponds to this absence of ‘patriarchal structures’, and into which Methodism expanded. Yet this is a curious hypothesis, especially given his work to establish the positive force of the colliers’ categories and perceptions, and the fact that they were not mere reflections of their context but active participants in it. Malcolmson was sketching out the history of the colliers subsequent to the period of his main concern, and his belated evocation of the stereotype does not undermine his thesis. Yet the appearance of the stereotype is indicative of its powers of definition, which we have already met with in discussion of the relationship between the sexes in Kingswood (or of family and locality), and which we shall meet with again in the subsequent discussion of indigenous conceptions of respectability. And the question will emerge: what is there in contemporary local categories and behaviour that lends itself to being perceived in terms of this stereotype, and indeed which is interpreted locally in analogous terms? For the moment, however, we shall tackle the question from the angle of our original concern, to wit, wherein lie the continuities between the past and the popular account, or, in other words, what reality emerges in this local history?

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 153

The Kingswood Whit Walk

153

IV It is possible to discern the outline of events in the late seventeenth/ early eighteenth century. A social space, an assemblage of definitions, relationships, reciprocities and so forth, which had been created within the long-term exploitation by local notables of the weakness of a distant royal power, collapsed, and in the context of that collapse a population emerged in a series of claims against perceived failures of the notables, made in the name of certain notions of legitimacy. This was the experience of the destruction of one world and of the emergence of another from its ruins, a transformation or redefinition of social space. Late on in that series of episodes, part of the local population responded to the open-air preaching of evangelists. The experience of collapse and redefinition of identity was primary, and the incidents of preaching and the establishment of places of worship epiphenomenal. Yet the subsequent perception of the period is recounted entirely in terms of the latter. The history of the collapse of order and of established relationships, and of the simultaneous emergence through self-definition of a population, is told in terms of a drama of savages and conversion. In the popular account, there is no mention made of any appeal to the King, nor of the role of the notables, nor of the place of toll roads; there is scarcely any memory of rioting, and none of claims based upon a popular conception of legitimacy. The restructuring is total. Indeed, scarcely any historical events are referred to, and the accounts are largely mythical in style: they are anecdotal and disconnected, there is no reference to any contemporary reality or context, time and place vanish, and political themes disappear. Similarly biography, in the accounts of the evangelists and of later local figures, has epic rather than realistic qualities, and the motivations for characters are obscure and even contradictory. Yet one factor remains constant: the crux of any account is the fact of conversion, the experience of transformation, which defines the subsequent possibilities. We may suggest that the experience of the collapse of Kingswood as a place apart and the simultaneous emergence of a population through self-definition took as its model the story of conversion, a clear pattern of transformation from violence into order. All sorts of relationships, alliances, habits, ways of doing things, unravelled and fell apart (this is the collapse of social space); new definitions, perceptions and so forth were forged using materials, debris, taken from this collapsing world, and order could be imposed upon this total experience in terms of violence and conversion. This one experience served as a key for the rest. So history, or the real, survives in this sense: the events are transformed, but the core of the traumatic event is preserved in the pattern that lies at the heart of all accounts of the local identity, the notion of ‘fiends transformed’.

03-Part III

154

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 154

Religion in English Everyday Life

I have three comments with which to conclude this discussion. First, if it is true that the fragmented remains of the transforming event are still perceivable, preserved in the ambiguous relations at the heart of the story, and that this uneasy constant, the endlessly repeated conversion (and silent falling away) which emerges in every account of the ‘history’ of Kingswood, bears witness to the core of the traumatic event, then what is presented is not the outsider’s view – the account of the notables, or of the forces of Law and Order, or of the Crown – but the view of those upon whom the effect of the events was to reorder totally reality: the indigenous population. There is not then a total ‘flatness’ of the text: reality leaves its mark. Time does not efface history. Rather, as Sir Thomas Browne remarks: ‘Time, which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments’.36 The minor monuments which Time spares have the form we have described. This conclusion has implications for those discussions of relations between cultures or definitional spaces which claim that the reordering is total. Indeed, there has been something of a tendency in recent anthropological discussion to react against theories of clarity, according to which other cultures exist as unproblematic isolates, and may be read at sight, and to turn to theories of rhetoric, according to which other cultures are effectively ‘invented’ by colonial, patriarchal and other powers. Edward Said’s Orientalism37 is an influential example of the shift, yet he exploits the reordering power of ‘discourse’ without any recognition of the minor monuments that Time may spare within it. Two critics express the problem in this way: ‘Said poses … no alternative form for the adequate representation of other voices or points of view across cultural boundaries … He acknowledges no political or cultural divisions among the subject peoples he is allegedly defending. These last have no more independent voice in his text than that of any other Western writer’.38 Said’s influence (and through him, that of Michel Foucault) is felt in a number of critiques of the relationships between cultures that ignore the way that ‘minor’ cultures shape and are present in the ‘discourse’ that greater powers hold upon them.39 Second, there is the complex question of the historicity of structures. The ‘mode of registration’ that we have identified must make sense in contemporary Kingswood: it is a statement of some sort concerning identity, to the extent of being a recognisable summary of ‘the past’ and of the origin of the present state of affairs. So it relates to and is part of contemporary thinking; in this (structuralist) fashion, the past exists in the present: it is not an object of thought so much as a category. There is a remarkable continuity in this mode of registration; it is a long-lived resource for making sense of who one is and, being categorical, this mode has connections with other categories. The concern

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 155

155

of the rest of this essay is with the detail of the present realisation of this structure, how it continues to make sense, through the familial components of locally perceived space, and through the consequences of the local perception of what it is to be a person in this space. As well as having a history, this mode of registration has its own historicity, or structuring of time, built in: it is an extremely familiar pattern that constructs and shapes perception, and distributes past and present. In it, an interpretative framework – which, as we shall see, contains and confirms a whole picture of what it is to be human, both good and bad – is given a temporal structure or vector, whereby the present transformed state is detached from the past, unredeemed state, and the past, if it reemerges, is seen as a survival, a vestige or throwback for which the present is not responsible. At the same time, this temporal mode of registration, this indigenous historicity, lends itself to outside readings of various sorts. In the case of Kingswood, two such readings stand out: a socialist one which reads the past in terms of legitimacy and community and also, perhaps, as a lost opportunity for a class consciousness to be realised, and a Methodist one, which sees the past in terms of evidence for the lasting transforming effect of evangelisation and subsequent faith. Neither reading takes account of the local perception, which does not see the past either in terms of the value of conflict (be it class or otherwise), or in terms of the primacy of religious faith. One would expect evidences of the local view to emerge in these readings only in inconsistencies, silences and anomalies. Other accounts of local societies present similar characteristics: they tend to eliminate or discount local perceptions of historical time and to impose their own. Community studies, for example, which are a valuable resource in considering a place such as Kingswood, present a vision of a world on the brink of disappearance; in them, typically, social science emerges as an attempt at salvage:40 the idea of community is cast in a mood of ‘always about to disappear’, as a recent memory or as a survival. Again, these versions employ indigenous representations as material, but do not express local temporal perceptions or concerns, and so present such populations as being in some sense ‘outside history’.41 There is an extra twist in this case,42 for Wesley’s experience of Kingswood provided him with an account of transformation that he applied elsewhere, and that story has become a generalised tradition, providing expectations and terms not simply for descriptions of religious conversion but also for other, secular histories which, as we have seen, form a constituent element of the gaze that is brought to bear upon such localities, whether in classical labour history, newer sociological and historical guises, or popular recensions. The historical experience of Kingswood is present in a precise way in the creation of accounts that attempt to repress its history.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 156

156

Religion in English Everyday Life

Such considerations lead on to our final comment, which is that at no point is there a pure untouched ‘internal’ or indigenous view which then comes into contact or ‘negotiates’ with the ‘outside’, with external perceptions and powers. Inside and outside views are constructed from the start with mutual reference: they consist in their interactions, their mutual (mis)interpretations. These views neither exist in isolation, nor can either be reduced to a reflection of the other. From the start, Kingswood has existed as a ‘place apart’, a space filled with people, in a series of definitional frames, each of which uses the others only as material with which to create a picture, though responding too to the constraints of reality or materiality in the way we have outlined. In this perspective, studies of local societies in particular become part of the empirical material under consideration: they are involved materially in this repetitive construction through interpretation that is a feature of the life – indeed existence – of any local society. This conclusion also indicates how we might place this essay: it is a part of the reiteration of Kingswood. The notion of ‘local history’ is then a way of raising the question of investigating what has been called a definitional space. Such a space lasts longer than the other particularities or events that to a degree fill it out and realise it, though in far greater detail, lived richness and complexity. The rest of this essay is an attempt to describe the contemporary realisation of this space, bearing in mind that other readings and accounts are part of the evidence.

Notes 1. ‘Local knowledge’ – see Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, New York 1983; cf. A. Biersack, ‘Local knowledge, local history: Geertz and beyond’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley 1989:72-96; see also Michael Herzfeld’s distinction between ‘stories’ and ‘History’, in Anthropology through the Looking Glass, Cambridge 1987: 43-4. 2. Official Guides: F.A. Wilshire, The Story of Kingswood and its Church, Gloucester and London [n.d.], I.H. Dearnley, Kingswood and Hanham, Gloucs.: The Official Guide, Cheltenham 1949, and Kingswood: An Official Guide to Kingswood and Hanham, 1960, and Kingswood District Council, Kingswood District Official Guide, Wallington 1984. 3. Local historians – see Bibliography Part 1: ‘Works pertaining to Kingswood or South Gloucestershire’. 4. Abraham Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: including all the ancient manors and villages in the neighbourhood, London and Bristol 1891; reprinted Bath 1969. See Dorothy Vintner, ‘Abraham Braine. A Gloucestershire Historian’, in Kingswood and District Local History Society, Forest Heritage: selected papers of the K.&D.L.H.S. 1967-8, duplicated, [Kingswood] 1968, for an account of Braine’s life. 5. Revd. H.T. Ellacombe, The History of the Parish of Bitton, 2 vols, Exeter 1881 and 1883. Ellacombe also left unpublished a vast collection of manuscripts, documents and so forth, relating to local history, particularly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this material is now to be found in the Bristol Municipal

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Page 157

157

Library Reference Section. Materials concerning Kingswood are to be found in vols 6-8. Wilshire, The Story of Kingswood: 19. Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: 285. Edwin Ardener, ‘Evidences of creation’, in Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald and Malcolm Chapman (eds), History and Ethnicity (A.S.A. Monographs 27), London 1989: 22-3. I follow Ardener’s approach in the remaining paragraphs of this section; see particularly ‘a flatness of vision’ – ibid.: 23, and ‘four levels’. For example, C.Geertz, ‘Blurred genres. The refiguration of social thought’, in Geertz, Local Knowledge. C. Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, Paris 1962. Ardener, ‘Evidences of creation’: 30-1. The ‘principle of density’ is introduced in an earlier paper – Ardener, ‘Remote areas’, in Anthony Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home (A.S.A. Monographs 25), London 1987: 38-54. Robert Malcolmson, ‘The Kingswood Colliers in the Eighteenth Century’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, London 1980: 85-122. Malcolmson follows in large part an agenda set by E.P. Thompson – see Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present 50, 1971: 76-136. Thompson’s work is now considered to be part of a wider ‘anthropological’ turn in the practice of historians – see Suzanne Desan, ‘Crowds, community and ritual in the work of E.P. Thompson and Natalie Davis’, in Hunt, New Cultural History: 47-71. Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: fourteenth-century destruction, p.38; sixteenth-century lawsuits, p.51; trials at the beginning of the seventeenth century, pp.53-55; lawsuits throughout the seventeenth century, pp.85, 87; extant correspondence of 1718, pp.88-90. Malcolmson, ‘Kingswood colliers’: 90. Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: 58-60. Quoted by Malcolmson, ‘Kingswood colliers’: 91. To adopt Malcolmson’s term. Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: 61. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, London 1975. This evidence raises, retrospectively, these questions with respect to Malcolmson’s work: how homogeneous in fact the crowds were; whether all groups participated equally and with similar aims in ‘ritual’ violence; and whether the perspectives of each group remained constant throughout the episodes in question. As Desan (‘Crowds, community and ritual’) remarks, the approach that refers to community cohesion, indigenous notions of legitimacy, and ritual as principles of explanation, tends to pay inadequate attention to the issues of transformation, conflict and power. Patricia Lindegaard, ‘The Mark of Cain: The Cock Road Gang’, Avon Past 9, 1983. Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: 217. According to George Eayrs, Wesley and Kingswood and its Free Churches, Bristol 1911. Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: 224. Ibid.: 225. The Letters of John Wesley vol 5: 121, quoted by Malcolmson, ‘Kingswood colliers’: 126. John Wesley, letter to Nathanael Price, 6th. Dec. 1739, quoted by Michael Feast, A History of Methodism in Kingswood, 1739-1920, duplicated, [Bristol n.d.]: 4. Eayrs, Wesley and Kingswood: 95. W. Matthews, The New History, Survey and Description of the City and Suburbs of Bristol, Bristol 1794: 75, quoted by Malcolmson, ‘Kingswood colliers’: 126. Quoted by Feast, History of Methodism: 5. Preserved in Ellacombe’s mss., quoted by Feast op. cit.: 6.

03-Part III

158

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 158

Religion in English Everyday Life

32. Jeffrey Spittal and David Dawson, The Kingswood Chapels Survey, duplicated, [Bristol] 1983. 33. Sources for this paragraph: Eayrs, Wesley and Kingswood, Feast, History of Methodism, Braine, History of Kingswood Forest, and Spittal and Dawson, The Kingswood Chapels Survey. 34. See, for example, the recent Kingswood District Official Guide (Kingswood District Council 1984: 17); the pamphlet produced by the Kingswood District Council (1983) to mark the dedication of a new pulpit on Hanham Mount; or the older Wilshire, The Story of Kingswood. 35. Malcolmson, ‘Kingswood colliers’: 126. 36. Sir Thomas Browne, Urne Buriall, chapter V, London 1906. 37. Edward Said, Orientalism, New York 1978. 38. George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Chicago 1986: 2. 39. Perhaps the most useful recent discussion of these problems is to be found in Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking Glass. 40. See Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: 95; on Community Studies, see above, Introductory. 41. For a further discussion of these questions, see J. Fabian, Time and the Other, New York 1983. 42. I am grateful to Keith Wrightson for pointing this out to me – personal communication. C.f. R. Colls, The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield: Work, Culture and Protest, 1790-1850, Manchester 1987: 168.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 159

5

RESPECTABILITY, REPUTATION AND RESTRAINT I An attempt to describe and to understand the experience of living in a local society has to give an account of what we might call ‘the person’. What does it mean to be a ‘person’ in Kingswood? The notion of ‘the person’ is both elusive and necessary; at a first approximation, it is related to such questions as ‘in what does the unity of a human life consist in the local perception?’ Further, how do people, locally, reckon what it is to behave well, and to live a good, proper or satisfactory life? In short, the notion of ‘the person’ is to do with how we are to understand the relation of the individual to society, and how – to employ a particular jargon – ‘the self ’ relates to the roles it plays and to its ends and purposes.1 Recent anthropological discussions of ‘the person’ in general begin from Mauss’s essay ‘A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self ’,2 and concentrate upon whether or not this category is universal, or necessary, and if so, in what sense. On the one hand, the universality of the category is problematic, for (in the sociological view) ‘the individual is a product of society rather than its cause … (since) individualism is a social product like all moralities and all religions’.3 There is therefore no compelling reason to suppose that such a notion will appear in every society, or will appear in such a way that any common core will emerge. On the other hand, it is possible to claim that ‘the person’ may correspond to a set of predicaments common to all humans. This sort of approach underlies certain modern theories of the possibility of translation (and indeed, of the anthropological enterprise), according to which it is possible for speakers of one natural language to penetrate the thought framework of another ‘not because their inherent conceptual schemes are identical, but because

03-Part III

160

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 160

Religion in English Everyday Life

their users, endowed with a common biological heritage, face the same sort of problems in making their way in the world’.4 The idea that ‘the person’ may correspond to a set of predicaments is surely a most useful one, and has affinities with the approach developed by Georg Simmel in his remarkable essay upon ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’,5 in which he situates the predicament in the dilemma of communication.6 Simmel begins from the observation that all relationships are based upon people knowing something about each other, and the complexity or development of relationships is related to the degree that the parties reveal themselves to one another. Considered in another perspective, a relationship between people presupposes a common culture that they can expect of each other. This common culture, though, does not presuppose accurate or true knowledge as such. A common culture does not entail transparency. There must certainly be much that is true in the knowledge that the parties have of each other, else they would act – in the extreme case – at random, yet there may also be much ignorance and error in either party’s view of the other. In addition, there is no rule of symmetry, or an equal distribution of ignorance: one party’s view may contain less of these defects than the other’s. Communication is based upon a pragmatic constraint, that the picture each party has of the other must enable action to continue and not to break down. This common culture is not stable, but exists in a series of encounters or interactions or events, for each party is continually acting on the basis of his (or her) picture of the other, and legitimating this picture upon the basis of the action that ensues. Social knowledge, or a common culture, exists in these mutual explorations or interpretations.7 The notion of personality, or character, is closely linked to the notion of interpretation in this sense. An individual exists in a claim to private space, a claim to personality. The individual sets limits as to what may be known about him or her, and demands a certain private space; at the same time and by the same token he or she claims a certain esteem or character, and demands the recognition of this character. These are the two sides of the same coin: a recognition of character entails a respect of personal space or privacy. Concealment and revelation are part of the same gesture. Yet the worth of this coin is a matter for negotiation. A person may allow only a certain knowledge about him (or her) self, but this does not necessarily restrict the other party’s knowledge about him. Similarly, a claim to character is only a claim, and may not be granted, or a different estimation may be made. Further, in granting a claim or making a different estimation, the second party is himself making a claim and seeking recognition in a similar fashion. In a local society such as Kingswood, therefore, the notion of personality, what it is to be ‘a person’, may be discovered in a series of

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 161

161

interconnected topics: in claims made to reputation, in the criteria used to make such claims and used in their evaluation, in the negotiations over evaluations, and in the consequences of agreement or failure to agree. Or, in the terms I shall discuss – respectively in this chapter and the next – the values of reputation, restraint and respectability, and the institutions that embody them; and the contrary values of fecklessness, gossip and violence, and the failure of institutions. These are the values that order local society: they are both the key to the description that has been made of the Whit Walk, the route of the march and the organisation of the family, and the contemporary realisation of the structuring historical experience of violence and conversion. Such a description as I propose is not, however, a straightforward business, for the values of ‘the person’ in such a local society imply certain constraints upon any investigation into them. The principle one is that there is no ‘value free’ language in which to talk about such matters. In Kingswood, there are no direct statements of customs of mind and beliefs. There exists no explicit indigenous framework for reference in matters of behaviour, and it is no use looking for key local terms; for example, neither ‘respectability’ nor ‘fecklessness’ have a specific local usage, they are not evoked as such, as a measure or as judgement. Indeed, such matters are not discussed as such, and it is no use asking directly for explanations of judgements or actions. Julian Pitt-Rivers remarks that, enquiring after matters of value and conduct, the ‘ethnographer in Andalusia, when he is not told simply that each man does what he wants …, is likely to discover afterwards that he has been misinformed’.8 It is no different in Kingswood. Information is not to be had for the asking. Codes of conduct are not laid down and held out for inspection; they are continually negotiated and manipulated in the business of everyday life, for in these negotiations and manipulations a person’s existence is created, shaped and refined. Important matters such as these cannot be discussed: much of their importance is linked with their unsayableness. An individual only presents interpretations that are currency in the business in hand, for who he is is tied up with how he conducts himself, and in this, silence is as important as speech. Therefore, in addition to there being no explicit indigenous discussion of values, there is also a strong sense of discretion, of control over what one says to whom and of to whom one owes the truth. The practical use of language is as much to conceal information as to convey it; what speaks volumes is how one calculates to whom knowledge is owed and from whom it is withheld. This raises the puzzle about the status of ‘informants’: a ‘good’ informant, a person of experience and insight, who is in touch with the central values of the local society, is bound to

03-Part III

1/21/09

162

4:29 PM

Page 162

Religion in English Everyday Life

be more discrete and say less than a ‘poor’ informant, whose talkativeness is itself a sign of his incapacity to say anything of significance. As Pitt-Rivers points out in discussing fieldwork under such conditions, it is then ‘necessary to devise some other means of discovering the norm than asking for it in so many words’.9 An understanding has to be constructed or negotiated, taking into account both the inquirer’s ignorance and who he is taken to be. Moreover he can at best present only simulacra or shadows of complex social orderings, of the ‘folds’ and ‘secrets’ of social life. In this sense anthropological knowledge is simply a special case of what is generally the rule: there is an equilibrium between discretion and reading what a person or situation conveys. Any discussion of ‘the person’ therefore raises complex questions of the mutual structures of recognition that include claims to, and acknowledgements of, an individual’s ‘space’, questions of privacy on the one hand and discretion on the other. Social life in this perspective cannot be read at sight; it is, as it were, folded in upon itself. Simmel writes,10 in this connection, that the secret in this sense, the hiding of realities by negative or positive means, is one of man’s greatest achievements. In comparison with … (a state) in which every conception is expressed at once, and every undertaking is accessible to the eyes of all, the secret produces an immense enlargement of life: numerous contents of life cannot even emerge in the presence of full publicity. The secret offers, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside the manifest world; and the latter is decisively influenced by the former.

Simmel links his discussion of the person and personal space to a consideration of certain organisational characteristics, in a way that is of interest to our concerns. Certain of the conditions for the production and maintenance of ‘the person’ are to be found at the level of local organisations: claims to reputation are made by membership of organisations that in some respects stand apart from the society around, making public the claims as to the sort of person who can join. Membership proclaims a certain quality of person. Moreover, these organisations have characteristics at their own level which reproduce or echo the structure of the person: on the one hand, they have an internal space, a privacy or secrecy, and on the other hand, they demand – and need – the acknowledgement of the society around. Even the commonplace organisations of local society, therefore, share some of the characteristics of secret societies that Simmel details: they have a certain privilege and élitism and mystery. As Simmel points out,11 ‘social conditions of strong personal differentiation permit and require secrecy in a high degree’, and conversely, the secret embodies and intensifies such differentiation. Within such organisations, there is a confidence between members, a belief in fraternity and

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 163

The Kingswood Whit Walk

163

a fundamental equality, which may nevertheless go hand in hand with a strongly hierarchical structure which a member penetrates step by step. Such organisations may have pronounced rituals and rites. All these characteristics are part of the fascination of possessing a ‘secret’, an inner space, which confers privilege and conveys the mystery of a superior person. On the other hand, these organisations have an element of public display. Although, in a Protestant milieu, adornment is in general discouraged, these ‘élite’ organisations draw attention to themselves in certain public events, by their formal appearance at the funerals of members, by their annual parades and services, such as on Remembrance Day, and by parading with banners on the occasion of the Whit Walk. In these displays, superiority is claimed: the possession of some special quality or character by virtue of membership. At the same time, however, dependence is demonstrated: dependence upon the recognition of the spectators and upon their good will. It is therefore possible to suggest that there will be a certain congruency between the question of the person and the question of local organisations; that in the same society, personality and organisations will display in some respects similar kinds of limits; and that in Kingswood, the Whit Walk is intimately connected with the local perception of what it is to be a person, in a complex calculus of separation and dependency.

II The social milieu in which the conditions and limits of personality are expressed has been shaped in Kingswood by two factors in particular which we have encountered already: coalmining and chapels. We shall come to consider aspects of Nonconformism and Methodism; we shall begin by recalling briefly the importance of coalmining, for it has been a major influence in the development of Kingswood. Coal12 had long been worked in a small-scale way, but in the eighteenth century new collieries were opened and production increased as industry expanded around the city of Bristol. By 1750 there were more than 140 collieries in and around Bristol; local pits supplied such industries as copper smelting works at Baptist Mills, Conham and Crews Hole, a brass foundry at Warmley, distilleries, glass and sugar manufactories. During the nineteenth century, the demand for coal continued to increase. New pits were sunk, including Frog Lane at Coalpit Heath and Parkfield near Shortwood. Old pits such as Speedwell and Deep Pit underwent extensive redevelopment. Conditions improved; most pits used furnaces for ventilation. By 1880, large collieries like Speedwell

03-Part III

164

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 164

Religion in English Everyday Life

and Deep Pit were installing steam-driven fans. The old vertical winding engines and horse gins gave way to new horizontal steam winders, made by local firms like Gregory of Kingswood Hill and Phipps the boiler makers, who had a foundry near New Cheltenham. The number of colliers in Kingswood and South Gloucestershire reached a peak in 1879, when there were twenty-one collieries working. By the second half of the nineteenth century there had developed in Kingswood a local élite, consisting of shopkeepers and managers, skilled engineering workers and factory overseers, as well as a group of more eminent citizens and patrons, drawn from the owners and upper managers of the mines and factories. The evidence for this comes from local government records (membership of the Sanitary Boards and the District Council) and from chapel records, as well as from various local histories and biographies.13 However, the East Bristol coalfield declined quickly. By 1900, eleven pits were working. Six of these had closed before the First War: the pit in Golden Valley, Bitton; California Colliery in Oldland; Easton Colliery; the Crown Collieries in Warmley; Mangotsfield Common and Church Farm Collieries in Mangotsfield. Some of these incorporated workings going back to the eighteenth century or before; others were nineteenth century developments. Of the five remaining, Hanham Colliery closed in 1926; Speedwell and Deep Pit in 1936; Parkfield in 1936; and Frog Lane Colliery was closed in 1946. An exception was the Harry Stoke Colliery, developed after the nationalisation of the coal industry (1947) to exploit the north Bristol area of the coalfields, which closed in 1963. Other local industries survived the rapid decline of the coalmining industry and adapted to new circumstances. There has been a changing constellation of small and medium-sized firms. Pin manufacturing closed down by the end of the nineteenth century; light engineering, the boot and shoe trade and garment manufacturing are still local industries. The manufacturing process has become concentrated, and outworking has been abandoned; the tendency has also been towards fewer and larger factories. In the process of adaptation and development two features of patterns of employment appear to offer parallels or congruities with past practices. The first we have already remarked: the employment of women in the local economy and the importance of this employment in sustaining family life. The second is the existence of an élite of skilled workers. In the 1981 Census, Kingswood Civil Parish showed 60 percent of household heads in socioeconomic classes IV and V: skilled and semiskilled manual workers, foreman/supervisor and personal services. A particular feature of the area is the self-employed worker, the skilled workman running his own small business, very often from home.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 165

165

Alongside the skilled factory worker there are self-employed plumbers, builders, roofers, decorators, electricians, heating engineers, clothes and curtain makers, upholsterers, furniture makers, men who run transport businesses, car repair mechanics, and other trades. These people do not necessarily work entirely on their own, but according to need will take subcontracting work, hoping in time to emerge as an independent business. Often, too, they work in partnership with a mate, a brother or, most frequently, a father- or brother-in-law. The construction and limits of the notion of ‘the person’ in Kingswood are closely linked with this group of skilled workers and with their collective practice of self-definition. The identity of such an élite in a local society is tied up with certain sorts of attitudes and behaviour, both individual and corporate or institutional, that may be summed up as the values of respectability.14 But just as in the case of the values of the family, caution must be exercised: these values of respectability are not an imitation or an assumption of externally defined aspirations. The thesis may be rejected that, through higher income and standards of living, the skilled working class comes to adopt the values of the middle class. Instead, the autonomy of their values should be insisted upon, for these have to be understood ‘within a specific working-class socio-economic situation’. These values operate within a particular context, and cannot be understood in abstraction. This emphasis is doubly valuable. On the one hand, it is easy to impose a stereotype of respectability, characterised by double standards, moral hypocrisy and individual self-righteousness, which misses both the independence of the pattern of values with which we are concerned (reducing it to a parody of middle-class morality), and the complexity of what is involved, for we are concerned with what is effectively a whole culture of ideas and actions, of judgements and patterns of behaviour. On the other hand, the emphasis upon independence focuses upon a concern that is central to the indigenous perception. A principal strand to this complex of values is a desire to exert control over the contingencies of life, whether they be experienced in health, employment or politics. This is expressed as a desire for social advancement, or to rise in the world, for this is synonymous in local culture with independence. This desire for advancement is not, however, a desire for occupational change, nor does it contain a rejection of the person’s class, family or area. A person cannot wish to change his grade if pride is associated with a craft or skill; nor does he wish to move away from the area, for there is generally felt a strong identification with and pride in both class and locality, articulated through the family in ways we have outlined. Mobility is concerned not with occupation but with status. Ambition is not principally economically motivated, although

03-Part III

166

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 166

Religion in English Everyday Life

independence has economic components, rather it is based upon a desire for a certain status or reputation, and this status or reputation is expressed in terms of what we shall call respectability. The key to this matter of reputation is the notion that a man can by his own behaviour entitle himself to a good character, and this means achieving a certain independence. The one condition to which a respectable man or family cannot descend is that of dependence. Independence therefore has many dimensions. In the domestic sphere, there is an extreme unwillingness to rely upon any help or advice except family aid in times of change or crisis. Financially, a family aims to be independent of the vagaries of circumstances; thrift is an important virtue, and we have seen the pattern of the woman going out to work in order to meet the needs of the family and in order to avoid depending upon charity or the State. At work, independence from the will and dictates of others is very important; hence the importance of self-employment, and the relative independence and power that a skilled trade gives. Although independence is closely linked to economic and social factors – in particular, to a certain level and regularity of earnings, residential stability, differentials within the workforce and stable relationships with an employer – in local perceptions respectability is primarily a matter of moral character. There is a circle of related, mutually supporting values – thrift, providence, industry and sobriety – which defines the moral character of the respectable person. Indeed the ability to benefit from these social and economic factors is understood to derive from these personal qualities; in this perspective, prosperity is virtue, and social ends and economic ends are practically identical. This view supports and emphasises the differentiation of the respectable from the rest of the working class, who in this moral vision are characterised by a lack of restraint, a desire for instant gratification, or fecklessness. A working man asserts his respectability by demonstrating that he can avoid the pitfalls of contingency, misfortune and poverty, and that he can overcome the temptations represented by credit, indolence and intemperance. Respectability, in the local view, is a matter of having the will to seek independence and the qualities necessary to achieve it. This moral vision may be illustrated by examples of (locally perceived) ill- and well-formed lives. As before, the opinions expressed are not my own, but belong to the family or neighbours. Four men’s lives are briefly outlined, for the criteria concerning women’s lives have been discussed and illustrated sufficiently in chapter 3. Patrick Bush was born in Hanham in 1924, one of four children; they were not a close family, and their mother, who is still alive, is in a home. He enjoyed war service, when he had friends and dressed smartly. After demobilisation he married, in Kingswood Parish

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 167

167

Church, a young woman from Downend, immediately to the north of Kingswood. For the first ten years of their married life they lived in Kingswood in temporary accommodation; in the late 1950s they moved to a council house, also in Kingswood, where they still live. They have three children, a son and a daughter who have both married and live locally, and another son who is unmarried and lives at home. In his wife’s words, Bush has had ‘a wasted life’. He has never really worked since marriage; he has always been depressed and stayed at home, not going out for long periods. He cannot meet people, except immediate family. Latterly, he has become ill, and will not go beyond the front door. He is a quiet, serious man who reads a good deal, mostly non-fiction, and watches television, particularly current affairs. He was a devoted father to his children, never raising his hand or his voice to them, and is devoted to his grandchildren. Eric Biggs was born in 1907, the youngest of fourteen. The family still lives locally; they are not thought of as particularly close. He truanted from school, and never learnt to read or write. He worked as a fitter’s mate at an industrial works in Avonmouth, in the far west of the city. In his twenties he had two bouts of pneumonia; after this, he continued to do light work for the firm, loading and unloading, and odd jobs, retiring at sixty, though carrying out some night watchman work until he was sixty-five. He has done very little since retiring. Biggs married in the 1930s. He and his wife lived a quiet life, rarely going out, although she used to go out with a woman friend to dances. She died in 1970, leaving a daughter who moved in to keep house for her father. After a short while, she left. Biggs then moved in with a sister, soon after that marrying again, for company and housekeeping. His second wife had been a widow for twenty years, and had her own circle of friends. They moved to a house in Kingswood, where they lived for seven years until her death in 1982. Biggs then moved in permanently with his daughter, who had married and lived with her husband, three children and two step-children in a council house in Kingswood, in a street where (in the local view) the Council tends to put problem families. The gardens are untidy and the houses in poor condition. Biggs has no interests and no friends, and this has been his condition throughout his life. He does nothing but watch television. He is mean with money, selfish and cantankerous; he makes trouble and has rows, he tries hard to get his own way and sulks if he fails. These two examples of ‘ill-formed’ lives reiterate the interdependence of such factors as work, residence and family, and demonstrate their complex interplay with health and, above all, character. One notable feature is the absence in either case of any participation in public life, in pub, club or other association. This contrasts with the following cases.

03-Part III

168

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 168

Religion in English Everyday Life

Patrick Giddens was born in Kingswood in 1905. He and his sister were orphaned early, and brought up in a home in Downend. At fourteen he joined the Merchant Navy as a stoker; subsequently, he worked in various trades, in an ochre works at Bitton, in Kingswood factories, and finally as a boiler man at Cossham and Frenchay hospitals (both in East Bristol). He also worked for market gardeners, father and son, in Mounthill and Hanham. He was a Special Constable during and after the War. He married into a good family from Mounthill, his wife being the eldest of three children, who worked locally and looked after her parents until they died. She married only upon their death, when she was thirty-three and he thirty-five. They married in Kingswood Parish Church, where her parents are buried. Her brothers live locally. The couple moved first to Shirehampton, in the west of the city, and then back to Warmley, moving finally a short distance back to Mounthill in 1950, to a newly constructed house. They had two children, one of whom has moved away to work, the other of whom (a daughter) is married, and lives and works, locally. Giddens became a lay-preacher in a Methodist chapel in Warmley, and became well-known in the different chapels of Kingswood. He had a great knowledge of the Bible. He held meetings regularly in the house, on Friday evenings. His wife sang in the chapel choir. The chapel defined life for both of them. Giddens was a big, strong man, responsible and hard-working, with a sense of humour, quiet and a peacemaker. He looked after his wife, and did the housework when she became ill. He was a good neighbour, and would battle on behalf of his neighbours. He died in 1987. Archie Teague was born in Kingswood in 1928. He married at the age of twenty-eight, first living with his mother-in-law, then moving to a newly built house two years later. He worked as a mould pourer in small foundries in Hanham and then in Fishponds. He was a devoted member of his trade union for more than twenty-five years, an organiser and shop steward for the AUEW (Allied Union of Engineering Workers), and attended his Union’s conferences. He took early retirement at fifty-four through ill-health. He is a Labour supporter, although not a Party member. He is not a great mixer, but a good family man, and he gets on with his neighbours. He has a dry sense of humour, he likes a pint, he is proud, correct, honest and a stickler for truth, courageous in ill health, cheerful and uncomplaining. Both the latter cases exemplify ‘well-formed’ lives, people who have made sense of their lives in local terms. It will be seen that no particular features need to be present other than a certain sociability, for one lacked a family, the other suffered from ill health, while neither was self-employed. Nevertheless, they achieved a degree of public recognition and acceptance, one in chapel life, the other through trade union activity, that is expressed in terms of a certain character.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 169

The Kingswood Whit Walk

169

III The notion of respectability possesses a particular dynamic for one section of the working class, the skilled or artisan élite.15 On the one hand, the assertion of self-respect is a way for an élite of workers to mark their superiority to and separation from the broad mass of the working class, who are regarded as inferior, ignorant and generally immoral. On the other hand, the concern with rising in the world demands a wider recognition of this élite’s value and respectability in the eyes of the world. There is therefore a double movement, a separation off from the mass of the working class, and a search for external recognition of the truth of this separation. In discussing the self-differentiation of this élite, it should be emphasised that independence is not so much an individual matter, but rather the differentiation of a group, and that in this perspective, respectability is best considered as a mark of membership of this group. A particular virtue of this approach is the way that it relates the values of respectability to certain collective aspects of local life. These aspects include patterns of residence and the structure of voluntary organisations, both of which express the indigenous aim of achieving a collective independence. Housing has played, and continues to play, a particular role in emphasising independence and respectability, and is a key to understanding the area. Kingswood is made up of repeated developments of small houses, built by local businessmen and factory owners from the late nineteenth century onward, and more recently also by the Council and by property companies. Moving from one street to another, and from tenancy to ownership, allows the expression of the aspiration to belong to a certain group and the claim to a certain character. It gives the individual some control over who his neighbours are. There is repeated social segregation on a small scale, a micro-geography of respectability that reinforces social attitudes both positively, for occupation, status and residence correlate, and negatively, for a rising man moves away from the poorer streets. This ‘micro-geography’ finds expression in a number of ways. For example, it is to be found in the way that a local person can ‘place’ somebody – such as a potential daughter-in-law – from the street where they live. Further, it underlies the continual pressure that is experienced to conform and to maintain standards, and the urgency or seriousness with which a failure to do so is regarded. A feckless family in a respectable street has a certain power over their neighbours, of bringing them into disrepute. The Morrisons are such a family. The mother lives quietly in a respectable street, separated from her husband, who lives the other side of Kingswood. One of her sons lives sometimes with her, sometimes in a council flat. He is more or less

03-Part III

170

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 170

Religion in English Everyday Life

incapable of looking after himself, and attracts trouble; in particular, he has formed a liaison with a woman, herself divorced, with whom he rows, violently and in public. The trouble of which he is the focus takes place mostly at his flat, but can occur at his mother’s house. She is ostracised by her neighbours, for the (involuntary) introduction of such behaviour into the street is a serious matter. There is therefore a continual potential for areas to polarise, for certain streets to rise and others to fall, and even to become ‘dumping grounds’. Council accommodation conforms to these laws as well as the privately owned sector. There are indeed interesting correlations at the extremes, between the ‘worst’ streets, where most often council tenants have moved away from the support structure of their families and are grouped together, and certain ‘hyper’ respectable streets, where for reasons of excessive ambition, and the failure of mutuality, families have moved away from their area of origin, and similarly have become isolated. Geoff Morrison’s council flat and Eric Biggs’s daughter’s house are set in the first kind of locality; the street Alfred Bell moved to in order to keep his beloved wife to himself is an example of the second: it is notable along its length for a lack of mutual trust and neighbourliness, several of the families having achieved too great a degree of independence in local terms. Locally, then, character is bound up with the nature of your work – your trade – and also with where you live; equally, it is bound up with how you spend your time and who you spend it with. Local organisations with voluntary membership both express and order the values of respectability. There is a wide spectrum of such voluntary organisations, which includes the Masons, Friendly Societies such as the Loyal Order of Buffaloes and the Ancient Order of Shepherds, the British Legion, working men’s clubs, and churches and chapels with their associated groups and youth organisations. There are certain characteristics that are common to them all .16 First, an individual’s membership of a voluntary organisation marks a choice to join the respectable élite, to be a certain sort of person. The other way about, membership also denotes the recognition of that person’s character, a quality of character which is demanded as a condition of membership of a respectable association. There is therefore a seemingly natural correspondence between membership and the ‘right sort of person’; each quality makes the other. Any attempt by an inappropriate person to join causes consternation, and will not in practice be accepted (though a direct refusal is rare), for membership is both a collective solidarity in the face of what is perceived as fecklessness, and reinforces differentiation through shared moral values. For these reasons, Mrs Morrison is refused effective participation in a local congregation, although she cannot of course be refused entry.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 171

171

Second, these voluntary organisations are in large part created in order to support and benefit from the virtues of respectability. This was particularly clear in the case of nineteenth-century self-help institutions, such as friendly societies, insurance clubs and cooperatives, but it remains true of contemporary voluntary organisations: they are marked by a collective aim of self-improvement and mutual support. None are organised simply for entertainment, profit or self-gratification. In this understanding, it is reasonable to assume that the ability to benefit from membership derives from a cluster of personal qualities, of regularity, sobriety, industry and thrift, for these qualities allow a person to join, to be accepted and to sustain his (or her) membership. Thrift should be considered in this context, for it is a central feature of this moral character, and demonstrates the interrelation of character and voluntary organisation. Thrift organisations have either drifted away from their original form and purpose (as in the case of building societies), or become the concern of only a minority (as in friendly societies), or are very small and limited in scope (as in savings clubs), although there are contemporary attempts to relaunch such projects in the face of increased opportunities for credit and debt. Nevertheless, thrift continues to be a central strand to local character. At a personal level, thrift emphasises the business of restraint, of slight present sacrifice producing future benefits. It also underlines the aim of independence, of freedom from credit and gaining control over one’s life and status. Membership of an organisation which demands a certain economic and social status therefore proclaims certain values of character: stability and forethought, the ability and the will to save regularly.17 The third point has already emerged in various ways: self help is collective. Voluntary organisations are not simply composed of individuals or families who share the common aim of self-improvement, they are not ‘aggregations’, for improvement implies the aspiration to be part of a certain social milieu. It is this aspect of respectability that is perhaps least well understood from the outside. Respectability is not primarily an individual virtue, nor is independence so conceived. The aim of prosperity is intertwined with social activities; membership of voluntary organisations implies a certain ideal of mutuality. In this context, it is worth noting the place of social drinking, and the importance of the pub and the club as places symbolising social cohesion and the ideals of mutual support. Indeed, the British Legion, the Buffaloes and the Masons are seen locally simply as working men’s drinking clubs. There is a tension between the ideal of drinking as a form of sociability and the failure to control drinking, for drunkenness is a moral matter, a loss of self-control and a character flaw.18 In middleclass eyes, social drinking has no part to play in a respectable, thrifty way of life, and the (local) temperance view suggests that the working

03-Part III

172

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 172

Religion in English Everyday Life

man has a flawed moral character and is unable to control his drinking. Such perspectives ignore the values of respectability: they reject social mutuality or collectivity and cast aspersions upon the moral character of the working man. Fourth, these various organisations formed in the pursuit and expression of independence also celebrate and proclaim this independence in their several characteristic ways. Such organisations, whether their primary concern is with Nonconformist religion or with working men’s self-improvement, have their distant roots in sects or societies which sought isolation from an unstable society, and in their isolated phase played a part in the definition and emergence of a new class awareness. The isolation of these societies has diminished and the paraphernalia of apartness, of secrecy and ritual, no longer symbolises retreat and selfprotection, but rather asserts exclusiveness and independence, a claim to recognition and a place in local society. Indeed, this place is celebrated in public on occasion, with marches of members, sometimes in regalia, bearing banners and led by a band: the social position of its members is brought out and paraded before everyone. The prominence of voluntary organisations has diminished in local society as the national affiliations of economic associations, political parties and trade unions have become more important. It is not the case, however, that local values have become correspondingly attenuated. In individual branches of national organisations, local character and values continue to inform, and to be expressed in, the way that business is conducted. These characteristics are therefore employed and reproduced in the everyday workings of these organisations. Nevertheless, there are also certain ‘nodal points’ in local society where these values are in particular located and reproduced and from which they are disseminated. In Kingswood, the churches and chapels play this role: they organise, inculcate, display and spread these values, and so exemplify the interdependence of character and local organisation. In Kingswood, membership of a chapel is a clear assertion of a respectable character. Locally, people do not distinguish between doctrines: a Christian is defined by his (or her) behaviour and the company he keeps.19 Methodism has been and is the predominant denomination in East Bristol and Kingswood, yet it does not stand completely separate from the others, for being a chapel member is less an adherence to a specific doctrine, and rather the affirmation of a collective identity. Indeed, a description of distinctively ‘Christian’ behaviour would hold good locally in all important respects for every respectable person. Chapel membership is both the claim to and an acknowledgement of a reputation founded upon restraint, for self-control, as we have seen, lies at the heart of the assertion of independence, and unites the various virtues of thrift, providence, industry and sobriety that contribute to its achieve-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 173

173

ment. Chapel members are defined first, then, by negative markers, or restraint: they do not drink or gamble, they have no place for luck and superstition; they avoid credit or debt. In each case, the rejection is the other side of an assertion of independence through self-control. In each case, too, it marks a separation from the ungodly, who drink and gamble, believe in luck and chance, accept credit and are saddled by debt. Chapel membership, however, does not simply denote a certain public character; it also, more positively, involves participation in a series of specific activities that inculcate these values and develop and support a certain way of life. As we have seen, who you are depends upon how you spend your time and with whom you spend it, and the chapels and their associated organisations embody a collective discipline of time. Two complementary principles underlie the manifestations of this collective discipline, and are stressed according to context and need. On the one hand, there is a principle of exclusiveness, or an emphasis upon boundaries and boundedness, and on the other, a principle of inclusiveness, or an emphasis upon community and fraternity. These principles emerge in a consideration of missions and class meetings, prayer meetings and worship. The importance of an individual’s conversion emphasises the collective identity by focusing upon the point of entry. Periodically in chapel life there are missions, and regular, more frequent, special services which concentrate upon the call to be saved, and in these immense tension can be generated, with the release of that tension as individuals ‘come forward’. Frequently, there are Pentecostal phenomena, speaking in tongues, being ‘slain in the spirit’, and exorcism. It is worth remarking both the exotic behaviour and the emotional power that is present in these ordinary, everyday – if hidden – events. These events are hidden because they constitute the joining of an exclusive and therefore private class of person, persons who are entitled to a certain mystery, those who are converted or saved. However, they are also hidden because, in their intensity, they constitute a potential threat to respectability, an undermining of the claim made. Glossolalia, shaking, a warmth of experience close to sexuality: all suggest a loss of restraint. There is an unspoken pleasure that fits awkwardly with the articulated values of respectability, and which indeed has to be mediated through the ‘other’ of Christian religion, the activity of the Holy Spirit. E.P. Thompson’s charge of ‘psychic masturbation’, aimed at the intermittent nature of early Wesleyan emotionalism20 – though deliberately unsympathetic in tone – has the merit of pointing to this sort of phenomenon, to the hidden pleasure that emerges in the assumption of the values of this collective identity. This moment of conversion is reflected upon and made public within the chapel. At class meetings, a person learns to give an

03-Part III

174

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 174

Religion in English Everyday Life

account of his or her conversion, and to describe his subsequent progress in life, usually in a highly stereotypical form. As might be anticipated, conversion involves turning from certain kinds of behaviour, seen in individual terms as fecklessness, drunkenness, gambling, swearing, keeping bad company, lacking any respect for others, and turning towards a new pattern of life, a pattern involving personal qualities (temperance, thrift, independence), a disciplined use of time (regular weekday and Sunday activities), and an ethic (a respect for neighbours, a life of service). The conversion of John Neal illustrates the interplay of factors such as status, family relations and church milieu, and also its perception in strictly personal terms. Neal is a man in his mid-twenties, trained as a bricklayer, who began working for a mate in a small local building firm, and is now setting out with his own business. He moved into a new house in Mounthill with his wife and young son. His mother had been a spiritualist (‘into palms, tarot, black and white magic, the lot’); she divorced his father in Neal’s teens, and subsequently remarried twice. He is not close to her, but is to his father, who has also remarried, to a ‘life-long church woman’; his father and second wife are members of a Pentecostal congregation. Neal had been to a Pentecostal church in Downend, and was also involved in youth work at the YMCA in Kingswood, and knew about the house church that held its meetings there. In retrospect, he considered himself to have had no interest in religion; he and his wife were converted at a service at his father’s church, and both were baptised by total immersion by the whole congregation. He sees his conversion in terms of ‘coming in from the cold’, of a complete turnabout, although from the outside it might be interpreted as being in continuity with his long-term behaviour, the influences of his family, and his stage of life. However stereotyped the style of the testimony, there is no reason to doubt the reality of this change, be it dramatic or slow, in many individual lives, nor the effects it has within a family and upon others involved with that person. The class (or an equivalent group) to which one testifies is the linchpin of a disciplined and planned life; it forms a structure in which a person learns the need to be able to account for his or her daily life, a life lived in a spirit of rational accountancy. The same definition of boundaries – a recognition of ‘them’ and ‘us’, the unconverted and the saved – and the same ordering values appear at prayer meetings. There is a distinctive style of free prayer which at its best is both remarkable and beautiful, an art which is learnt and which has recognised masters. It mingles contemporary events and people with scriptural passages, at the same time expressing a stereotypical range of perceptions and judgements. The other side of this exclusiveness is an inclusiveness, a sense of community or fraternity. One expression of the collective identity of the

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 175

175

chapel is in worship, through the singing of hymns. Singing together in harmony is a discipline which demands both education and restraint; it expresses both an individual’s qualities and a collective quality. It is also an emotional activity, a moving – and sometimes intense – experience. Choirs are also a matter of pride to the chapel; they represent the chapel to the rest of the local community, as do the mission bands which take part in the Walk. Again, in the case of the bands, there is both pride in the discipline displayed, a lyric of restraint, and a pleasure inherent in such activity. The fact that choir – and band – members tend to marry one another may have to do both with the pleasure shared in and with the ‘right sort’ of person being a member. For the members of the chapel regard themselves as a group of like people. The prayers reflect this as they mention the sick, the elderly and the community around. There is no great emphasis upon salvation and sin within the congregation; although the theological distinction might be admitted, in practice it is hard to separate respectability from salvation. Each chapel is in practice made up of particular families, and is therefore associated with a particular small locality. It has human and geographical dimensions. In the case of each family concerned, the chapel is interwoven with its history, and in particular, the baptisms, marriages and funerals that mark its developments and transitions. Enid Thomas was born, lived her whole life and died within sight of the Wesleyan Chapel in Blackhorse Road, where she was married, and where her parents and her husband lie buried in the graveyard. Albert White, a carter by trade, and father of Mavis Wise (mentioned in chapter 3), ended his life living with his daughter and son-in-law. His funeral service was held in the small church on the corner opposite their house (facing the pub all three frequented), a building for which he had transported the stone seventy years before. The interior of such a chapel is a familiar place, with the ugliness of a pub: every ornament, memorial and furnishing has its story and its place, and particular families that are involved with that story. Every reordering is therefore fiercely contested. If a graveyard is reordered, the bitterness can last for years, and the closure of a chapel – such as that of Blackhorse Road Chapel – destroys part of the fabric of the locality for many families. The logic of separation and solidarity operates between chapels (and churches) as well as within each. Indeed, the values of respectability contain a potential cycle of drawing apart and joining together, of successive emphasis upon salvation and communality, within the stratum of the local religious élite. There is always a potential for ‘revival’ within this stratum; there are always individuals actively seeking after an intensification of enthusiasm and exclusivity. It has been suggested that in periods of change and anxiety in particular the heightened sense of community and assurance within such a group has a great appeal, and

03-Part III

176

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 176

Religion in English Everyday Life

may have a considerable effect upon the personality. New groups or sects grow up or break away from churches that have grown ‘slack’. They set themselves apart, even from other Christians, exploiting the logic of separation; they draw off members from existing congregations, they convert, baptise and fill with the Holy Spirit. Outward marks of differentiation, such as the covering of heads, or glossolalia, play an important role. Hence Kingswood’s churches are from time to time riven by revivals, and threatened by the emergence of new sects or movements. Each new group imposes a new discipline, and draws a new line. Old buildings, occupied previously by congregations that have failed, are taken over by new congregations that burgeon. Kingswood High Street has been described somewhat in this light; a stretch of the Soundwell Road, where there are seven chapels extant in just over half a mile (see map 3.5), offers some contemporary examples of the replacement of congregations. There are two Methodist chapels, built in 1862 (1 on the map) and 1874 (7) respectively, in both cases for congregations after the United Methodist Free Church split, a United Reformed Church chapel (4), built for the Congregationalists in 1893, and the Bethesda Independent Methodist Free Gospel Church (6), built in 1892, each of which demonstrates a continuity of organisation. Apart from these, there are three chapels which have changed hands. Walking north, on the right, there is Soundwell Road Spiritualist Church (2), built in 1843 as a Wesleyan chapel. This is recorded in the Chapel Survey as the Roman Catholic church of St. Paul’s; it is unclear whether this represents an intervening use, or an inability on the part of the surveyors to distinguish, or their desire not to recognise or to disguise the present ownership. Further up on the left there is Soundwell Christian Fellowship (3), formerly Soundwell Baptist Church, built in 1912, and, on the same side, the Gospel Hall (5), built in 1905 for the Christian Brethren and now occupied by another independent house church. Yet the logic of exclusion is intermittent in its operation. As we have seen, a Christian is defined less by doctrine and beliefs than by behaviour and character. Similarly, the different denominations and sects – and these are numerous, as will be clear from the description of the Walk – cannot clearly be distinguished either on grounds of doctrine or on grounds of class origins, values or recruitment. In particular, the long-established chapels, the Baptists and Methodists, the Congregationalists and United Reformed Church, and the Moravians, represent an élite and form the backbone of a homogeneous class and network. In general, they cooperate in each other’s activities, attend one another’s functions, and display their unity together on the Walk. By definition, this respectable élite neither seeks nor obtains much support from other sections of the local population (although, as we shall see, this statement will have to be qualified). Other churches,

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 177

The Kingswood Whit Walk

177

N 6 7

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

5

Soundw 4

2 ell Road

3

1

Salem Methodist Church Soundwell Road Spiritualist Church Soundwell Christian Fellowship Staple Hill United Reformed Church Gospel Hall Bethesda Independent Methodist Church Staple Hill Methodist Church

Map 3.5 Churches and chapels along the Soundwell Road

though organised according to the same values, vary somewhat in their relation to the rest of local society. The Salvation Army, for example, because of a continuing mission to the ‘feckless’ element of society, maintains the markers of respectability and conversion with considerable rigidity, for the aspects of a personal discipline, displayed in such matters as temperance, sabbatarianism and public confession, are of great significance. The Anglican Church, on the contrary, is notable for a certain lack of differential elements. Its status is anomalous in two senses. First, its position as the Established Church fits ill with the predominant local value of independence; the local church is easily compromised in theory by its relation to the National Church and Society. Second, it is compromised by its contact with the general population through the occasional offices. The fact that nothing is required for membership and that there is no strict dividing line, no radical conversion required, might give Anglicanism low prestige and peripheral status in respectable society. Nevertheless, the central core of the congregation constitutes an élite group, exclusive and respectable, and indistinguishable from the élite of any chapel. The core of the churches and chapels which march in the Whit Walk are therefore collective entities, made up of people who have to a degree mutually accepted one another, and who are similarly mutually dependent upon each other for their character. They are people committed together to self-improvement and service, hard-working, sober, thoughtful and careful in the management of time and money, dedicated to achieving a degree of independence, and generous within the freedom that has been gained; and confident enough, too, to declare themselves in public as such, on this occasion.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 178

178

Religion in English Everyday Life

IV In every case, the congregation know the non-church-going population as neighbours or kin. Furthermore, although the chapels appear to be well bounded groups, cut off from the rest of local society, in fact the picture is more complicated. Just as the values to which chapel members subscribe are of far wider currency, so there is a wide penumbra to participation in chapel life. A large number of people have some sort of relationship to a chapel other than membership. They may be irregular attenders, lapsed members, people who are related to members actual or past, or who have some looser connection with the chapel, through neighbours or workmates. Such people attend for ‘rites de passage’ touching their own families and those through whom they are connected, and this is significant, for in this sense the chapel holds the key locally to ‘well formed’ lives. The large family descending from Mrs Haynes illustrates the spectrum of possible options. Mrs Haynes is the widow of a man who ran his own business, and who was for a period warden of a local Anglican church. Mrs Haynes no longer attends regularly, but is a leading member of the women’s circle which meets fortnightly. Her daughter was baptised at the church, attended Sunday school and later the Guides, and was married there. In turn, her two elder daughters were baptised there and, in due course, although the family had moved to Cadbury Heath, returned to be married there. The five children these daughters have subsequently borne have also been baptised as infants in the church, as has their younger sister; various cousins, uncles and aunts serving as godparents. There is considerable variation in status that could be claimed, from the younger members of the daughters’ families of marriage, some of whom have been in trouble with the police, to the unimpeachable Mrs Haynes, yet all relate in differing degree to this church. Participation in this penumbra equally denotes sharing in the same qualities of character, and just as membership involves not only being a certain sort of person but also demands a certain discipline of time, so also there is a cycle of social activities centred upon the chapel which draws upon a far wider circle of sympathisers than members alone or even attenders. These activities have as their ostensible purpose either fund raising, self-improvement or the moral education of the young, although there is a strong element of mutuality and recreation. There is an annual round of outings, suppers, concerts, bazaars and fêtes, and a monthly or weekly round of committees and meetings. These, as much as chapel activities, are organised by and reproduce the values of respectability. The institution of the Sunday school is of interest in this context, for it is through this organisation in particular that a wide section of

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 179

179

the population receives a thorough education in the collective practices, values and discipline of the local culture.21 While the children are given a grounding in religious matters, and taught stories from the Bible and the history of the Church, these are always given local illustration and application. Above all else, the children are given a moral education. They are given instruction in practical and ethical behaviour, taught the value of service, the use of talents and the merits of restraint, and they are inculcated with the ideal of good habits, of kindness, punctuality, exactness and thrift, resisting temptation and speaking the truth. The children are also trained up to give disciplined public performances, and much effort is put into Christmas plays, recitations, anniversaries and parades. Older children are trained up as new Sunday school leaders, and learn how to prepare lessons, control classes and speak in public. It is therefore possible to understand why Sunday schools flourish, even though the sponsoring congregations may appear to be ageing and inward-looking. Through sending their children to Sunday school, many families express their affiliation to a chapel and, more importantly, to a set of values, for Sunday school is widely recognised as a worthwhile activity, providing an introduction to and participation in a respectable way of life. The same purpose of moral education underlies other forms of voluntary work with children and young people, in particular, the ‘uniformed organisations’ – the Cubs and Scouts, Brownies and Guides, Boys’ Brigade and so forth – that are more or less loosely attached to a church or chapel. Although the church or chapel sets up the Sunday school, the latter is in many respects independent of its parent body, and has a life of its own that runs in parallel to that of the chapel. This is true more generally: the ‘penumbra’ about the chapel does not lose its distinctness or separateness from the chapel, although individual participants may belong to both.22 This distinctiveness has several causes. First, as we have seen, chapel membership is an assertion of a certain status which involves a whole series of social and economic factors: a certain independence or place within the workforce, place of residence, a certain level and regularity of earnings, and a particular moral character. Few of these characteristics are available to the majority of the adult members of the local population, least of all to young adults. However, participation in the activities of the penumbra, through mere attendance at events, through children, through wives, through voluntary work or through responsibility for organising such activities, allows different degrees of involvement, a graded scale of claim and recognition along which negotiation of reputation can take place. Second, this organisational life never joins up with that of chapel life, not only because it has a wider, more diffuse focus, but also because its leadership is recruited from among its own members, who

03-Part III

180

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 180

Religion in English Everyday Life

may never have had any other contact with the chapel. So, for example, a Sunday school trains up its own teachers. Moreover, Sunday school is only one part of a cycle of activities that begins with children, passes through a spectrum of adult activities (some of which I have mentioned) and ends with old people’s clubs. It is possible for a person to participate in this parallel sphere throughout their life, staying outside the chapel. Third, participation in this cycle of activities is affected, as we have seen, by such factors as age and stage in the life cycle, as well as by less tangible factors such as family status and reputation. It is also controlled by a person’s gender, for this parallel sphere is shaped and dominated by women. Women have a central place in the structure of local society, and these parallel organisations which play such an important part in the inculcation and maintenance of its values express that centrality. The organisations are largely run by women, their perspectives are defined in practice by women, and the cycle of organisational life reflects the life cycle of women. Men’s place in this cycle is correspondingly peripheral. They take part in general as clients, as boys in Sunday school and as retired men in old people’s clubs. While women of any age aspire to and embody the values of respectability and participate in these activities accordingly, adult working men rarely play a role of responsibility and leadership. However, a minority take on voluntary work, in particular with the uniformed organisations or youth work, and this option makes a strong statement as to their character and respectability. In brief, there are always potential conflicts within the broad class of respectable persons, between in particular the church or chapel and the various organisations associated with it in the promotion of and participation in the values of respectability. Tensions arise from conflicts of interest between different age groups, organisational aims and the sexes, despite – or, rather, because of – the subscription to common values. Further, as we shall see, these conflicts of interest play a role in the articulation of non-local with local perspectives, both contributing material to and drawing strength from this wider context of interpretation. In the description so far, one important element has been missed out. The chapels also have a stratum of outsiders or incomers: in addition to the central core of respectable self-employed, skilled workers, white-collar workers and shopkeepers, there is a number of middleclass members, professional and business people, managers, doctors and teachers. This stratum plays an important role with respect to the local members, that is in practice twofold. First, they are considered to be there to offer recognition and approval of local aspirations and achievements, of the life style and values affirmed and attained through local institutions. So although such outsiders appear often to

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 181

181

have a high profile and to occupy a central place in the organisation, in fact their role is that of honorary members: they are to approve decisions taken rather than to participate in decision making. Indeed, any attempt to lead, or to patronise, or to impose different understandings of values and aims encounters strong local feeling and hostility. Second, in practice they also act as scapegoats, allowing the local group to project their differences onto them and to maintain an image of unity. They permit many of the conflicts generated by the values of respectability to pass unrecognised as such. They encourage this by their readiness to take positions of prominence, and to act as spokesmen for particular positions or courses of action. We shall come on to this topic. Their significance is therefore out of proportion to their numbers, for it is in the interpretations by and of this group that wider and local perspectives and values are articulated. In some sense the complex notion of respectability is condensed or actualised in the claims made for recognition to this group and the misunderstandings that ensue of the principles of local self-sufficiency and independence. Characteristically, these misunderstandings concern the qualities we have already encountered. At the centre of these is the failure to recognise that the chapel or church sees itself as a closed group of respectable people, people of a certain character, who march as such together on the Whit Walk to proclaim their exclusiveness. The virtues of independence structure, as we have seen, attitudes to the poor, who have to respond to their situation and join in by their own efforts. Charity is then tempered, for a distinction may be made between the deserving and the undeserving poor.23 Further, because salvation is seen as a matter of will and effort, the Church in general is supposed to be concerned with the spiritual realm rather than the social, and with the individual rather than the collective. A Christian life is manifested in works. A good person visits the poor and elderly, looks after his or her neighbour, and is active in the cycle of chapel activities. In this perspective, the Christian life is deeply conservative: the respectable person in no way seeks to be transformed. It may be seen, therefore, that an outside perspective that views poverty principally as a structural matter, that proposes to treat all the poor alike, and that wishes to open the church to them, will not readily reach an understanding with the local view. Similarly, images of change and growth, which are very often associated with geographical movement (as in the notion of a ‘pilgrimage through life’) do not fit easily a static population with a strong local identity and a powerful sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’. A corollary to the failure to recognise the exclusiveness of the chapel core is the assimilation of the respectable to the rest of the local population, and treating the whole as an undifferentiated mass. We have touched upon the question of temperance: the advocation of absti-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 182

182

Religion in English Everyday Life

nence may appear to accuse all working men of being unable to control their drinking, and ignores the values of mutuality. On the other hand, matters are rendered more complex by temperance being one of the marks of conversion, and by its use in local society by congregations in an exclusive phase to mark themselves off from others. It is a distinguishing feature that may be brought into play in local society; the outside perspective ignores its differential quality and at the same time assimilates the respectable (who may drink) to the feckless (who may get drunk). A similar misunderstanding can arise over finance. National Churches try to encourage local churches to covenant. Yet to promise money you do not have conflicts with the principles of independence, providence and thrift: it smells of credit; a person loses control over where their money goes, and accepts outside interference; and it threatens to make public an aspect of family life, a man’s income and how it is managed. At the same time, refusal to covenant is made to appear feckless in outside eyes, as a refusal to plan for tomorrow, and the respectable appear to be assimilated again to the unrespectable. The values of respectability therefore also explain groups other than the core members who appear on the Walk. On the one hand, they generate the place for outsiders, who march often in the front rank of the élite of each chapel in the procession, and yet whose account of the event may differ markedly from that motivating those in their wake, differing both in terms of the readiness with which they may give such an account, and the omissions, elisions and misrecognitions that it may contain. On the other hand, these values appear directly in the presence of the local children who parade with the Sunday schools and with the uniformed congregations, and of the adults who participate, as parents or more distant relations, and as organisers and teachers. These two groups also fill the pavements. There are the local notables, and the broad public who, almost without exception, at some stage of life will have taken part, if not in the core organisation, then in the penumbra, as a member of the Sunday school or youth group, as a Scout or Guide, as a parent or as a leader.

V The churches and chapels of Kingswood are institutions organised by the same principles that define the concept of ‘the person’ locally, and the working out of these principles has been described in certain respects of the life of these institutions. As a conclusion to this part of the discussion, I wish to raise the question of the relationship between politics and religion in local society, for two reasons. First, politics too expresses views as to the limits, destinies and interactions of persons,

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 183

183

and their practical outworkings. Religious attitudes and political views are closely linked, for the kind of politics that will be found in a local society will also be informed by the values of respectability. Indeed, in the analysis of the Whit Walk, we saw how the respectable groups to an extent stand in for the political authorities. The Walk is, simultaneously, a definition of territory, a recognition of belonging, and the proclamation of a legitimacy, or hierarchy of values; it demonstrates a right ordering of the people who live in that place that is in essence political, or a matter of polity: a particular, accepted ordering of society. Second, the relation between politics and religion in working-class society has been the subject of a good deal of academic debate. This debate has been concerned largely with historical materials, but it has had a strand of contemporary interest woven into it, in the form of an assessment – either explicit or implicit – of the potential for a workingclass politics, on the basis of past opportunities. The discussion focuses in particular upon the place of conflict in a description of local society, and this topic both echoes earlier themes in the essay and introduces the subject of the next chapter. It also raises in another form the matter of outside interpretations of local society, and the self-presentation of local society to this gaze.24 Local values are constructed and reproduced in exchanges with more cosmopolitan interests and in these, as in every dialogue, there is both self-concealment and self-display, as well as insight and failure to perceive (often taking the form of stereotyping). Such exchanges, or acts of mutual interpretation, occur repeatedly and at various levels. The Walk may be taken as a complex but exemplary instance, not only of local society ‘reflecting upon itself ’, but also opening itself to outside judgement. The underlying principle of independence that is central to the values of respectability also contains an inherent optimism or idealism, for its aim is collectively to control the world for the better, and it assumes that society can be made a better place for the working man.25 In this view, there is a belief in justice and progress, and a deep faith in rationalism. These élite groups we have been discussing therefore represent a form of collective hope for all of local society; they stand for the aims of justice and freedom, and the values of collective enterprise and mutual trust; they embody the belief that independence, self-government and self-reliance can be achieved by all. This indeed may be what the Walk ‘means’ locally, if it can be said to have a single meaning. There is thus a good fit between the political aims of freedom, equality and self-respect on the one hand and the model of the respectable working man on the other, a person of moral character who makes his own way within the given social order. The politics that arose in such a milieu in the late nineteenth century was conservative, for it defended craft skills and privileges, and local in focus, hav-

03-Part III

184

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 184

Religion in English Everyday Life

ing neither a national nor a class basis.26 The resulting political organisations saw rationality, not conflict, as ordering social and political relations: they believed in the ultimate compatibility of the interests of Labour and Capital, and so sought negotiation, arbitration and conciliation in industrial relations, and looked to education and reform to ensure progress. Such political/respectable views, in short, although they attacked inequality and privilege, lacked what would now be called a radical class consciousness. In discussing these organisations, a major focus has been upon the impact that Methodist leadership had upon local labour politics, and in particular upon the refusal to see class conflict as central to the ordering of society.27 One assessment of such leadership is that it restricted the development of class consciousness for three reasons: because ethical issues (of salvation) outweighed economic and political (class) issues; because the leaders did not articulate class issues as such; and because Methodism was subject to communal, local values and therefore was divorced from wider, national issues.28 In the light of such conclusions, it is claimed that the ideas of radical working-class politics developed outside the milieu of local Methodism, for such ideas are based upon the concept of conflict between classes. This radical politics is not necessarily secular, for it can identify the promises of the Gospel with society’s unredeemed, but it challenges the values of respectability, rejecting compromise and reform and threatening the basis of stability. The emergence of radical labour politics in this view was connected with the rise of unskilled labour, as well as factors such as high unemployment which revealed the failure of the trade unions and reformist politics, and an element of generational conflict locally. There is evidence that, in the Methodist community, the radicals of the International Labour Party were criticised for breaking various local boundaries, all connected with the values of respectability: its members mixed (agonistic) politics and religion, indulged in mixed camping, and adopted pacifist ideas. In the perspective of the categories that we have been exploring, classbased politics can readily be assimilated to the feckless end of the spectrum of behaviour. This is for several reasons. Conflict may always be present in local society but, as we have seen, reputation is defined by restraint, and so conflict is unacknowledged, projected or repressed. Therefore any form of politics which appears to advocate conflict, even if it expresses aspirations towards justice and equality, is by definition unrespectable. Furthermore, the perspective of class conflict assimilates the whole of the working class to one mass and, indeed, elevates the unskilled worker to the dominant role. It therefore undermines the whole apparatus of discriminations that orders local society. Lastly, any appeal to collective interest with distant workers in other places on a class basis

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 185

185

fits ill with the sense of locality that is interwoven with the values of respectability. There is therefore always a potential for misunderstanding or misinterpretation between the ‘wider’ perspectives of radical politics and the ‘narrower’ perspectives of local politics: the former may regard the latter as reactionary, and may be regarded in turn as feckless. We may draw two conclusions. First, whatever the alliance of interests making up national political groupings, this strand of ‘respectable’ working-class politics remains a force to be reckoned with, or a resource to be drawn upon. Although political organisations and configurations change, and there have been cycles of growth and decline, and changing patterns of alliance – for example, the effective separation of Nonconformist religion from the political sphere – the values that were embodied in these past organisations and alliances persist, for they have been and are constitutive of local society; and they have been given expression, albeit imperfectly, successively in the old Liberal Party, the Labour Party and, most recently, the Conservative Party. Second, these values have persisted in part because of, and in part despite, an enduring pattern of misunderstanding between wider and local levels. As we have seen – to put it figuratively – local categories both lend themselves to misinterpretation and define themselves in a rejection of such misreading. The outside view tends to take at face value the opposition of respectable to feckless, to concretise it by attributing these characteristics to distinct populations, and to employ these figments in another story, that of a struggle between classes. From the local perspective, the outside view fails to observe proper distinctions, for it assimilates the whole of local society to the role of the working class, and it inverts the truth, for it places the figure of the unskilled worker at the heart of the working class. The perspective of class struggle misses the complexity and subtlety of the local categories, for the opposition of respectable to feckless plays the role of effecting discriminations, a flexible and revisable means of negotiating claims to personality, while at the same time permitting a wide range of possible behaviour, from compromise to violence. These observations, which arise from paying particular attention to the operation of local categories, may cast a side light onto themes that play a part in far wider debates, both historical and sociological,29 where the pattern we have identified is often repeated: taking at face value the opposition of respectable to feckless, identifying populations that correspond to these categories, and using these ‘groups’ to tell a version of the story of class struggle. This ‘repression’ results in a specific problem, from our perspective and concerns, one with two faces. On the one hand, in these accounts, the unskilled worker remains curiously ill-defined, and indeed stereotyped, a function of the argument, rather than being a living member of the local society. On the other hand, the approach seems to accept the account offered by the

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 186

186

Religion in English Everyday Life

principle actors in respect of the unskilled workers and their families, an account which posits an absolute distinction between the ‘respectable’ and the ‘unrespectable’. Yet if we accept this, we are left with a group of persons in local society for whom no satisfactory ethnographic account exists, for they are taken as the product of a classificatory exclusion: nobody has inquired how ‘they’ define and perceive ‘themselves’. Indeed, once the stereotype is taken as real, it may be used in other frames of reference, though the supposed population that results is rather implausible. For example, in it is embodied the view that the bulk of the working class is a shapeless emotional mass, which is supposed to contain within itself the spontaneous ‘truth’ of the class struggle, and yet which must depend upon leadership from outside itself to express this truth. This leadership, therefore, can either give this truth back to the working class, as in a militant leadership, or conceal its truth from it, as in a reformist leadership. The dialectic of inclusion and exclusion reemerges, but in a different story. It is, however, possible to see matters in another optic, and to suggest that the categories or values of respectability, which are so closely tied to the identity of Kingswood as a local society, contain within themselves the potential for generating conflict as well as for projecting that violence outwards. Moreover, it is conceivable that these potentials emerged together, and have been expressed differentially in the cycles of enthusiasm and mutuality that have been detected in the histories of other local societies. It is therefore time, on the one hand, to develop an account of the values that inform the apparently amorphous subclass of the ‘unrespectable’ and, on the other, to examine the place of violence in the heart of the values of respectability.

Notes 1. Cf. Stephen Lukes, ‘Conclusion’, in Michael Carrithers, Stephen Collins and Stephen Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person, Cambridge 1985: 285. 2. Marcel Mauss, ‘A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self ’ (1938), reprinted in Carrithers et al. The Category of the Person: 1-25. Cf. the discussions in Stephen Collins, ‘Categories, concepts or predicaments? Remarks on Mauss’s use of philosophical terminology’, in Carrithers et al., op.cit.: 46-82, and in George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Chicago 1986, chapter 3: ‘Conveying other cultural experience: the person, self and emotions’. 3. E. Durkheim, ‘L’Individualisme et les intellectuels’, Revue bleue, 4e série, X: 7-13; cited (without reference) by Collins, ‘Categories, concepts or predicaments?’: 66. 4. Nicholas Rescher, Empirical Enquiry, London 1982: 37, cited by Collins, ‘Categories, concepts or predicaments?’: 72. 5. Georg Simmel, ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’ (1908), in Kurt Wolff (tr. & ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Illinois 1950.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 187

187

6. Collins, ‘Categories, concepts or predicaments?’, whose approach we have followed in the previous paragraph, pursues Rescher’s mention of a ‘common biological heritage’, suggesting that ‘the person’ is the locus where the physical body is inserted into the social order. The body, he states, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for personhood, and personhood must be completed by some psychological identity, the possibility of which depends upon social relations, and the content of which cannot be determined in advance. Humans have, in brief, the universal predicament of how they make sense of the biological fact that they have discrete bodies. I doubt that the body may be taken as a necessary – though not sufficient – condition for ‘personhood’ in this way because the definition of ‘the body’ as a discrete unit is always already a collective and social phenomenon. Collins draws upon Bernard Williams’s suggestion that connecting experiences as a part of one’s consciousness requires their being related to a spatio-temporally concrete and continuous body (in B.Williams, Descartes, London 1978: 95-100, cited by Collins, ‘Categories, concepts or predicaments?’: 74). Again, this seems to hint that a biological body in some sense underwrites or allows the category of ‘the person’. Yet ‘the body’ has to be perceived as concrete and continuous in order to be taken as a necessary ground for ‘the person’: each idea presupposes the other. In this perspective, the category of ‘the person’ includes the condition of its own possibility; it is an ‘empty category’ that distributes difference, organising encounters, perceptions and exchanges (being in this respect comparable with both ‘mana’ and ‘honour’ – see J.Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem, Cambridge 1977: 13): hence both its elusive quality and its necessity, referred to in the opening paragraph of the chapter. 7. Cf. T. Jenkins, ‘Fieldwork and the perception of everyday life’, Man 29, 1994: 43356, for a discussion relevant to the succeeding paragraphs. 8. Julian Pitt-Rivers, People of the Sierra (1954), Chicago 1971: xviii; (Preface to the Second Edition). 9. Pitt-Rivers, People of the Sierra: viii. 10. Simmel, ‘The Secret’: 330; cf. the discussion of secrecy in Part IV. 11. Simmel, ‘The Secret’: 334-5. 12. Cf. John Cornwell, Collieries of Kingswood and South Gloucestershire, Cowbridge 1983. 13. To be found in, among others, Abraham Braine, History of Kingswood Forest: including all the ancient manors and villages in the neighbourhood, London and Bristol 1891; reprinted Bath 1969, George Eayrs, Wesley and Kingswood and its Free Churches, Bristol 1911, Michael Feast, A History of Methodism in Kingswood 1739-1920, duplicated, [Bristol n.d.]; such pamphlets as Joseph Lovell, ‘A sketch of the history of the Kingswood Circuit and some of the men I have known in it, by Joseph Lovell (18421919)’, ed. Revd. J.M. Franklin, Bristol 1977; and Official Guides such as F.A. Wilshire, The Story of Kingswood and its Church, Gloucester and London [n.d.], I.H. Dearnley, Kingswood and Hanham, Gloucs.: The Official Guide, Cheltenham 1949, and Kingswood: An Official Guide to Kingswood and Hanham, [Bristol] 1960, and Kingswood District Council, Kingswood District Official Guide, Wallington 1984. 14. The following paragraphs draw particularly upon Geoffrey Crossick’s valuable study of the emergence of a skilled working class in nineteenth-century Kentish Town (G.Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society, London 1978). In particular, ‘within a specific working-class socio-economic system…’ – ibid.: 134; and, two paragraphs below, ‘a desire to exert control…’ – ibid.: 136-7. Crossick defines his position against the sociological thesis of ‘embourgeoisement’, or the assimilation by sectors of the working class of middle-class values, making a response therefore to the debate on the ‘affluent worker’ (J.H. Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, Cambridge 1968). The emphasis upon collective self-definition contained in the idea of respectability might contribute both to notions of ‘languages of class’ (see Asa

03-Part III

188

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 188

Religion in English Everyday Life Briggs, ‘The language of ‘class’ in early nineteenth century England’, in A. Briggs and J. Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History: In Memory of G.D.H. Cole, London 1960, Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, Cambridge 1983, P. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class, Oxford 1991); and to the debate over ‘orders’ and ‘classes’ (see M.L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification, London 1992, P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1840-1914, Cambridge 1991, Ross McKibben, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880-1950, Oxford 1990). In a review of the last two books, Cannadine (‘Cutting classes’, New York Review of Books, 17/12/1992) concludes, in a fashion relevant to our purposes, ‘it is easy to forget…that the changes in social identities brought about by the Industrial Revolution were imposed upon an elaborate and pre-existing hierarchy of ranks and orders. The result was a society of exceptional complexity, and much of that complexity survives to this day…What is most urgently needed…is a history of status’. Again, following Crossick’s analysis (An Artisan Elite), particularly chapter 7; ‘respectability…as a mark of membership of this group’- cf. ibid.: 150. Cf. ibid: 150ff. On the question of the autonomy of plebeian culture and values, see also Stephen Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis, London 1976, R. Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth Century England, London 1982, J. Obelkovich, Religion and Rural Society in South Lindsay 1825-75, Oxford 1976, T.W. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability. Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture 1780-1850, New Haven 1976, D. Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England, Princeton 1985, W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, Cambridge 1992. Crossick points out that this combination of thrift, foresight and deferring of gratification was displayed in the Cooperative movement, which demonstrated faith in the moral value of collective action for self-improvement. The Cooperative movement in its early stages showed a limited idealism, with its aim the elevation of a class. The organisations also showed very strongly the marks of their origins, for they did not look to any wider context than the local, nor to wider issues. One of the most interesting aspects of Crossick’s work is his identification of a political dimension to the process of self-definition which he shows to be present in these workingclass self-help institutions, and to dovetail with political Liberalism in the late nineteenth century. In so doing, he links earlier traditions of dignity and independence to the meaning of self-respect; in the context he discusses, to identify oneself as a Liberal was to make a statement about one’s place in local society, one’s independence, moral equality, disregard of privilege and rejection of patronage (An Artisan Elite: 136). This raises the question – to which we will return – as to wherein lies the political dimension in the contemporary values of respectability. Crossick, Artisan Elite: 153; cf. B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872, London 1971. For the following paragraphs on chapels as institutions of respectability, see Robert Moore’s useful study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Methodism in a Durham mining community (Pitmen, Preachers and Politics, Cambridge 1974), particularly chapter 4; cf. E.P. Thompson’s review (‘On history, sociology and historical relevance’, British Journal of Sociology 14, 1976: 387-402) and R. Colls, The Pitmen of the Northern Coal field: Work, Culture and Protest, 1790-1850, Manchester 1987, also on the Durham (and Northumberland) coalfield. Curiously, Colls makes no mention of Moore. ‘A Christian not defined by doctrine’ – Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics: 96, 125; the next paragraph and following, considerations of missions, class meetings etc. – Moore op. cit.: 115-18; cf. Colls op.cit.: 118-21, 146ff., chapter 11; below, ‘the linchpin of a disciplined and planned life’ – Moore op.cit.: 118; the singing of hymns – ibid.: 116-17; a group of like people – ibid.: 126; con-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

Page 189

189

siderable effect upon the personality – ibid.: 96; cf. Colls op. cit.: chapter 9; Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters. E.P. Thompson, The Making Of the English Working Class (1963), London 1968: 405. On Sunday schools: Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics: 96; Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: chapters 6 and 7. On the independence of Sunday schools, see Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: 32, 74, chapters 6 and 7. Cf. Leo Howe, ‘The ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’: practice in an urban local Social Security office, Journal of Social Policy 14, 1985: 49-72. Cf. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking Glass, Cambridge 1987. Cf. Crossick, Artisan Elite: 155-6. See P. Joyce, ‘A people and a class: industrial workers and the social order in nineteenth century England’, in Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes: 200-1, and Cannadine (‘Cutting classes’) on politics with neither a national nor a class basis. Moore shows that, in the context he is considering, Methodist perceptions and oldstyle Liberalism converge in two respects. First, he points out how the universalism of Methodism – the view that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God – fits with the Liberal view that ultimately class interests are compatible, and conflicts between interests adjustable (Pitmen, Preachers and Politics: 158-9; cf.23-4). Second, he indicates two themes in Liberal economic orthodoxy in particular to which Methodists responded. The first was the laissez-faire doctrine of the State, which was compatible with the view that the role of the State was to intervene in a minimal fashion, seeking the ‘rationalised ethical transformation of the world and the control of sin’ (ibid.: 23). In this view, the State was not an end in itself, but an agency to maintain limits, and the transformation of men and women was to be sought through personal change and not structural or political change. The second theme was that of individualism, for the economic doctrine embodied a Protestant view of the individual who stands alone equally before the majesty of God and the forces of the Market. Considered in another perspective, the Liberal idea of the Market and the implied functional harmony of Society fits readily with the vision of Christians as members of one body, each with their own function or calling to perform (ibid.). Thompson is dismissive of these views (‘On history, sociology and historical relevance’: 390). ‘One assessment’ – Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics: 167-8; cf. 26-7; ‘radical politics … challenges the values of respectability’ – ibid.: 172-4; ‘there is evidence that …’ – ibid.: 176. I have in mind (a) the sociological debates concerning the ‘deferential’ (as opposed to the ‘proletarian’) worker, which have developed the analysis of work situation and status (see David Lockwood, ‘Sources of variation in working class images of society’, Sociological Review 14 (3), 1966: 249-67, and The Blackcoated Worker, London 1966, plus ‘Postscript’ to Second Edition, Oxford 1989), and (b) the historical debates concerning the political consequences of Nonconformist and, in particular, Methodist religion: the place of Nonconformist religion in the transition to industrial life, its effects upon the development of class consciousness, and its role in the creation of a culture that favoured the development of capitalism – see E. Hobsbawm, ‘Methodism and the threat of revolution in Britain’, in Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, London 1968: 23-33, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, R.F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Struggle of the Working Classes 18501900, London 1954, and The Social and Political Influence of Methodism in the Twentieth Century, London 1957, A.D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change 1740-1940, London 1976, Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics, H. McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City, London 1974, Obelkovich, Religion and Rural Society, D. Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850, London 1984, Colls, The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 190

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 191

6

ANXIETY, CONFLICT AND GOSSIP I The discussion of the values of respectability needs to be extended. So far, a consideration of the concept of character in local society has led to an emphasis upon the social or mutual aspect of such a notion: the complex of values organised around concepts of respectability, restraint and reputation can only be embodied by a group, a group that together seeks and achieves a degree of independence, and that is loyal to the ideals of equality and of universal brotherhood. In this way of thinking, individual independence and personal worth is not a function of a strict individualism, but a collective enterprise. At the same time, there is a strongly divisive or sectarian component to this complex of values, which is the other side to the universality of the ideals invoked. The respectable group is cut off from the unrespectable by their members’ achievements, their moral values, their foresight, their independence, and so forth. In this way, a person’s social situation and moral worth tend to confirm each other, and to interact. Nevertheless, such a description of character in local society in terms of respectability leaves something of a blank space when it comes to talking about the unrespectable person. This space is filled with the negatives of respectable virtues, and a stereotype is glimpsed: the feckless person is not independent, nor restrained, nor thrifty, nor prudent, nor temperate; he or she is at the mercy of chance, violent, spendthrift, concerned with gratification, unthinking, fatalistic, often with a tendency to drink and to gamble, unreligious and superstitious. These negatives of local categories tend to feed into and confirm a more widely held stereotype, one that, while constructed in interaction with local perceptions, serves other ends. In this wider context, the ‘feckless’ part of the local population carries a heavy symbolic load, representing the dark side of the working-man’s psyche (as opposed to the ‘inner truth’ of the proletariat). The feckless person stands for sex-

03-Part III

192

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 192

Religion in English Everyday Life

ual oppression, as opposed to sexual activity, the lumpen proletariat, rather than spontaneous class ideology, and irrational violence, instead of the perspective of class struggle. This subclass is made up of creatures of instinct, emotion and impulse, given over to superstition, poor diet and racism; at best, they may be viewed as the raw material for progress, but in practice they are ineducable and incorrigible. There are, unsurprisingly, few attempts to give an account of the life of the unrespectable; the Ashton study represents an honourable exception, as does Clancy Sigal’s Weekend in Dinlock.1 Both these books, however, tend to fill out the negative stereotype, and to play down material that does not fit. Yet, as has been noted for the Ashton study, the voices that emerge are curiously contradictory. I wish to suggest that what I have in shorthand called the values of respectability hold for the whole of local society, and are manifested in various patterns of judgement and behaviour, of ideas and actions; further, that these patterns precipitate contrasting interpretations and conflicts that draw upon and confirm the original values. In other words, it is better to consider the opposition of respectable to feckless as contrasting poles in a single indigenous process of classification; both are conjoint aspects of a repertoire available to all in local society. It is therefore inadequate to attribute the qualities or values in question to separate subclasses in too positive a way, as if one could carry out a census of who is respectable and who is not. Nor does it work to add a historical dimension and to describe the transformation in time of a population from predominantly one kind to the other; the opposition of respectable to feckless is itself a structure of interpretation, one which by its nature obscures the question of its genealogy. The virtue of this approach is that it coincides in an important respect with indigenous practice. For although everybody in local society knows that there is respectable and unrespectable behaviour, a pale beyond which damnation lies, everybody speaks as if they were within the pale. Whether or not the values of respectability arose within a particular subgroup or élite, they now have a general currency in local society at all levels. In other words, these values are not the preserve of that sector of the working class that appears best to embody them. Rather, everyone in Kingswood subscribes to these values, speaks in the name of them and criticises perceived failures to adhere to them. Everybody is respectable in their own eyes. These are the focal values for the whole area, quite as much as – and in practice, not distinguished from – the values of the family, and everyone protests loyalty to them. Yet these values also have unintended consequences. They can operate to produce effects or results that are undesirable locally: as we shall see, they can give rise to, and appear in, gossip, quarrels and, indeed, violence. The picture then is a complicated one: through the

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 193

193

defence and application of respectable values, particularly the concern for reputation, behaviour may be generated that others will regard as unrespectable. It has already been argued that what we have called respectability expresses a particular desire to get on in the world, realised less in the sense of economic improvement than in that of being a full or complete person in the terms of the local society. In this perspective, as has also been noted, the values of respectability imply a crucial double aspect that is focused in the notion of reputation, for respectability is both the value of a person in his (or her) own eyes, and his value in the eyes of his society: it is value claimed and value granted. In this respect, there are marked similarities to the plebeian notion of ‘honour’ that Julian Pitt-Rivers describes.2 Respectability, like honour, is both a personal and a public matter. A number of points may be made to exploit the parallel and to expand upon matters already raised. First, an individual does not simply prefer a particular mode of behaviour, but also demands to be treated in a particular way in return. The right to self-respect is the right to a certain status, and this entails the recognition of a certain social identity. As we have seen, the ‘markers’ of respectability, which include a concern for appearances and a personal morality, indicate a person’s worth, independent of a person’s wealth; by the same token, they are criteria for social judgement. As Pitt-Rivers points out, this notion of personality is deeply conservative, for it expresses the aspiration of an individual to personify the values of his or her society. Such a notion of personality or social status is probably only possible in a society of the sort I have described, where people are known to each other in overlapping sets through kinship and neighbourhood, and are engaged in relatively homogeneous forms of employment. An equally important factor to take account of, however, is the continuing force of the values of family and respectability, which may be said constantly to recompose and reconstitute, indeed to reproduce, such ‘local’ cultures, so that they are widespread in contemporary society. Second, in such a society, a person cannot stand alone; there is a constant tension between achieved and ‘inherited’ status, between an individual and a collective identity. Although status is a matter of personal excellence, it is also a matter of a person’s family and relations, as well as the groups with which he or she associates, and the neighbourhood in which he lives. A family may be brought into disrepute by one member, or a street by one family. There are, therefore, various degrees of collective status, in which a person participates of necessity, and to which he contributes by his behaviour. Third, such a notion of personality further demands a basic premise of the equality of men, of their potential or essential worth. For in this

03-Part III

194

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 194

Religion in English Everyday Life

social context, esteem or reputation is granted by neighbours; it cannot be claimed in isolation, nor in defiance of the opinion of others. Their right in principle to social judgement has to be accepted and so, by that token, their potential equality to oneself. There is an essential basis of egalitarianism or universalism. Yet, fourth, there is also implicit a strongly competitive or antagonistic element, for in practice respectability is not simply claimed on the one hand and recognised or granted on the other; it is claimed in contrast to others: it is an implicit claim to precedence and excellence. This claim has to be made implicitly for, in a society of equals, to attain one’s neighbour’s esteem is as high as one can properly aim; to establish openly precedence over them detracts from that esteem by violating the premise of equality. Therefore claims to respectability are almost always made by pointing out the failures of others, and in so doing presenting the implicit contrast to oneself. This competitive element appears in showing oneself to be better than others, seeking to interpret others’ behaviour, or even leaving their behaviour unremarked upon, in telling silence.3 Lastly, as should be clear, such a notion of personality must be deeply ‘anxious’, for respectability or reputation can only be granted by others, by public opinion, and any claim to status is balanced upon a knife edge. On the one hand, a person cannot be indifferent to public opinion without losing respectability and appearing feckless; on the other hand, too great a concern for the opinion of others both contradicts the principle of independence and rapidly appears as hypocrisy, as being ridiculously oversensitive and as offering a parody of respectable behaviour. This ‘anxiety’ then is structural rather than psychological: it is an expression of the pattern made up of involuntary solidarities and social judgement, of universalism and competition for precedence. Considered under its public aspect, therefore, respectability is experienced above all in the matter of reputation, of social status claimed and judged according to criteria we have identified, and the notion of reputation is potentially unstable. In a generalised and formal sense, this instability arises from a conflict between the two demands of equality and competition. In local terms, however, the conflict is focused in the single value of restraint. The question is, who is allowed to be restrained? Just as within a family there is a distribution of roles, possibilities and fates, so there is a distribution of possible behaviour and interpretation over the local population, conceived and expressed in terms of the values of respectability. As we have seen, there is a circle of mutually supporting circumstances and interpretation which allows certain individuals and families to embody and personify the values of local society better than others.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 195

195

Respectable behaviour and a good reputation are identified with restraint, with the rejection of short-term gratification on the one hand, and of violence on the other. The values of respectability are linked both to a notion of equality between peers and to the identification of clear boundaries: the exclusion from consideration of those who are not judged equals. There is in this way an ideal, assured position, where status claimed is the same as status accorded. In practice, nobody embodies this core position in an unambiguous and unanxious way, and everybody has continually to pay attention, to assert and defend their reputation. Every action is open to conflicting interpretations, to being seen in terms of, on the one hand, mutuality or competition and, on the other, respectability or fecklessness. Take, for example, the range of possible attitudes to spending money. On the one hand, there is a conflict between a principle of generosity or mutuality, treating one’s family and one’s mates, and the principle of thrift, which raises the question of when does generosity go beyond the limits of reasonable restraint and become feckless behaviour? Taken the other way about, thrift threatens to become meanness and a failure of mutuality. On the other hand, generosity may be a way of asserting superiority, over other families or even over the recipients of the spending, an act that claims superior status and that, by doing so, opens itself to the twofold accusation of excess and the destruction of mutuality. Anxiety takes on different forms depending upon where in the field of the distribution of values the actor stands, whether he (or she) is a ‘core’ person, or whether he stands in the ‘penumbra’, in the shadow cast by the core values, where interpretation is still determined by them, but different behaviours are evoked. In particular, restraint is a marker of core values, and it loses its force towards the ‘edge’, so that contrary qualities become valued. The more a person is at the margins, the less can he rely upon the mute assertion of worth through restraint, and the more reputation is asserted or defended in a competitive fashion. There is then a continual interplay of situation and character: a person becomes who he is allowed to become, and yet within each situation there is a degree of freedom of interpretation and action. So different contexts evoke different behaviour, and there is a range of possible behaviour, a spectrum defined by two poles, the one being ‘reputation = restraint’, the other being ‘reputation = precedence’. Each actor establishes and defends a reputation using whatever materials are to hand. I shall now discuss in turn three transformations of the structure of anxiety that may be found distributed in local society: its expression in violence, in gossip, and in divisions within local organisations. These are themes which were first raised at the end of the discussion of family and locality.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 196

196

Religion in English Everyday Life

II One cannot discuss matters of reputation and restraint directly, and there are equal difficulties in obtaining information upon matters of reputation and precedence. Neither topic can be articulated as such; the description of values or strategies would be a serious error of judgement in any given situation: one neither proclaims one’s restraint nor boasts of one’s precedence. Nevertheless, materials concerning the latter topic may be discovered in the court reports of local newspapers.4 These accounts usually contain a description of events leading up to the incident in question, and sometimes transcribe extracts from the testimony of participants. There are obvious constraints upon the use of such material. First, such reports make up a biased sample; all the cases are extreme, in that they have come to court. Second, the accounts have to be accepted as they stand; they cannot readily be investigated further. And third, they pose a problem of discretion, concerning the extent to which we may properly use them, what detail may be cited and so forth. However, despite these restrictions, it is possible to use such material – in bare outline, in response to the last consideration – to illustrate the transformations in the values of respectability that are under consideration. Any case that comes to court is marked by a lack of restraint, and yet there is still evidence of ordering according to values with which we are familiar. Take the case of Darren Fudger, a twenty-year-old engineer who returned home in the early hours of a Sunday morning after an evening spent drinking. He met his father on the stairs; they started arguing, and the son tried several times to punch his father. The latter, finding himself unable to control the younger man, went to call the police. When he returned, he found his son had caused considerable damage to the house. Even when the police arrived, he continued to shout obscenities and to throw household items into neighbouring gardens. He was charged with behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace, a charge which he subsequently admitted, pointing to drink as the cause of the problem, and apologised for his behaviour. Being of previously good character, he was bound over to keep the peace. This case in its detail is banal, as are all such cases, yet the specific nature of the lack of restraint, though attributed to alcohol, is clear: it appears in the lad’s swearing at and attacking his father, in his destruction of the home and in his involving the neighbours, by making a public row and throwing things taken from the house into their gardens. As we shall see, it is also made clear in his forcing his father to resort to the police. Conflict within a family is not rare. There are regularly cases of youths who steal from the family in order to finance their life with

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 197

197

friends. A youth aged fifteen admitted stealing a television set and a record player from his father’s house and two offences of stealing cash from the same source; he did so in order to buy a second-hand car which he and a sixteen-year-old friend took to Devon. He also admitted a further theft of cash, using a vehicle without insurance and making off from a petrol station without paying the bill; all offences committed on the trip. The father said he was ‘stunned’ when he heard of the offences. The family reacted with less tolerance in the case of Kevin Grounds, an eighteen-year-old who admitted six offences of using his brother’s cash card to withdraw money from the bank. At the time, he shared a bedroom with his brother, who was a year older. His defending counsel said ‘he has already been punished because he is no longer living at home – his family have ostracised him’. Grounds accepted that he had committed a breach of trust, but said that at the time of the offences he was unemployed and could not afford to go out with his friends. In both cases, solidarities between contemporaries overwhelmed solidarities within the family, feeding no doubt upon existing tensions. These group solidarities recur as a motif. This is a typical example: a group of about twenty youths were shouting and swearing at another such group in the entrance to a youth club. Several parked cars had their tyres deflated and their aerials bent. The youth leader called the police; an officer came and asked the youths to disperse. Most did so, but Simon Boxer, a sixteen-year-old trainee engineer, continued to shout abuse. When asked again to move on, he swore at the policeman and was arrested. He said in court he had been shouting because all his friends had been doing the same. Fighting on the streets between youths or young men, which has been commented upon as long as there have been accounts of Kingswood, and which still is frequent, is a function of the assertion and defence of reputation. Youths, just as much as their elders, are caught up in the responsibility of establishing and maintaining the status of their person, family, group or locality. Fights are started in the competition for precedence. Steven Bowles, a quiet eighteen-year-old, was walking with a group of friends when they came upon a group of boys who, in the past, had taunted Bowles and called him names. A particular youth, aged fifteen, whom Bowles had seen only three times before, came up to him and made insulting remarks about his girlfriend. The boy had previously been abusive, and Bowles decided he had had enough. There was some pushing and shoving, and the boy fell into a supermarket window; the pair were detained by the manager who called the police, and Bowles was charged with damage and a breach of the peace. As in the more conventional idiom of respectability, competition is a matter of interpretation of acts and intentions, which is kept within

03-Part III

198

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 198

Religion in English Everyday Life

strict bounds. Oversensitivity is ridiculous, insensitivity is evidence of cowardice. The first aggressive gesture is the glance – or the interpretation of a glance – called ‘giving the eye’ or, in sexual imagery, ‘screwing him’. This gesture can either be defused by a greeting, or responded to by verbal recognition of the challenge, leading to the exchange of insults and then, sometimes, to violence. There are certain recurrent patterns concerning the resort to violence. First, the motive lying behind the kind of behaviour we are discussing is an assertion of moral worth, and central to this assertion is a claim to independence, or the ability to make one’s own way. It may seem the better course, for example, to steal from one’s own family. This claim to independence appears in the compulsion to settle matters outside the law: an appeal to the law represents a personal failure, and can of itself serve to provoke violence. This proved true in the case of David Miller, a forty-year-old shop owner, who used to go drinking with a twenty-three-year-old fitter named Peter Sykes. Sykes started an affair with Miller’s wife, who left her husband and went to live next door to the shop, where Sykes moved in with her. Miller slashed the tyres of Sykes’ car; Sykes rushed into the shop and attacked Miller with a knife, and then ran off when the scuffle was interrupted by a customer entering. Miller informed the police. Later that evening, Sykes, having heard in the pub that the police were looking for him, returned to the shop and assaulted Miller. Miller’s fifteen-year-old son and a neighbour called the police and pulled Sykes off; Sykes then attacked and chased the son. He was gaoled for twelve months. In the first case mentioned above, resorting to the police may have been the least inappropriate way out of the situation the elder Fudger found himself in with respect to his son. A second aspect of the pattern is that this moral worth or independence implies membership of a group. An individual is not free to decide for himself what course of action to take, but is implicated in locally-defined solidarities, in family, group and neighbourhood, so that he cannot avoid certain conflicts on his own account. Certain solidarities are invoked to ‘explain’ violence: a brother has been attacked, a wife or daughter seduced, a group of friends insulted. Equally, violence is justified by failures of mutuality, attributed to a workmate or neighbour. Even attacks upon strangers are justified in these terms. Anthony Mullins, a twenty-three-year-old employed at a local engineering works, bought a house with his girlfriend. He had financial problems, the house needed repairing, and there were problems obtaining the necessary grants. His girlfriend left him for another man. He took to drinking heavily, gave up work and the house, and went to live with his brother. One night his brother came in, looking as if he had been beaten up. Mullins and a friend went out and con-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 199

199

fronted two youths aged seventeen and nineteen. Mullins hit the latter with a rolling pin, killing him, and attacked the former, blinding him in one eye. He was gaoled for life, plus five years for grievous bodily harm. Third, the tension inherent in respectability between equality and precedence appears in this form: to accept a challenge – or to interpret an act as a challenge – implies the acknowledgement of a claim to equality, for one answers only to equals; yet it is done with the purpose of establishing precedence, with violence if necessary. In this sense, all violence is defensive; status is challenged or violated, and is restored through blows. There is always, therefore, anxiety inherent in judging the ‘correct’ response or interpretation, lying between oversensitivity and insensitivity; the actor has to judge whom he counts as an equal, to whom he has to respond, and how. The most aggressive and anxious behaviour comes from people of low status. These are people who, like everybody else, claim reputation and judge others in terms of the values of respectability, but to whom nobody listens. In a sense, such people can get away with a great deal, because nobody with a surer sense of who they are in local terms needs to take them on. In another sense, they are allowed no freedom to negotiate, for they lack in effect any persona. There is, then, a category of ‘people without reputation’. Such people, although often well-known, will have little or no support in the area. Sometimes they have been moved by the Council into an estate, and lack family locally, or their family has ceased to recognise them. Often they are unemployed because they lack the necessary contacts, and are reliant upon local welfare services. They are often troublesome, for they are without effective restraint, and tend to be violent both physically and verbally. They are outcasts in local terms: they are not owed the truth in any way, and they can be accused to their face of appalling behaviour – for example, incest – and of hereditary taint – for example, epilepsy – both of which accusations implicate their families. Lastly, because they are effectively outside local society, although generated by its values, they are of little or no significance in terms of gossip. This category lies at the opposite pole to that of assured reputation: they are extremes which define a spectrum of possible behaviour. In practice, many people come in between, in that part of the spectrum where worth is asserted positively, and reputation is a function of precedence rather than of restraint. Here reputation is an antagonistic quality, a function of a man’s ability to claim his place through his assertion of himself, through competitiveness, and some of the values we have encountered appear to be inverted. There is, therefore, a version of reputation, the characteristics of which may include being a sexual adventurer, a fighter, a drinker and a gambler; these qualities, although not ‘respectable’, are viewed positively in their context. An individual who embodies these qualities has a positive persona, even though from

03-Part III

200

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 200

Religion in English Everyday Life

another perspective he may be seen as feckless. Raymond Black is such a person. He was accused of sexual assault on his former landlady, Mary Porlock, aged twenty-five. Black, aged twenty-one, and his girlfriend had been tenants of Mary Porlock and her husband, all living in the same house. His girlfriend had remained there when Black was gaoled for burglary, theft and taking cars. Black claimed that Mary Porlock had propositioned him at a party given to celebrate his release from gaol. Mary Porlock subsequently left her husband and went to live with Black’s uncle, who lived at the same address as Black. At the time of the alleged assault, Mary Porlock had returned to her husband; Black, indeed, went to the house to sell a car part to him. Black, in denying the assault, claimed to have had sex with Mary Porlock on different occasions, also with her sister-in-law, and with a neighbour of the sister-inlaw. Mary Porlock’s father, James Elroy, a long-distance lorry driver, said of his daughter, ‘she is an out and out liar, she can’t help it’, and of Black, ‘if I thought this [accusation] was true, Black would be a dead man’. The newspaper report said that there were supporters of Black in the public gallery throughout the two-day trial, and added that the case had split families and caused much bitterness in a small community. Black was acquitted of the charge. This inversion of values is not simply a masculine phenomenon, for relations between the sexes are implicated too. In this part of the spectrum, women have a certain degree of freedom of action: as the court cases illustrate, they have the option of choosing their sexual partners, and this freedom is a major source of men’s anxiety; Mr Elroy for one giving striking expression to the contradictory demands to which he has been subjected. This freedom is not to be confused with that of women of no reputation, who swear and fight, and can be accused of promiscuity; it contrasts strongly also with the restraint implicit in the values of respectability. In the latter case, the husband’s reputation implies his authority over the family; women keep themselves out of bad company, and the adulterer – rather than the cuckold – is despised. A jealous husband can invoke the values of respectability and seclude his wife, forbidding her to go out to work and discouraging her from mixing with or visiting others. In this way, he avoids through anticipation a situation which, in another context, might lead to violence. It is therefore possible to suggest certain parallels between the values that emerge in the non-respectable part of local society and the aristocratic concept of honour through precedence that Pitt-Rivers describes. In the latter, honour becomes an exaggeratedly masculine mode of behaviour, detached from virtue and intensely competitive: honour becomes a matter of aggression against the honour of others who may be counted equal, and defending one’s honour, which includes the honour or virtue of the women of the household, against the aggression of others.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 201

The Kingswood Whit Walk

201

The comparison will not stand too much examination, yet, as we have seen, in this part of local society we find such ‘aristocratic’ features as an interplay between intention, sincerity and deception (or ‘to whom do you owe the truth?’); courage, generosity and display are more highly valued than restraint; violence is accepted as a way of establishing precedence; settling matters outside the law is regarded positively; and the cuckold is considered to be the offender rather than the adulterer. Pitt-Rivers indicates in a most interesting passage how Protestant values may be interpreted in a historical perspective as the rejection and inversion of the aristocratic equation of precedence and honour.5 In particular, he points out that Protestant attitudes reverse aristocratic ones on such matters as display, women, cuckoldry, courage, violence, rank and privilege, legality, lying, literacy and even Time. These ‘aristocratic’ values appear in local society as the inversion of the (Protestant) values of respectability. It is enough for our purposes to note the similarities in the operation of the two systems of interpretation, through which personal identity is negotiated and sustained within a complex matrix of values.

III The interplay of values, interpretation and context generates two incompatible modes of reputation, just as certain line drawings generate two incompatible modes of perception. Any act and any intention is then thoroughly ambiguous, for it may be seen in one or the other optic. This mutability inherent in the values of respectability is experienced as ‘anxiety’, and may be expressed through gossip, although ‘gossip’ is scarcely an indigenous term; people refer rather to ‘talk’. As we have seen, respectability is status claimed by an individual and his or her family, subject always to acceptance by the neighbourhood. It is a business of matching self-regard and public regard. This claim is experienced in practice in a twofold anxiety, on the one hand, ‘wanting everything nice’, or avoiding conflict, an expression of the value of restraint and, on the other hand, worrying about what others might say. For the prestige of a person or family is constantly under evaluation in the community through the discussion of personalities and events. Talk is therefore endemic. It is an aspect of who you are: in it, you negotiate your own status with respect to that of other people. Yet this negotiation cannot be performed directly: conflict is unacceptable, face-to-face confrontation is to be avoided, and appearances are to be preserved. Moreover, competition for status is of itself unrespectable,

03-Part III

202

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 202

Religion in English Everyday Life

being a denial of equality and restraint. Talk, therefore, must have a denial of its own purpose built in; this denial is most commonly expressed in a concern for others (which, at the same time, will be genuinely felt), with implications concerning failures with respect to the canons of respectability, the values of which are, as we know, in many ways ambiguous. Discussion may touch upon domestic and family topics, the behaviour of children and so forth, implicitly evaluating the role of others as wife or mother, as husband or workmate, and evoking the values of home and family. Gossip, therefore, is not idle talk, for it is never without cost; indeed, it is better described as compulsive, for it has an involuntary aspect, being forced out of the participants. This compulsion expresses the power of the ambiguity of the values at work, the anxiety inherent in the context. To express opinions about a local person is to implicate two networks of kin and acquaintance, one on behalf of the speaker, the other on behalf of the subject of the discussion: a calculus of solidarities is brought into play. Talk is then a serious matter, and rarely without substance; every issue is turned over with care, and remembered for a long time. It follows too that talk is tightly controlled: who you talk with, how much you say, and how much you can prevent yourself saying, are all aspects of who you are. Two points are worth reiterating with respect to this matter of compulsion. First, nothing marks out a person with no reputation more than lies or idle gossip. Idle talk is the sign of a feckless person, who will say anything. Such people are pariahs, on the edge of local society, and extravagant things may also be said of them – or even to their face – without the speaker’s reputation being at stake. Even here, matters are nuanced, for the constraint upon a respectable person to be restrained is not lifted, and such an individual is confronted with a difficult judgement to make: how to make clear their opinion of a feckless person. In practice, usually little is said but the condemnation is clearly cast and irrevocable; such judgements fall into the class of opinions people will not discuss. Despite the force of the opinions held about them, people judged feckless are rarely confronted to their face, in part because of the real risk of a row or a fight developing. Second, outsiders are of no interest, either, with respect to gossip: there is no compulsion experienced in discussing them, and no price to pay. Because the motive force that appears in talk is this compulsion to speak, functionalist explanations of gossip – such as that it is a transactional negotiation to maximise rare information, or that it is a way of maintaining group cohesion and solidarity6 – although illuminating, can only be partial in the case of Kingswood, because they leave unexplained the inability to keep silent. A description of gossip in terms of a transactional analysis, then, offers useful parallels; in this

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 203

203

perspective, gossip is part of a style of indirectness and restricted communication (which fits well with the notion of personality and privacy outlined earlier). Children are encouraged to conceal facts about themselves and their home life, and are watchful and hesitant to act or to express themselves; adults too are guarded with one another, and engage in constant games with each other, minimising the control others have over them, while improving their own position. Friendships are limited in scope and style of expression under such conditions. Yet gossip in Kingswood is not simply a matter of calculated interaction, of not telling all you know, of seeking to misdirect, and of finding out more than is said, for such a description misses the inherent compulsion: the speaker cannot bear not to speak. This compulsion is neither a calculation of advantage nor a breakdown of the system; it is rather a symptom of the way the self is defined and asserted. In one of the cases outlined in the previous section, James Elroy found himself in an impossible situation, concerned at once with attempting to preserve his family’s reputation and with the legal consequences of so doing. Hence the extremity of the two reported remarks forced out of him: on the one hand, threatening death, on the other, washing his hands of the business. Similarly, the analysis of gossip as an aspect of social control is useful but incomplete. The desire to avoid conflict, upon which gossip plays, is the other side of a strong sense of identity: there is a belief in Kingswood as a community that is an expression of the values of equality and universality. Under such circumstances, open conflicts are to be avoided not only because they exhibit a lack of restraint on the part of the individual, but also because they disrupt local social relations and contradict the belief in community and commensality. This emerged in the course of Black’s trial, in which a number of neighbours and relatives gave conflicting evidence, and which was reported, as we saw, as having ‘split families and caused much bitterness in a small community’; one of the witnesses subsequently complained that the press account made them sound as if they ‘weren’t ordinary people’. Equally, gossip reinforces the values of the family. An individual is concerned not to bring his (or her) family into disrepute through the things he says or does. He avoids doing anything which may draw attention to himself and his family. Gossip also implicates kin, so their existence too puts pressure upon the individual. As gossip cannot be confronted, it exerts influence through the indirect expression of judgement, the principles of which are never questioned. It is therefore a conservative force affirming existing solidarities. Yet social cohesion and solidarity are better considered as symptoms of the classificatory system at work, rather than as functions. While it is to an extent true that gossip distinguishes insiders from outsiders, in Kingswood this is an expression of

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 204

204

Religion in English Everyday Life

what might be called the distribution of compulsion rather than being an in-group defending their identity by restricting the right of gossip to themselves.7 Indeed, the existence of ‘people with no reputation’, a local category effectively excluded from the field of gossip, is evidence that different principles are at work. Furthermore, gossip has detrimental effects upon social cohesion, for it limits participation in local life, and can undermine the workings of local organisations. An individual protects his reputation by shunning social responsibility and by keeping others at a distance, and this is reflected in what appears to be an individualism in local society.8 Gossip may therefore lead to a lack of initiative in local affairs, through the fear of being talked about, and may cause the breakdown of organised activities as any potential leadership is cut down to size. Gossip has its effects, therefore, not simply in the penumbra of local society, but also within the central practices organised by the values of respectability. It is experienced in the workings of voluntary organisations, reflected in the rule of gerontocrats who represent conservative, familial values, and in the reluctance of younger people to assume responsibility, refracted in the difficulties of obtaining new recruits and of introducing innovation. But it is experienced too in the conflicts and splits which disrupt such organisations, as we shall see. In this way, conflict, which we first met as it was excluded from the categories of respectability, reemerges at the heart of them, revealed as a central constituent of their logic.

IV Just as there are connections and resemblances between the notion of the person and aspects of voluntary organisations in local society, which are functions of the values of respectability, so too there are characteristic features of anxiety which emerge in such organisations. Frankenberg’s discussion of the dynamics of local organisations9 is the most detailed account available of such features, and offers many parallels to the case of Kingswood, despite differences in situation and scale. Their characteristics may be summarised as follows. First, no project can be initiated, promoted or led by a single individual, for such a move would break with the premise of equality: such a person would then be criticised and cut down to size, and support for such a project would not be forthcoming. All activities therefore are organised through committees, which aim to represent local public interest and to respond to local discussion. All committees are limited in their behaviour by the interests and desires of local people, and in their proposals by the forms of activity that local people hold to be

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 205

205

appropriate. In general, committees form around a specific project and try to enlist the whole community, not simply a sectional interest. There are committees composed solely of women, some solely of men, and mixed committees, according to the activity in question. Second, as we know, membership of a committee is a mark of respectability, of a certain public character. Informal pressures are great, and operate at every stage of the life of the committee, including its initial selection. Standing for membership would expose an ‘inappropriate’ candidate to public discussion; in practice, lists are drawn up according to criteria which include rightness of fit. Although who you are is more important than what you do, nevertheless committee members in general are drawn from the ranks of shopkeepers and managers, white-collar workers and skilled men, and their wives; unskilled labourers are scarcely represented. Within this group, a particular dynamic throws up a conservative leadership. People are reluctant to appear to take initiatives, although they work hard as executors, and because of a reluctance to take public responsibility on the part of most members, certain individuals accumulate multiple office. Such an accumulation of office will lead to one of two possible conclusions. Either it will lead to the eventual isolation of the person in question, who will have been deemed to have overreached himself; there is increasing conflict, and the person eventually withdraws from public life. Or, if a conflict never precipitates around the person in question, as he becomes older and his position strengthens, he becomes an exemplar. In this case, it is possible to talk of some sort of ‘archetype of respectability’. Such a person becomes separated off from the surrounding society, marked off by his character, according to criteria we have already met – he is not frivolous, he neither drinks, nor gambles, nor swears, and so forth – and marked off too by recognition of that character, for he is respected and looked up to. Such a person has an assured public reputation, a reputation which may be borne witness to posthumously by anecdotes relating how he commanded respect, even from the most feckless. Two examples were given earlier, in Patrick Giddens and Archie Teague; Howard Dalton would be a third case. He was born in 1910, the eldest of four brothers who were orphaned early and brought up in Kingswood by a grandmother. He worked briefly as a miner, then in the building trade; he became a sergeant major during War service and, after the War, rose to be senior foreman in a local factory. He married at twenty-five, and spent more than forty years in the same house. He was secretary to the local branch of a friendly society, and was a formidable character: a man of authority, physically strong, mentally powerful, strict and punctual, while at the same time, sociable, humorous and a devoted family man.

03-Part III

206

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 206

Religion in English Everyday Life

These ‘archetypes’ are the elders of the chapel or local politicians, gerontocrats or patriarchs who create an absolute moral authority over a long period, an authority built out of an amalgam of character and influence (or personality claimed and acknowledged), with connections running through family and neighbourhood, school and work, chapel and politics. These figures cannot be removed from power, nor even denounced, though their influence may be resented. To break with them is out of the question, for in the calculus of solidarities there is only ever one possible outcome. In these figures in particular, apparently sectarian groups such as chapels, friendly societies and secret societies are in fact submitted to local values to the effective exclusion of associational rules.10 In these figures, local values are embodied and a conservative moral authority is personified, and only death can remove them. Third, although committees are limited to the promotion of projects of common interest, the group in practice is never unanimous. Local groups always have an internal potential for conflict, even discounting aspects of competition for reputation, for there are different solidarities ready to be called into play, relating to kin, neighbours and work. Moreover, as we noted in the discussion of the organisations that lie in the penumbra of chapel life, different age groups have differing points of view, there are groups with different organisational aims, and the two sexes have different perspectives and practices. Factions then form readily with particular views or interests to promote. With respect to the interests of men and women, Frankenberg suggests that while the division of roles between the sexes within the family is complementary, outside the roles may well be antagonistic.11 Even this is not a simple matter. Certainly women have the opportunity to organise their views; they meet during the day through the care of children and visiting, or through the pursuit of a common purpose (sewing groups, Sunday school teachers’ meetings, prayer or bible study groups, and so forth). Their views are enforced by informal pressure, by concerted action at public meetings, and by the withdrawal of support if the decisions of a meeting do not go their way. Although men coordinate as neighbours, workmates and drinking companions, in comparison they appear less well organised; often, too, their discussion of matters will be initiated and shaped by their wives, and so reflect other solidarities. Frankenberg’s description of the antagonism between men and women in the public sphere is related to his perception of the decline of men’s organisations, and the comparative failure of men to participate in public life. He relates this decline to the disappearance of local employment, and to the consequent fashion that men’s interests have become less local in focus.12 In this way the influence of women in public life is regarded as a product of what

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 207

207

we might call ‘unequal development’: their way of life has persisted to a greater extent, with a greater degree of coherence, than that of the men. This alteration, he suggests, is resented; antagonism is a psychological response to, or product of, change. In his account of coalmining in Kingswood between the wars, Fred Moss offers an, in some ways parallel, account. He presents material to suggest that a high degree of male coordination and participation in local organisations was related to large-scale local employment.13 Membership of such organisations was a central part of a person’s public persona, and became less important as employment became more fragmented. He cites a familiar list of agents of change: the population has become more mobile, people are better off, families have washing-machines, televisions and motor cars; they are more independent and keep themselves to themselves. The neighbourly spirit is still there, he concludes, but the community spirit is gone. Both these accounts, one by a sociologist or anthropologist, one by a local person, share the view that change is equivalent to a decline or a falling-away from an original state of ‘community’. Community studies indeed have been conducted, as we have seen, in a perspective that defines their subject matter as survivals, as the fragments of past ways of life that cannot persist much longer. In this definition, ‘community’ by its nature belongs to the past and not to the future. This is a story told in a romantic perspective, upon which both informants and sociologists may draw, a story that disguises the processes ordering social life, which may never have been as satisfactory and full as the vision promised by the notion of community. The antagonism that Frankenberg describes is a function of this romantic perspective; in fact he also presents material which might point to a continuing structure of relations between the sexes showing similarities to the distribution of possibilities within the family described above in the case of Kingswood.14 Once more, the significance of conflict needs to be appraised very carefully: it is a feature of the operation of the values involved rather than simply of ‘social structure’. Lastly, in the situation where there are diverse interests always present, but where there is also a premium upon avoiding open conflict, outsiders play a vital role in permitting local society to maintain its claims to equality and separateness, indeed in allowing it to define its identity. We must distinguish two ways of being an outsider. On the one hand, the category of ‘a local person’ is not a simple, positive given; it may indeed be part of a local person’s experience to feel that he or she has always been considered an outsider. An aspect of the constant discussion of reputation and status is that the position of outsider shifts and is defined according to context. A person may count as local in one context and an outsider in another; the criterion used may be that of

03-Part III

208

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 208

Religion in English Everyday Life

birthplace – for an outsider may be defined as having come from outside East Bristol, or Kingswood, or Cock Road – or kin – for each organisation has a cluster of key families and neighbours – or status (in terms of respectability). There is a fluidity in the distribution of symbolic weighting; an aspect of the life of local organisations, as well as an aspect of local life in general, is made up of deciding who is part of the common interest – the ‘us’ of the group – and who is outside it. On the other hand, and in the context of the way groups make their decisions, ‘outsider’ refers to the incomer with a certain independence of local values. I raised the question of this category in the previous chapter. Such people are sometimes self-employed (shop-owners or builders, for example), sometimes professional (doctors or schoolteachers or local government managers), sometimes retired; the important factors are that their work and salary are not locally dependent, and that they are not related to other families in the area. These people have a certain status through their wealth, education and the sort of job they do: they are the local ‘notables’. These outsiders are expected to take on figurehead responsibilities, to sit on committees and usually to chair them, to contribute financially to projects, to confer approval and not to interfere. They are often also, by virtue of their position, insensitive or uninformed as to local values and opinions. As we have seen, committees do not initiate projects, but rather seek to act on a basis of popular intention. The local group ‘sets the agenda’, but outsiders are required to propose motions and to initiate action. Decisions are taken by the local group, but appear to be taken by the outsiders, who are forced to shoulder responsibility for decisions when they prove unpopular. Outsiders then act as visible agents by whom change may occur and decisions be initiated, and they serve as scapegoats in the case of division or dissent. In an organisational context, outsiders are brought in to take responsibility for decisions and to withstand the unpopularity of leadership, and so to allow the local group to preserve their exemplary unity in the eyes of local society. A case that appeared briefly in the local newspaper concerned the closing-down of a bar and social club attached to a Roman Catholic church. The initial report stated that members of the parish and diocesan trustees had made the decision to close the bar, with debts ‘rumoured to run into thousands of pounds’. The diocesan treasurer said that the bar had ceased to have any attraction, that it had been ‘soldiering along as a non-entity in the parish’. A number of local groups that used the premises, such as a judo club, a keep-fit session and skittles teams, would have to find an alternative venue. A subsequent report developed the story. The treasurer denied any debts, but pointed to the bar’s ceasing to fill a social function. Subsequently he could not be contacted by the reporter. Two prominent local members

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 209

209

of the club were interviewed. One – a builder – stated that the club was one of the most successful in Kingswood, and that he was interested in leasing the club to keep it going, but that no one seemed interested in discussing this plan with him. He complained that members had only been given a week’s notice of the closure. The other, who had joined the club when it was founded twenty years before, and who organised the twenty skittles teams based there (involving 400 people), said he had not been allowed to attend the meeting when the closure was decided because he was not a member of the church. The first member hinted that he held the new parish priest responsible for the closure, whom – unlike his predecessor – he had never seen in the club. There was no doubt, in the local view, that diocesan trustees and the new priest, secretive meetings and bad management could be held responsible for the collapse of a twenty-year-old project. In sum, the values of conflict emerge in the lives of the respectable, and the life of local organisations is in important respects ordered by the structure of anxiety, which appears in the use, constitution and conduct of committees, and which is perhaps most clearly expressed in the contrasting functions and powers of the gerontocrat and the outsider. These values, or this structure, lie behind features of the conduct of local committees that may puzzle outsiders for, as mentioned above, they do not always read the situation in which they find themselves with great accuracy (and for good reason). Among these features are the following:15 (i) Elections to the committee are not in practice contested. Instead, membership is established by considerations of balance, or representation of interests, and precedent. Lists are drawn up informally to fit the number required. There is no overt competition nor comparison of candidates in this way, and the people who agree to stand are assured that their consent to serve is not going to be interpreted as putting themselves forward. (ii) Although minutes are taken at most meetings, they rarely record discussion, for this would be a record of differences, nor are the minutes referred to in subsequent discussions. The minutes, indeed, are often documents with little content. The records that count are not written ones; rather, precedents are remembered, discussed and compared by the more experienced participants. (iii) As public conflict is to be avoided if at all possible, dissent is largely invisible. Hence the ‘decisions’ which are arrived at are rarely a consensus, although people have not differed. Indeed, what people (the interest groups) ‘really’ think frequently is not articulated. (iv) Although there may be fierce disagreement between local people, a local person will rarely be moved to contradict a public statement and, in particular, will not correct remarks made by an out-

03-Part III

210

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 210

Religion in English Everyday Life

sider, who may propose an unacceptable motion without gaining a hint of its lack of reception. Similarly, a local person will rarely refuse outright a request to carry out some action if this is suggested by the committee or the chairman, but if he or she disapproves of it, will infinitely delay fulfilling it. (v) Voting is conducted upon principles far removed from the opinions expressed and the issue in hand, for it expresses other divisions and solidarities – of sex, kinship and residence, social and economic loyalties – and may also relate to other issues than the one that appears to be in question. This factor also underlies the way that apparently irrelevant concerns emerge in the course of a discussion. (vi) Because of these features, there is a phenomenon of a decay of support, so that an apparently unanimous decision made at one meeting may be not simply undone but effectively reversed by the next, for as opinions are determined by various solidarities, these can be reversed by the reactions of those outside the committee to the decision taken. All these characteristics can be perceived as inefficiency or even as duplicity, and may contribute to a version of a ‘dark legend’, whereby local people can be seen as incapable of making a committee work, of sticking to a decision they have made, or of carrying out what they have decided. In fact, the committees are an efficient and expedient way of carrying out a locally recognised cycle of activities, and of mobilising active support. Yet it is also clear that, apart from the constraints imposed by anxiety upon their everyday working, any activity conducted under such circumstances contains a further inherent potential for conflict: not merely a steady state of anxiety, as it were, but the possibility of crisis. A local committee, as we have seen, is subject to constant covert criticism, and there is no loyalty to any project which overrides other sectional interests. The leaders lack executive authority and decisions have to be unanimous, for unless people’s hearts are in it, tasks are not carried out. Frankenberg’s thesis is that, under such circumstances, conflicts cannot always be avoided, disputes emerge that evoke the divisions within local society, and there is a cycle of decline and collapse of public activities. The situation of any committee is inherently unstable, because local values discourage initiative and participation, and encourage criticism in the name of the values of mutuality and equality. Committee members cannot easily share with or delegate either powers or chores to non-committee members; as we have seen, key individuals tend to accumulate offices and, in a similar way, committees easily appear exclusive. The committee members are then subject to criti-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 211

211

cism for the failure of the committee to promote common interests, and their solidarity with the committee’s project declines. A committee so threatened may retreat into secrecy in order to avoid criticism, and so accelerate the crisis. Divisions can emerge at this stage: participation decreases, or inactivity increases, and it becomes harder to recruit people. If disagreement threatens, members can stay away or resign, but this itself is controversial, as any act of overt conflict will carry blame for the failure of the project. There are rarely resignations, for fear of loss of face and the blame, although if an individual resigns, an informal group of his or her supporters is lost to the project; there is more often a cluster of resignations, or a boycott of certain activities. Most frequently, a group does not stand for reelection. There is, therefore, never a steady state, but a constant ebb and flow of support for projects, sometimes tipping over into outright crisis. People move in and out of activities; there are always changes in personnel and in levels of involvement; new activities are evolved and old ones decline; always against a backdrop of talk, of interpretation and blame. The role of outsiders, it has been suggested, is to allow some sort of muffling of these manoeuvres, to allow the projection of conflict and blame outside local society, just as the unrespectable have the same unacceptable qualities projected onto them. Looking at the situation more abstractly, the committees may be seen as focal points or points of density in the definition of local society, sharing many qualities with the gerontocrats who run them. Committees both are maximally constrained by the values and demands of the local society and serve as centres from which definition proceeds: respectability both narrowly shapes them and flows from them. And so the pressures of local society, in its self-definition both against the outside – in its resistance to outside interpretation – and against the inside – in the rejection of the negation of its values in fecklessness – are at their greatest intensity in these committees. These demands of specification, as we might call them, leave little room for manoeuvre, for in such an environment anything that happens is liable to be reinforced and defined as significant. In one way, then, the pressure – a feature of the definitional space – means that the failure of the project and the foundering of the committee is always a possibility. In another way, such a failure is inadmissible, for it is a failure of respectable procedures in their own terms at their point of maximum intensity, and it cannot be spoken of, for the principles of order in local society are at stake. (This structural characteristic means that any outside account of these matters – such as this essay – is liable a priori to be rejected.) These considerations apply over the whole range of local organisations, from the workings of temporary committees to the functioning of more permanent, formal bodies, such as local govern-

03-Part III

212

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 212

Religion in English Everyday Life

ment, the churches and chapels. In the light of this, it is possible to offer a speculative interpretation of the splits between chapels. It must be a speculative interpretation because, in the case of Kingswood, the evidence is extremely fragmentary; in particular, details of local conditions or context are entirely lacking in chapel and denominational histories.16 Nevertheless, a certain simple pattern may be detected, a typical event consisting of three components: a split in a local congregation, an outside stimulus which precipitates the split, and a change in local symbolic space, the building of a new chapel. These elements, which may occur in any order, are present in the three cases along the route of the Whit Walk for which we have some indications. In the earliest case, Wesley blamed the split between Kingswood School and the New Society Room in 1741 not on doctrine but on local differences; on the other hand, the split was set off by differences between Whitefield and Wesley. Later, the removal from the original school site to a new Wesley Chapel in 1843, under the impulsion of a local benefactor, Samuel Budget, and the removal of the school itself to Bath, led to considerable local feeling; this found expression through the national Methodist split of 1849/50, leading to the opening of what became the United Methodist Free Church, Zion, in 1855. The third case occurred in 1854, when the larger part of the congregation of Whitefield Tabernacle left and founded Kingswood Hill Congregational Church, following a dispute in which the Trustees (outsiders) overruled a majority decision of the members to call a particular minister. This secession followed hard upon the building of a new Tabernacle, completed in the same year. In each example, a local difference or trauma becomes encapsulated in a feature of local geography, a differentiation of local symbolic space. In the last case, the memory is contemporary and instructive. The new church founded, Kingswood Hill – now Kingswood Congregational – maintains its difference with Whitefield Tabernacle, and the action of the Trustees is still referred to. As we know, when Whitefield Tabernacle joined the United Reformed Church in 1974, Kingswood Congregational stayed independent. Local difference is maintained, and the outsiders are blamed: despite the loss of practically all historical detail, the pattern persists. From this example may be glimpsed the difficulties that national bodies experience when encountering local society. Local society is deeply nonconformist: it is hostile to any level of government or organisation that is higher than the local but, on the other hand, it is incapable because of local antagonisms of uniting in a sustained way to present a common face to outside authority. Hence, to recall an earlier example, ‘ecumenical’ projects founder first because outside authori-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 213

The Kingswood Whit Walk

213

ties fail to recognise local independence and are insensitive to local decisions, aspirations and values, and second because there is at a deep level a lack of reciprocity between local chapels and churches. It appears that once a split has emerged and has destroyed an activity, there is no way back. Reconciliation is out of the question, perhaps because conflict is so badly rated in local values that a quarrel or difference can never be admitted to or recognised as such, but only projected onto the other side or onto a third party. In this way, the succession of chapel splits exemplify in bricks and mortar a more general characteristic of local organisations: that there is a cycle of organisational life, a rise and fall of activities, that is repeated at many levels of local society and that is, in the last analysis, an expression of the values of respectability, with their double demand for precedence and restraint.

Notes 1. Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Clifford Slaughter, Coal is Our Life, London 1956, Clancy Sigal, Weekend in Dinlock, London 1960; cf. ‘Weekend in Dinlock: A Discussion’, New Left Review, May/June 1960. Among social historians, Gareth Stedman Jones’ account of the London poor (Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian London, Oxford 1971) stands almost alone. 2. Julian Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem, Cambridge 1977. Pitt-Rivers licenses this comparison for, introducing his original Spanish ethnography, he writes: ‘the whole book can be read as no more than an explication through an ethnographic example of Simmel’s great essay on secrecy and the lie’ (People of the Sierra (1954), Chicago 1971: xvi ). 3. See part IV for a further elaboration of the combination of fraternity and fissiparity, or of a universalistic tendency with a schismatic. 4. The examples in this chapter are drawn from the Kingswood edition of the New, then Bristol, Observer 1985 to 1987. The use of such materials points to debates concerning the place of ‘cultural’ values in the generation of delinquent or criminal behaviour: see W.B. Miller, ‘Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency’, Journal of Social Issues 14, 1958: 5-19, D. Matza and G.M. Sykes, ‘Juvenile delinquency and subterranean values’, American Sociological Review 26, 1961: 712-19, P .Cohen, ‘Subcultural conflict and working class community’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2, Spring 1972, J. Braithewaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Cambridge 1989, and C. Sumner, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary, London 1994. Braithewaite’s views are particularly interesting, as he points out that the same values can be generative or inhibitive of crime depending upon the context. 5. Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem: 36. 6. Group cohesion and solidarity – see M. Gluckman, ‘Gossip and scandal’, Current Anthropology 4, 1963: 307-16, and ‘Psychological, sociological, and anthropological explanations of witchcraft and gossip: clarification’, Man 3, 1968: 20-34; transactional negotiation – see R. Paine, ‘What is gossip about? An alternative hypothesis’, Man 2, 1967: 278-85, and ‘Gossip and transaction’, Man 3, 1968: 304-8; cf. S.E. Merry, ‘Rethinking gossip and scandal’, in D. Black (ed.), Towards a General Theory of Social Control, Orlando 1984, vol. 1: 271-302, and Parman’s

03-Part III

214

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 214

Religion in English Everyday Life unpublished thesis (1972), cited in M.Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture, London 1978: 203. Cf. R. Frankenberg, Village on the Border, London 1957: 20. Cf. Chapman, The Gaelic Vision: 204. Frankenberg, Village on the Border. As R. Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics, Cambridge 1974, points out; cf. M. Abélès, Quiet Days in Burgundy, Cambridge 1991 – a remarkable study of local politics in France, and in particular of the question of what makes a politician locally ‘electable’. Frankenberg, Village on the Border: 54. Ibid.: 54-55. Fred Moss, City Pit, Bristol 1986: 68-69. Frankenberg, Village on the Border: 56-57. Frankenberg, Village on the Border: passim. Cf. David Clark’s account of the working out of the formal Methodist Union of 1932 on the ground in Staithes (Yorkshire) – Between Pulpit and Pew. Folk Religion in a North Yorkshire Fishing Village, Cambridge 1982: 81-88.

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 215

7

IN CONCLUSION What is it like to live in Kingswood? At a first approximation, we might say that a local society is constructed through the interaction of three perspectives, through an ‘economy of fantasies’1 created between outsiders, a local élite and the bulk of the indigenous population, wherein each perspective employs the others as elements to play a part in the picture it creates. There is therefore no single homogenous social order that might be experienced and grasped, or perceived (as it were) at a glance, but only the interpenetration of incompatible interpretations, a complex structure of mutual misunderstanding. From the point of view of the individual, each person learns the inwardness of a particular form of understanding through the manipulation and exploitation of the resources at his (or her) disposal, and indeed can change perspective under certain circumstances. People develop in understanding and practical skill, and in so doing replace other persons in the complex social order and reproduce categories and structures. In this way, a social space is made up of innumerable apprenticeships of signs, of the endlessly repeated discovery and reinvention of the resources available in a particular historical configuration of human beings, a configuration that by its process of constitution is neither arbitrary nor fully determined. Given the nature of social space as described, there is an ever-present temptation to offer an ‘objective’ understanding of society, whether as an anthropologist or as an informant. In this understanding, the sign is attributed to the people that bear it, so that – for example – one might propose in principle to take a census and count those who are respectable and those who are not, or to distinguish those for whom the mother–daughter bond is more important than that between husband and wife, and then seek to explain mechanisms of recruitment and replacement. Pursuing this approach, one is bound to be disappointed, for people never live up to the potential they seem to embody, and cannot be taken for what is symbolised. In this perspec-

03-Part III

216

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 216

Religion in English Everyday Life

tive, too, the experience of social structure is always in terms of imminent change and loss, the vision of a world on the wane that will soon be gone. An anthropological approach must then avoid this temptation to be ‘objective’.2 In this respect, it is essentially of the same kind as any other practical understanding, for it must be constructed in its own context. In the case of what I have called ‘local particularity’, that context demands recognising the interdependence of anthropological and indigenous perspectives, for the anthropological gaze is part of the indigenous context: the experience of living locally cannot be separated from the (admittedly fitful) outside perception of that experience. This interaction is both simultaneous and of long duration, and we have fragmentary materials demonstrating its persistence. These materials raise the question of the nature of the persistence of such a society. Communities of the kind studied here were supposed to have disappeared at the same time as, for a variety of financial and political reasons,3 interest moved away from locally based research of the sort pioneered by the Institute of Community Studies. As has been suggested, their ‘disappearance’ from the literature was predictable along the lines of the intellectual assumptions underlying their ‘discovery’; at the same time, aspects of the local categories lent themselves to this particular structure of misrecognition: they have long existed behind the appearance of ‘being about to disappear’. This study claims that local particularity continues to exist, and that its existence has three interdependent components or vectors. It emerges in local history, in families or households, and in self-definition or ‘personality’.4 In each, different versions of the same patterns emerge, for people make sense of their lives – establishing continuities and coping with discontinuities – through a limited number of ordering devices that echo and support one another. In this way, the ‘historical’ account of ‘fiends transformed’ reappears on the one hand in the ordering of relations between the sexes, in the perception of the central place that women hold with respect to the family, as transformed and transforming, and of the men as peripheral, with a correspondingly greater degree of freedom of behaviour; and it is reproduced on the other hand in the values of respectability, where the state of ‘having been transformed’ is realised and its shadow cast upon others. In a similar fashion, the values of respectability can be read back upon family structure and upon accounts of local history, and so forth. Together, these constructions form a complex ordering of reality, a social space mapped onto a territory, a particular way of life. The complexes of values described are then mutually sustaining, so that this total framework ordering local space and time persists through partial realisations; the categories are actualised to differing

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 217

217

degrees according to varying conditions. It may be suggested, in this light, that these values organising ‘local society’ are far more widespread, and stable, than would be the case if it were supposed that values reflected specific social structures in any simple way. The local identity of Kingswood is the historically specific precipitation of the wider categories of respectability and family. The other way about, these categories are part of an ethnography of what it is to be British, which would have to include the fact of local particularity. These complexes of values permit continuities to be established and parallels to occur under different conditions; they constitute a part of ‘all that goes without saying’, which allows people to make sense of the ‘facts’ (demographic, economic, political and so forth) they encounter. In brief, the resources to cope with change are certain relatively simple basic patterns of behaviour and thought that are laid down (in historical configurations of people) and cannot easily be altered, though clearly they too have their own history. If it is true that much ethnography has been haunted by the image of loss and the project of salvage, the emphasis I suggest is not simply an inversion of this idea, proposing a structure without history; rather, it is to remark that change itself has an order to it, and that this order may be part of the experience of a place. The Kingswood example is, then, an unusually complete realisation of the values in question. At each level in this case, local society is defined and defines itself in opposition to another, be it to the wider society or to those who are rejected within the local camp. The existence and force of local particularity is therefore seen most clearly in the institutions and figures that epitomise respectability, for these are the points at which resistance to outside assimilation or redefinition is at its extreme, just as here too is the maximum distance from the feckless element. These are the focuses of local society, where particularities – definitions, anomalies, events – are at their most intense. Through a consideration of local particularity, we have described not simply the respectable and the institutions of respectability, but have been able also to generate all the ‘actors’ that appear in the Walk: the congregations marching and their leaders, both notables and gerontocrats; the families that are affiliated to the chapels and who make up the floats, the bands and the uniformed organisations, following behind; the families – both respectable and less so – who watch from the pavements; the groups of disordered youths and the social outcasts, who resemble distorted reflections of, respectively, the youths marching in their uniforms, and the stewards, banner bearers and elders at the head of the procession. At the same time, it has been possible to gain a better understanding of the significance of the Walk, to account for the evidence it offers and

03-Part III

218

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 218

Religion in English Everyday Life

the puzzles it raises. The Walk, to the informed eye, signals a number of topics or continuities, among them the particular importance of the family, the place of women, the pervading and compelling notion of respectability, and the enduring consequences of certain conflicts. Taking each briefly in turn: those who march and those who watch are defined through their families, both being associated with particular districts of the area and allied to particular congregations by means of them. The Walk is a rhythmical and spatial process whereby congregations representing each district, made up of families from that district, come together in a greater body to represent the whole area, which then disperses again into its constituent units of territory-and-family. Then, the paramount importance of the family – and the consequent patterns of residence and participation – is in the end an expression of the organisation of social continuity through the women, who form in this way the backbone of the Walk. The succession of women propagates the values of the family, which in turn women above all embody; they are the key therefore both to the institution of the family, and that of the congregation, and to the construction of local space. Moreover, the continuities established in this way also accommodate an array of symptoms that appear to indicate the breakdown of local society, such as male fecklessness, illegitimacy and divorce on the one hand and, on the other, the presence of alternative models of the (‘modern’) family. The variety of possible human stories that is displayed on the occasion of the Walk is in some sense permitted by, and given some coherence through, this female nexus. This range of human variation provides the raw material with which the values of respectability work. They not only appear in the lives of the families of Kingswood and of the individuals composing them but, as we know, shape the workings of the local chapels, their organisations and their committees. The opposition between the respectable and the unrespectable in a sense pervades the whole Walk. It appears in a pronounced form in the proclamation made by the congregation to the crowd, and in the possibility of conversion the former embody; and is manifested less abruptly within the ranks of the respectable, in the more or less subtle distinctions of enthusiasm between congregations, and in the calculus of degrees of participation performed by marchers and spectators alike, in particular through the involvement of the women and the children. This opposition also accounts for the vastly differing repertoires of behaviour allowed different persons present, which cover every aspect of life, from the posture of the body to the company kept, and which shape (beyond the moment of the Walk) the trajectory of each life as a whole. The opposition also underwrites matters of reputation, which are finely calculated and expressed in making distinctions, ordering prior-

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

The Kingswood Whit Walk

Page 219

219

ities and coping with conflict, and which appear in the fine orderings of the Walk. These matters, at the same time, through the interplay of interpretations, generate the unintended consequences comprising much of the substance of social behaviour in both formal and informal settings, public and private life, and which likewise may be read in many aspects of the Walk. Among these silently competing interpretations, the differences distinguishing notables and congregations have a special place, in part because they are the point where negotiation takes place between local life and an outside gaze, and in part because upon occasion they leave behind them permanent monuments, containing traces of the strategies and values that have been our concern, hinting at their longevity. The route of the Walk in this way indicates the complex nature of the continuity at work, for the underlying values in question are expressed in discontinuities, in the events of local history. In this, the route is exemplary: the various continuities embodied in the Walk demonstrate, at a level deeper than that of difference and separation, an interdependence of the constituent parts, a common identity that defines a local polity, which is expressed in the facts of mobilisation and display, as well as in the sense of appropriateness and historical continuity felt by those who participate. Indeed, all the factors evoked in the previous paragraphs have their place in an account of local identity. Because this is so, in the Whit Walk we are dealing with what Mauss calls a ‘total social fact’. He defines this idea as follows: ‘In these … societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the fabric is composed. In these total social phenomena … all kinds of institutions find simultaneous expression: religious, legal, moral and economic. In addition, these phenomena have their aesthetic aspect and they reveal morphological types’.5 Though Mauss wrote this of ‘archaic’ societies, his criteria hold good here. In the Whit Walk, religious institutions (or values, as we might prefer to call them) are present, for conversion and membership are clearly expressed. Membership of such voluntary organisations has a quasi-legal status, for it concerns individual and collective rights. Moral values and orderings are displayed in a complete and convincing way; as are economic values, conceptions and status. Social morphology is exhibited, for everything that happens presupposes the longer-term existence of both families and wider groupings, and the aesthetic element is present in the dramatic display, the banners paraded and the performance of the bands. In short, in the Whit Walk, we are dealing with the totality of a local society; adopting Mauss’s words, we can say: ‘It is only by considering it as a whole that we have been able to see its essence, its operation and its living aspect, and to catch the fleeting moment when the

03-Part III

1/21/09

4:29 PM

Page 220

220

Religion in English Everyday Life

society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards others’.6

Notes 1. ‘Economy of fantasies’ – see part II. 2. A compensatory temptation must also be resisted, to seize upon signs as if their embodiment were incidental, or as if they were independent of the people who (re)invent, deploy and so reproduce them. In this perspective, change ceases to be an issue at all, or else becomes a feature of systems of signs that exist, quite independently of the population, in their own sphere. (Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge 1977). 3 Peter Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, in M. Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, Cambridge 1985: 148. 4 These components correspond to a degree to long-, medium- and short-term periodisations; cf. Kirsten Hastrup’s useful discussion of ‘long term structures’, ‘key notes’ and ‘self definitions’, in ‘Studying a remote island’, in Hastrup, Island of Anthropology. Studies in Icelandic past and present, Odense 1990. 5 Marcel Mauss, The Gift (1925), 1970: 1. It should be noted that a ‘total social fact’ cannot be reduced to a metaphor that somehow organises and ‘explains’ a society. The distinction needs to be made in the face of the introduction of certain literarycritical techniques into ethnography (e.g. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York 1973). 6 Mauss, The Gift: 77-8.

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 221

PART IV: SECRETS OF THE SPIRIT WORLD

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, To report the behaviour of the sea monster, Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry, Observe disease in signatures, evoke Biography from the wrinkles of the palm And tragedy from fingers; release omens By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams Or barbituric acids, or dissect The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors – To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press: And always will be, some of them especially When there is distress of nations and perplexity Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgeware Road. T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 222

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 223

SECRETS OF THE SPIRIT WORLD I Some recent studies in social history and anthropology1 have taken an interest in the moral aspects of occult knowledge, and have shown continuities to exist between such exotic or secret practices within English life as spiritualism and witchcraft, and the concerns of the wider society. This chapter investigates that common basis in terms of an epistemology or cosmology rather than through an anthropological or historical case study, although the matter came to my attention as a puzzle posed in a specific social context, in Bristol.

II The district of East Bristol and Kingswood is urban and industrial, and the population is predominantly working or lower-middle class, with an élite consisting of skilled workers and self-employed men. In this milieu, there is a spectrum of ways of ‘making sense’ of life, a spectrum that includes socialism, various forms of Nonconformity, Methodism, Pentecostalism, unorthodox healing practices and spiritualism. What is remarkable to an outsider is that any permutation or combination of these practices is possible. One might expect to find a Methodist who is also a socialist, for these approaches share certain common ethical strands, but in this world, a trade unionist and socialist may also be a spiritualist, although one might have supposed there to be a conflict between an essentially materialistic approach and an immaterial one; Methodists and Nonconformists take to Pentecostalism and healing, although these informal and unorthodox practices fit uneasily with the declared doctrines of the various denominations; spiritualists too are engaged with healing practices, despite the lack of contact one might expect between disembodied spirits on the one hand and the

04-Part IV

1/21/09

224

4:30 PM

Page 224

Religion in English Everyday Life

body and its ills on the other; and so forth. This quality of permutation between apparently heterogeneous or even incompatible practices constitutes a puzzle, and raises the question of whether they have a common basis. The situation is by no means new, nor unique to Kingswood. In a recent book concerning the history of working-class involvement with spiritualism in the second half of the nineteenth century, Logie Barrow2 sketches out a process whereby certain practices concerned with healing became differentiated from others and were privileged. In particular, he describes how an exclusive legal status was established for medicine (and later, for psychiatry, as a branch of medicine), and how a number of other healing practices were ‘excluded’ or left ‘in opposition’. These included mesmerism, spiritualism, spiritual healing, phrenology, herbalism and vegetarianism. All these latter practices appear to be of late eighteenth or early nineteenth century origin, at least in the forms we know them, and they never had the potential, I believe, to equal the achievements of modern medicine. Nevertheless, it is worth noting (following Barrow) that the legal status of medicine was established before what might be called its pragmatic success was the rule; medicine was an orthodoxy at the beginning as much by virtue of its legal definition as by its scientific protocols or procedures, which it developed on its patients. These ‘unorthodox’ or ‘alternative’ practices that Barrow identifies therefore developed within the same general intellectual framework as early medical science, in particular sharing the following three characteristics. They claimed to have scientific status, drawing upon the vocabulary of the physical sciences of the time; they looked to education as the means of enlightenment and of spreading the truth, and they were ‘democratic’ in the sense that they held knowledge to be open to and available to all. In retrospect, perhaps especially by virtue of the last characteristic, they can be seen to have been caught up in the web of appeals to immediate experience, premature generalisations and imponderable universals which I shall subsequently identify as characterising the ‘epistemological obstacles’ that hinder the development of scientific or critical thinking. Yet by these same characteristics they form part of what Barrow calls a ‘plebeian’ culture: they are linked to Nonconformity, Methodism and socialism by their common origin in a working-class élite, and by their shared concern with the problems of self-definition, self-education and the control of man’s destiny (even with his salvation and the explanation of suffering). In this milieu, confrontation with ‘orthodox’ structures (be they of science, medicine, education, the Church or the State) is a central feature of the process of self-definition, and has served to protect from questioning the noncumulative nature of these ‘alternative sciences’,

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 225

Secrets of the Spirit World

225

and the nonfalsifiable nature of their utopias and universals. Moreover, the lack of cumulative theory and of revisable explanatory schemata, and the multiplicity of totalising universal concepts, has been matched by the inability of the groups (despite overlapping membership) to coordinate themselves and to form structured organisations; the divisive tendency towards denunciation has always proved stronger in practice than the rather vague countervailing tendency towards universalism. This outline of Barrow’s provides a key to a common pattern in the practices in Kingswood. On the one hand, they combine an appeal to individual testimony and experience with an appeal to the most abstract and universal principles, such as Human Goodness, the Spirit World, Biblical Revelation or the Will of God. On the other hand, in the name of these universal principles, groups and individuals reject one another, and deny the validity of another’s experience. For example, many socialists are scornful of Christian claims and the hypocrisy of believers. Many Christians distrust those who practise healing; others practise healing, but utterly reject the healing of the spiritualists. Pentecostalists are only the latest of the religious groups to be notorious for their schisms and divisions. Yet all these practices are deeply embedded in a particular part of contemporary society (for all their appeals beyond time and space), and all are concerned with such matters as the explanation and control of suffering, companionship and reassurance, and the claims of respectability. The theme common to all these practices is what I call ‘secrets of the spirit world’, or a concern with what Barrow calls ‘imponderables’. Spirits may take on a highly ethereal form, or a highly materialist one, as in the phrase – quoted from Keir Hardy – ‘the unseen forces that make for progress’.3 The way of thinking with which we are concerned is more widespread than might at first have been suspected.

III Each of the unorthodox groups in question possesses its own secret, its own central and – to itself – undeniable, universal truth. Yet the notion of secrecy is a curious one, and the concept of ‘the secret’ as such needs a theory. Whilst the holders of a secret are obsessed with what they know, the truth to which they have been called, and with the reasons for secrecy, there are other matters to be considered. What is concealed, and the reasons for its concealment, serve to distract attention from the dynamic of the secret: what at first sight appears to be static and indeed dead, possessed by and known to only a few, kept in some dark place, in fact has a life and movement of its own. A secret

04-Part IV

1/21/09

226

4:30 PM

Page 226

Religion in English Everyday Life

is a social relation, dividing those who know its content from those who do not, to whom it is imperceptible. But matters are more complicated than that. On the one hand, the secret is always being broken, passed on, glimpsed or overheard, so that what has been imperceptible to a person is perceived. Yet the secret is not ‘out’ on that account, or finished; a secret betrayed, discovered or shared is still a secret perception, one that in its turn aims to be imperceptible. The person who has surprised the secret has his (or her) own reasons for keeping what they have learnt secret. Secrecy therefore propagates itself through a structure of secret and betrayal. People can only be let in on a secret; it does not by that token become common knowledge, even if, in the extreme case, everybody knows it: the secret is quite a different sort of knowledge to common knowledge or common sense. The secret therefore remains dark whilst it moves outward; it has the property of contagion or insinuation, for it retains its secrecy despite, or even through, being divulged. A secret imposes itself and spreads through betrayal. On the other hand, a secret is not simple, even when you are ‘in’ on it. For there are secrets within secrets; there is a movement inwards, as if to compensate for the propagative move outwards, a concentration as it were of secrecy. Even when you have been let into the secret, things are not what they seem: there is more to know, there is an inner council, or deeper knowledge to be obtained. There is a continual deferring of the moment of truth, a movement all the time towards the imperceptible, a seductive movement in that the rules may change during the course of the game. So there are two principles at work within the secret, which we may call (i) the propagation of the secret, or the secret perception of the secret, and (ii) secrets within secrets. While there is much more that could be said upon the subject,4 these elementary points serve to define a major problem in any consideration of what are termed ‘occult’ and ‘psychic’ phenomena. These phenomena, which lie at one extreme of the spectrum we are considering, are not easily characterised except by their secret quality: on the one hand, they are personal, private ‘experiences’ and are not amenable to common sense; on the other, there are problems of contagion or seduction, of being drawn in. Therefore any interested person or investigator has an acute problem in distinguishing understanding from participation. This indeed imparts a distinctive flavour to writings upon occult subjects; practically every such book, from whatever angle it is written, contains a ‘warning to the curious’: curiosity leads to vulnerability; learning involves the learner in secrets, and understanding is associated with the struggle for mastery and power. This is a twilight world, where there is no disinterested knowledge, and where the notion of objectivity or of a scholarly interest is a lure and a deceit.

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 227

Secrets of the Spirit World

227

In order to act responsibly in such a world, we need what might be called a strategy, a way of conducting oneself. A book entitled Deliverance, produced by the Christian Exorcism Study Group and edited by Michael Perry,5 offers an example of such a strategy, proposing a view of how the world is (at least in part) and a way of acting in it. The book is cautious, unsensational and intelligent. Its particular interest is that it is representative of a more widely spread way of thinking. It shares an approach and presuppositions that are to be found in a vast range of writings and practices, including healing, spiritualism, alchemy, astrology and fortune-telling. Many if not all these are concerned with informal ways of coping with misfortune and discontinuity; they attempt to explain suffering and offer to control or mitigate man’s destiny, they share certain strategies and, perhaps most importantly, they share a popular view of the nature of matter. They are, fundamentally, modern cosmologies. Indeed, as we shall see, the field spreads far wider than is implied simply by reference to ‘occult’ practices, and the notion of ‘the secret’ is transformed.

IV In 1985, I attended a conference held in Cambridge on exorcism at which the two principal speakers were a priest and a doctor, both members of the Christian Exorcism Study Group. In the course of their excellent outline of the topic, it emerged that the priest (an exorcist) doubted whether he had ever encountered anything that could not be called ‘psychological’ in origin, whilst the doctor (a psychiatrist) insisted that certain phenomena must be judged to be ‘demonic’ in origin. Whilst noting in passing that, in our society, the ignorance of doctors certainly carries more weight than the ignorance of priests, the important point is that both insisted on referring the phenomena in question to a region outside their field of competence. Two reinforcing attitudes appear in this strategy, therefore: first, reference to a residue, which remains after a process of classification (within one’s competence) has been completed, and second, an acceptance of what (following Barrow) I shall call imponderables, for the fact that we do not know, or cannot possibly know, is held up as some sort of reassurance, an indication of the truth of the phenomena under consideration rather than an incitement to scepticism. There is therefore a coupling together of a markedly ‘scientific’ approach (classification) with an acknowledged lack of causal explanation, and the two reinforce, rather than contradict or undermine, each other. This characteristic of uncertainty or ignorance lending power of conviction rather than otherwise is most important, and should be underlined as it is the reverse of what might be expected.

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 228

228

Religion in English Everyday Life

The same strategy is presented in more detail in the book Deliverance, with a clarity which derives from the book’s being at the same time a reflection upon and an example of this kind of thinking. The aim of the book is to offer a classification of occult and psychic phenomena, so as ‘to bring some sort of order out of the mêlée of possible kinds of disturbance’.6 After initial clarification and advice, the book considers in turn ‘poltergeists’, ‘‘ghosts’ and place memories’, ‘occultism, witchcraft and Satanism; sects and cults’, ‘possession syndrome’ and ‘possession and exorcism’. In this procedure of classification, there is a certain concern with definition (see, for example, the discussion of the terms ‘occult’, ‘psychic’, ‘spiritual’ and ‘magic (black and white)’7), and there is a movement from the simpler phenomena to the more complex (for instance, ‘always go for the simplest answer that will explain what is going on’8). There is therefore a progression, a counting-out of possibilities until a residue is reached, a residue of demonic possession: ‘when all the foregoing cases of possession syndrome or pseudo possession have been described, there is still a residue of cases where the only remaining diagnosis is the activity of an evil spirit …’9 The method of seeking residues is an ambiguous one. On the one hand, it is undoubtedly associated with the establishment of a scientific ‘method’, and further is perceived by participants as an attack upon the integrity of the experience of imponderables, as denaturing the believers’ world. Barrow points out that the method of residues was used by the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s, and had already been used thirty years before that in relation to mesmerism.10 Yet, on the other hand, the method of residues (and therefore the book Deliverance) shares an aspect of the structure of a secret. The progression of the process of classification corresponds to the secret’s deepening within itself, its power of concentration. Attracted by the order and reassured by the ‘rational’ explanation of such phenomena as poltergeists, place memories and so forth (for example, concerning the first of these: ‘exorcism is not appropriate, because there is no evil spirit to be cast out’11), the reader is led to the imponderable residue. As we shall see, there is not a sudden discontinuity between the earlier categories and the residue; they all rely upon the same underlying schema.

V The classification Perry employs is a hybrid, combining scriptural and traditional Christian elements with secular, scientific ones. Taking the former elements first, the structure of the classification combines a fundamental dualism with a continuity; in other words, it contains the double possibility of opposition and universalism. On the one hand, we

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Secrets of the Spirit World

Page 229

229

are told in the first paragraph of the Preface that ‘the devil’s work is manifold, and not all of it is obvious. The occult is but a small part of his empire…’12 On the other hand, in an Appendix we read that ‘if we believe in the existence of God and of Satan and of human beings (both incarnate in this world and disincarnate or reembodied in another form in another world or worlds), there is no reason in logic why there should not be a great Chain of Being which includes all sorts of creatures and spiritual beings like angels and demons, and why some of them should not show allegiance to God and work for good, while others of them belong to Satan and influence us to do evil’.13 The function of the system of classification is, as I have suggested, to discern where the evil spirits are, and also to fight superstition, in other words, to discern where evil spirits are supposed to be but are not (‘not everything that is popularly described as ‘the occult’ is properly so called’14). The task of classification is to sort out the residue of inexplicable cases which must, since they cannot be explained any other way, be attributed to evil spirits or to the devil. We are concerned with imponderables, demons or spirits outside other (scientific, medical or psychological) systems of explanation: a devil of the gaps. This abstract, general system of classification brings with it a guarantee of the reality of the phenomena that it classifies. In other words, if we have eliminated all other explanations, what remains must really be evil spirits, as real as the other conditions that have been considered and discarded. The system acts as a guarantor of the truth of that in which it deals. Because of this function, considerable care must be taken in choosing the criteria of elimination, in guarding against the threats of credulity or superstition on the one hand, and scepticism on the other. It is this need for care that sets the tone, for example, in a fastidious appended discussion of ‘the demonic and exorcism in the Bible’, where the question is raised of the translation of Isaiah 34:14. Is the verse to be translated ‘The satyr shall cry to his fellow’ (Revised Standard Version, following the King James Bible), or, less mysteriously, ‘he-goat shall encounter he-goat’ (New English Bible)? And are we, in the subsequent line, dealing with ‘the night hag’ (supernatural) or ‘the nightjar’ (natural)? Yet the question of meaning is not simply a textual one (was there a primitive belief in demons, or is this a way of evoking atmosphere? etc.) for, once made, a translation has a life of its own, an autonomy from the original. For instance, the line ‘the satyr shall cry to his fellow’ provides the keynote to one of M.R. James’s highly effective stories, ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’.15 In that context, it is no use substituting ‘he-goat shall encounter he-goat’. The question of what the verse ‘really’ means is not the whole question, for it means what it means in its context. But this approach would bring into question the entire idea of a classification existing outside any context as a positive set of given truths.

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 230

230

Religion in English Everyday Life

VI In fact, the general system of classification employed by Perry is coupled with a series of individual case studies, and an appeal is made explicitly to an ‘empirical’ approach. The value of this approach needs to be assessed carefully. On the one hand, Perry outlines an investigative procedure: ‘treat every approach made to you seriously and listen with attentive care … Investigate, as far as possible, the social, family, medical and spiritual background of all concerned … Make careful notes of the case. A comparison of these with what is said or done at a later stage may well reveal troubles and tensions not openly expressed’.16 The investigator has to attempt to reconstruct the interpretative framework which permits, or is present in, the experience of the event. On the other hand, this empirical approach is undermined by an appeal to immediate experience, in a way that complements the appeal to a positive, context-free classification. This appeal is implied in the idea of ‘the only remaining diagnosis’ (with reference to the residue), a combination of seeming common sense and omniscience. Moreover, it is clearly stated, in this form: ‘experience is sacred, interpretation is free’.17 It might be objected, in defence of the investigative procedure, that there cannot be experience without interpretation. The effect of the appeal to immediate experience is, however, to bypass all the careful, empirical investigation and to allow the confirmation of the positive classification we have outlined, a picture with its own criteria, definitions and explanations. This move is made in the name of the proper concern of taking people in trouble seriously, for Perry’s book has a practical, pastoral focus.18 Yet one cannot make what I will call a critical understanding hostage to such a concern, nor is there any call to do so. A critical understanding is constructed against initial or immediate experience, for the appeal to immediate experience goes hand in hand with a view of reality that quite obscures the complexities of living in the world. There is a problem of scale in the kind of systems we are considering, in which vast general schemata are coupled with appeals to individual experience. Whereas, any critical understanding includes some estimate of the limits of its own applicability: it lies between too large generalisation on the one hand, and particular case studies on the other, for its knowledge is constructed, not intuited. Be that as it may, a certain scientific language has an important place in the strategy we are considering, though, as we shall see, it is drawn from a particular era of scientific thought. This language emerges in particular in Perry’s early chapters, where some causal explanations are offered. Concerning poltergeists we are told:

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Secrets of the Spirit World

Page 231

231

it seems as if the phenomena are produced by some form of psycho kinetic energy produced and programmed by the deep unconscious mind of the poltergeist ‘owner’ … The mental or emotional or psychic stress seems to focus at one point and there becomes transformed into physical energy which is manifested in terms of noises or the movement of objects or the malfunctioning of electronic equipment.19

Again, concerning ‘place memories’, we read that ‘it could be postulated that what is happening is that one person is, as it were, on the correct ‘frequency’ to pick up the ‘vibrations’ of memory (the terms are used purely by analogy …). He then retransmits the memory as he perceives it, by some form of psychological or telepathic contagion, so that the bystanders also experience disturbing phenomena of the same general type, but differing in perceived detail’.20 These explanations are offered tentatively: ‘the explanation offered … is only speculation. The reader for whom the psycho-kinetic transformation of emotional energy into physical energy is not on his list of acceptable possibilities will have to make his own explanation …’21 And likewise, ‘the above explanation is an attempt at rationalising what is perceived in such a case. Those who cannot accept the explanation are asked to believe the phenomenon occurs – as witness the cases which will follow in this chapter – and are invited to work out explanations of them which will fit in with their belief systems. Once more, experience is sacred, interpretation is free’.22 Yet it is hard to see that a completely different system of explanation would leave the phenomenon or the experience intact. The choice of this scientific vocabulary has a purpose; it is not arbitrary, but brings with it a certain set of possibilities, of possible perceptions and possible outcomes. First, such a ‘scientific’ vocabulary produces an effect of distance: it separates the serious student from the merely superstitious or simply primitive,23 and it sets the investigator apart from the client, guarding against credulity or too hasty an analysis. In doing this, it reinforces the effects of the work of classification. Second, the language used echoes early nineteenth-century scientific jargon, and brings with it a particular view of the nature of matter. This is most important. Barrow points out that throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, there was widespread confusion as to the fundamental nature of matter. The most relevant aspect of this confusion for us was over the existence of various forces which were not physically traceable except by their supposed effects,24 in other words, the existence of ‘imponderables’, phenomena that could not by their nature be tied down or examined. The discussion of the nature of matter included its amenability to, or penetrability by, Spirit, or spirit, or spirits, and when applied to human beings, led to reflections upon personal experience of health and illness. For example,

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 232

232

Religion in English Everyday Life

Newton had written of ‘a very subtle spirit (i.e. fluid) … pervad(ing) solid bodies’, binding them together, lying at the root of electricity and of heat, and facilitating all biological processes.25 The legacy of popular speculation upon Newtonianism seems to have included (i) a belief in the porous nature of matter, (ii) a belief that bodies could act upon one another at a distance, through one or several immaterial but active ‘aethers’, and (iii) development or speculation concerning these imponderables. Popular science generated imponderables, particularly after the example of electricity, each theory postulating its own subtle force or fluid, often conceived of as permeating the universe, and with the quality of penetrating bodies. This particular form of the dualism of matter and spirit (or aether) is therefore quite modern; it is also extremely widespread. The view of, on the one hand, porous or penetrable matter and, on the other, imponderable spirit links the causal language of Deliverance to such occult sciences as mesmerism, clairvoyance and phrenology, among others. It also provides the continuity that links all the kinds of phenomena discussed in Deliverance: the imponderable process of the conversion or retransmission of psychic energy into kinetic energy, and the danger of penetration by evil spirits both lie within this perspective.26 I want to suggest that, to the modern user, this language of causality makes sense in terms of a cosmology of porous matter and imponderable aether. It is this cosmological category which permits a whole range of practices to make sense as a part of the modern world. These practices are not then survivals or remnants, but potential and actual, available for all to call upon and to take part in, by virtue of this underlying, largely unquestioned, widely shared popular view of the nature of matter.

VII The language that this strategy draws upon, and the modes of thought it implies, have been studied by Gaston Bachelard, who examines the obstacles such a way of thinking has put in the path of the development of scientific thought. His work is of considerable interest, both in its own right and because it serves to underline the patterns already discerned. In his own terms, Bachelard studies the scientific language of the earlier period less from the point of view of a historian than from that of an ‘epistemologist’, discussing historical phenomena from ground subsequently achieved: ‘It seems to me that the epistemologist – who in this respect differs from the historian – must emphasise the productive ideas from amongst all the knowledge of a period’.27

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Secrets of the Spirit World

Page 233

233

Bachelard makes this distinction because he believes (and as we have already suggested) that the creation of scientific concepts arises in making a break with immediate experience. The appeal to immediate experience, he argues, is coupled with the habit of generalising from first observations. We are back on familiar ground. The appeal to experience therefore reinforces a tissue or web of intuitions, that is apparently independent of any context and investigating community, and in so doing justifies a static and closed system of knowledge. Such knowledge, in distinction to scientific knowledge, is noncumulative, for nothing could constitute disproof, or lead to a revision of theory. An unchallengeable general ‘theory’ is coupled with specific appeals to individual experience, testimony or case studies, which in turn vindicate the general theory. By contrast, scientific theories are or should be ‘the grouping of successive well-ordered approximations’.28 In these unscientific theories, the impulse to generalise develops according to certain ‘rules’ which Bachelard identifies: among them, the tendency to classify, the development of theory through the analysis of particular images, and the appeal to general principles. The first allows the association of heterogeneous concepts and the ‘reading’ of observations according to the system, even to the extent of generating phenomena by filling in gaps in the classificatory grid; the second permits the elaboration of explanations by drawing out the hidden content of the image without reference to its context or setting; and the third invokes for the purposes of ‘explanation’ some unexamined principle that is unknowable or imponderable, such as the Unity of Nature, or the utility of natural phenomena, or the properties of ‘matter’. The appeal to the Unity of Nature appears in Perry in the ‘Great Chain of Being’, which unites all sorts of creatures and spiritual beings in a scale of perfection and completeness, and the utility of natural phenomena underlies the homeostatic theory that ‘health and wholeness’ is what God wills for all creation.29 Such grand, unitary hypotheses go far beyond experience and lie beyond contradiction, and they sit easily with the complementary claim that the designs of God are hidden. There is assumed to be an analogy (the mechanism of whose workings is unknown) between the vast unitary principle on the one hand and the empirical on the other, between the macrocosm and the microcosm, so that the health and wholeness intended for creation is to be reflected in each of its parts. Indeed, the view that the properties of ‘matter’ ‘explain’ the phenomena associated with it is widespread and largely unquestioned. ‘Matter’ is attributed all sorts of heterogeneous properties, superficial and deep, manifest and hidden, and one quality is always ‘proved’ by reference to another. An example of this kind of thinking is found in the appeal to Scripture, which is supposed to be sufficient unto itself,

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 234

234

Religion in English Everyday Life

possessing of itself all necessary guidance, truth and authority on the matters under consideration. Thus the first two sentences of Deliverance read: ‘The first letter of John (3:8) tells us that the Son of God appeared for the very purpose of undoing the devil’s work. We believe that the Church exists for the same reason’.30 No other justification is needed; one need only refer to the intrinsic properties of Scripture. The discussion of the translation of Isaiah 34:14, mentioned above, hints at the same ‘realist’ point of view: it is desirable to find out what the word really means in the Bible, for that is what it means for us too. In brief, a ‘formless’ theory, often claiming very wide or even universal relevance, is developed along with an appeal to experience or ‘the facts’. Secrecy is still at work, in the imponderable truths that lie at the heart of the claims made, in what may be called a generalised a priori form, the secret in which the members share: an imperceptible absolute.31 The claims made by these theories concern subjects of the utmost importance: they are claims made as to the nature of man, his materiality and his destiny. They also offer the possibility of some sort of explanation of suffering and of control of a person’s destiny, healing and even salvation. Such claims are in theory of universal application, and there is a strong tendency to include all men in some form of universal brotherhood. Yet, at the same time, the spreading of the secret is effectively synonymous with its betrayal, through dilution, distortion, ill-will and so forth. There is therefore also a strong countervailing tendency to perceive enemies who might steal the secrets, or counterfeit them, or betray them, a tendency to identify and denounce plots, schisms and treachery. Deleuze calls this combination of a strong universalist (or proselytic) tendency with a strong divisive (or denunciatory) tendency the ‘virile paranoiac’ form of the secret. It is a widespread form, characterising not only the occult sciences, but also the history of such movements as Nonconformist religion, Methodism and socialism. Each sect represents an unofficial or ‘unorthodox’ attempt to explain and control man’s place in the world, and each is more often than not preoccupied in practice with the denunciation of official or ‘orthodox’ incompetence or illwill on the one hand, and with betrayal or counterfeiting by rival sects and the identification of internal schisms on the other. Though the field of its activity has widened, the dynamic of the secret persists.32

VIII Three points have emerged from this discussion. First, the various social practices which first drew my attention in Kingswood share the same cosmological or epistemological presuppositions. Their compat-

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 235

Secrets of the Spirit World

235

ibility or possibility of permutation lies in the unacknowledged, shared framework of the ‘theory’ of the nature of matter that we have identified, the connected notions of imponderables and the penetrability of matter. This framework links all the various attempts to explain and control man’s place in the world that we have touched upon, however they are labelled (medical, religious, political, occult, et cetera). Second, I have delineated the importance and the working of ‘the secret’ in these ways of comprehending the world. The people involved experience secrets, that are identified as the Spirit, or spirits, or psychic energy, or for that matter, the People’s spontaneous energy, and that work by infilling or by penetration, by influences or by ideology. The actions of these imponderables are imperceptible, only their effects can be perceived or, more likely, anticipated, foreseen and forestalled. The secret takes on a completely generalised form in these groups, in the end without a content, or imponderable, and ceaselessly being reproduced through its anticipated betrayal, in the paranoia and divisiveness of the groups. In the case of Kingswood, the values of respectability may be interpreted in the light of this analysis as expressing, particularly in their extreme manifestations, the play of distinction for its own sake. Third, although the framework outlined is widespread and extremely powerful in its capacity to incorporate material in its interpretations, I have suggested an alternative approach: it is possible to develop critical concepts of limited application that situate the phenomena under investigation in their wider, social context; to ask what the activities in question – spiritualism, occult knowledge in various forms and so forth – might be seeking to achieve in their own terms. I am advocating a change in emphasis, from natural or supernatural phenomena to social practices, and in that perspective, suggesting that the occult sciences should be considered as part of a larger set of practices that attempt to understand and control man’s place in the world. In doing so, we return to the discussion outlined in part I, and the questions of method with which we began.

Notes 1. Vida Skultans, Intimacy and Ritual, London 1974, Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits, London 1986, Tanya Luhrman, ‘Witchcraft, morality and magic in contemporary London’, International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 1 (1), 1986: 77-94, and Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic and Witchcraft in Present-day England, Oxford 1989. 2. L. Barrow, Independent Spirits. 3. See Barrow, Ibid.: 112. 4. For the above, and for a development of the discussion, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris 1980: 351ff., and Georg Simmel, ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’ (1908), in Kurt Wolff (tr. and ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Illinois 1950.

04-Part IV

1/21/09

236 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

4:30 PM

Page 236

Religion in English Everyday Life Michael Perry, Deliverance, London 1987. Ibid.: 3. Ibid.: 44-5. Ibid.: 8. Ibid.: 82. Barrow, Independent Spirits: 143-4, 91ff. Perry, Deliverance: 25. Ibid.: xi. Ibid.: 104. Ibid.: xi. M.R. James, The Collected Ghost Stories, London 1964: 426. Perry, Deliverance: 4-5. Ibid.: 29. Although the strategy adopted by Deliverance to all effects and purposes reproduces the strategies of those practices with which it is concerned, it is not clear that there is an alternative or ‘better’ one to be adopted with respect to the case studies recounted. Indeed, the strength of the position advanced in Deliverance is that it repeats the fundamental presuppositions of those involved and permits the articulation of new possibilities upon the basis of the actors’ perceptions. It is hard to see how else, practically speaking, hope may be given to people. Thus there is no suggestion being made either that the phenomena under consideration are in any sense nonexistent or bogus, or that the strategy adopted is pastorally mistaken. Perry, Deliverance: 17. Ibid.: 29. Ibid.: 17. Ibid.: 29. Cf. ibid.: 70,79. Barrow, Independent Spirits: 67. Ibid.: 74. Parallel material could easily be produced for the diffuse field of healing; here the language of causality also depends upon a theory of the penetration of imponderable spirit into porous matter. A typical pamphlet (David Howell, The Armour of God, [Crowhurst n.d.]) speaks of our need to defend our bodies by prayer, and of the capability we have of ordering feelings of oppression (and worse) to leave us, and of asking that the gap be filled with the Holy Spirit. The whole discussion is in terms of protection, penetration, expulsion and infilling. Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l’esprit scientifique, Paris 1938: 11. Ibid.: 61. Perry, Deliverance: 104. Ibid.: xi. Bachelard concludes his survey of the obstacles to the development of scientific thought by attempting to show where the pleasure lies in the ‘realist psychology’ which he has delineated. He describes a psychology of miserliness, of the concentration and distillation of the ‘essential properties’ of matter, and suggests a certain pleasure in the possession of knowledge as property, of static knowledge experienced and enjoyed. He notes, too, that there are connotations of sexual pleasure in the notion of possessing secrets and in the language of purification and preparation, of initiation and seduction, of penetration and being penetrated, and of mastery and control. Dominique Lecourt (Marxism and Epistemology, London 1975: 140) cautions against Bachelard’s resorting to the libido of scientists to explain the constitution of epistemological obstacles, as being insufficiently ‘historical’; nevertheless, it is surely right to raise the question of the pleasure, or compulsion, inherent in such ways of thinking.

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Secrets of the Spirit World

Page 237

237

32. Indeed, imponderables are a feature not only of plebeian worlds, but also of the history of academic disciplines. To cite two philosophical examples, Putnam, following Wittgenstein, criticises what he terms an essentially ‘magical’ view of reference: the theory that mental pictures and words intrinsically represent what they are about (see Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge 1981: 3-5); and earlier, Collingwood similarly attacked what he called the ‘obscurantist philosophy’ that threatens both metaphysics and science (R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford 1940: 342). Although imponderables undoubtedly comprise part of what might be called ‘the intractable nature of the empirical’, or what is given, there are nevertheless good reasons for intellectuals to refuse to affirm them unconditionally in their own, theoretical sphere.

04-Part IV

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 238

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 239

BIBLIOGRAPHY Part 1 (i)Works Pertaining to Comberton Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely County Council Planning Department, Comberton Village Plan, duplicated, [Cambridge] 1971. Foreman, R., Barker, B. and Stephenson, S., Comberton Village Handbook, duplicated, [n.l.] 1981. Gardner-Smith, P., Comberton Parish Church: a descriptive and historical account, [Cambridge] 1929. Pevsner, N., Cambridgeshire, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth 1970: 323-4. Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, An Inventory of Historical Monuments in the County of Cambridgeshire. Vol.1, West Cambridgeshire, London 1968: 48-55. South Cambridgeshire District Council, ‘Comberton’, in Local Plan, vol.2, Cambridge 1993: 53-5. Wright, A.P.M., ‘Comberton’, in The Victoria County History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, vol.5, Oxford 1973: 175-89.

(ii)Works Pertaining to Kingswood or South Gloucestershire Braine, Abraham, History of Kingswood Forest: including all the ancient manors and villages in the neighbourhood, London and Bristol 1891; reprinted Bath 1969. British Regional Geology, Survey of the Bristol and Gloucester District, 2nd edn, London 1948. *Britton, G.B. & Sons Ltd., The End of the Tale, Bristol 1977. *Britton, G.B. & Sons Ltd. and Wilshire, F. & Co. Ltd., Cobblers’ Tale, Bristol 1951. *Bryant, Samuel, Memoirs of the life and character of Samuel Bryant, a Kingswood Collier, Bristol 1827. Cornwell, John, Collieries of Kingswood and South Gloucestershire (No. 2 in the Coalfield series), Cowbridge 1983. *Cossham, Handel, ‘Paper on the late discovery in the Kingswood coal field’, Cotswold Naturalists’ Field Club 8, 1884: 247-53.

05-Bibliography

240

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 240

Bibliography

*Dearnley, I.H., ‘The Golden Jubilee (Nov. 21, 1894-1944) of Kingswood U.D.C. (Kingswood and Hanham)’, reprinted from The Bristol Observer, Bristol 1944. ———, Kingswood and Hanham, Gloucs.: The Official Guide, Cheltenham 1949. ———, Kingswood: An Official Guide to Kingswood and Hanham, [Bristol] 1960. ———, Kingsfield: Design for a Borough, duplicated, [Kingswood] 1962. *Dearnley, I.H., Plowright, E.W. & Eaton, E.A.W., ‘The Old Lady shows her diamonds: a historical souvenir of the diamond jubilee of Kingswood U.D.C.’ reprinted from The Bristol Observer, Kingswood 1954. Eayrs, George, Wesley and Kingswood and its Free Churches: with an account of the Wesley Memorial Church, Bryant’s Hill, Bristol by W.J. Clarke, Bristol 1911. Ellacombe, Revd. H.T., The History of the Parish of Bitton, 2 vols, Exeter 1881 & 1883. ———, Unpublished collection of manuscripts et cetera relating to local history in Bristol Municipal Library; materials concerning Kingswood in vols 6-8. Feast, Michael, A History of Methodism in Kingswood 1739-1920, duplicated, [Bristol n.d.]. Halliwell, J.O., Historical Sketch of the Provincial Dialects of England, from Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 2 vols, London 1847. *‘Hanham Court’, in Gloucestershire Notes and Queries 6, 1895: 143-49. Huntley, R.W., A Glossary of the Cotswold (Gloucestershire) Dialect, London 1868. Jennings, J.K., The Dialect of West England, particularly Somersetshire, 2nd edn, London 1869. *‘J.L.’, ‘Lawless state of the Kingswood district 1795-1817’, Gloucestershire Notes and Queries 4, 1890: 17-18. *Jones, Arthur Emlyn, Our Parish, Mangotsfield, including Downend: a brief account of its origin and history, Bristol 1899; reprinted Bath 1978. *Jones, Ignatius, ‘The Story of Hanham 1829-1942’, British Congregational Monthly, April 1942. *Kingswood District Council, Listed Buildings. Kingswood District, Kingswood 1982. ———, Pamphlet to mark the Dedication of a New Pulpit on Hanham Mount, Kingswood 1983. ———, Kingswood District Official Guide, Wallington 1984. Kingswood and District Local History Society, Forest Heritage: selected papers of the K. & D.L.H.S. 1967-8, duplicated, [Bristol] 1968. *Lindegaard, Patricia, ‘The underground men: a personal view of the Kingswood Colliers’, Avon Past 4, 1981: 17-21. ———, ‘The Mark of Cain: the Cock Road Gang’, Avon Past 9, 1983. Lovell, Joseph, ‘A sketch of the history of the Kingswood Circuit and some of the men I have known in it’ by Joseph Lovell (1842-1919), Revd. J.M. Franklin (ed.), Bristol 1977. Malcolmson, Robert, ‘The Kingswood Colliers in the Eighteenth Century’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 241

Bibliography

241

and their law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, London 1980: 85-122. Matthews, W., The New History, Survey and Description of the City and Suburbs of Bristol, Bristol 1794. Mills, A.D., A Linguistic Study of Gloucestershire Place Names, MA thesis, University of London, 1960. Moore, John S., ‘The Medieval Forest of Kingswood’, Avon Past 7, 1982. Moss, Fred, City Pit, Bristol 1986. *Painter, C.H., A Short History of Hanham, pamphlet, [Bristol] 1975. *Purdy, Victory, Poetical Miscellanies, by the Late V.P., generally known in the vicinity of Bristol by the appellation of the Kingswood Collier, Bristol 1825. Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, Nonconformist Chapels and Meeting-houses – Gloucestershire, London 1986. *Russell, James, ‘Barrs Court Oldland’, Avon Past 2, 1980: 5-12. ———, ‘The Archaeology of the Kingswood Area – A survey to A.D. 1700’, Avon Past 7, 1982: 17-25. Saniger, William, Article on the Kingswood Whit Walk, Western Daily Press 15/6/1939. Smith, Albert Hugh, The Place Names of Gloucestershire, (English Place Names Society) vol 4, Cambridge 1964. *Spilsbury, G.B., ‘The Brittons of Kingswood Chase and some Gloucs. connections’, duplicated, [Bristol] 1985. Spittal, Jeffrey and Dawson, David, The Kingswood Chapels Survey, duplicated, [Bristol] 1983. ———, ‘The Kingswood Chapels Survey’, Avon Past 8, 1983: 15-28. Street, Doreen, ‘Not Worth a Pin: Pin Making in the Kingswood Area’, pamphlet, Kingswood History Project, Avon County Community Environment Scheme, Kingswood 1986. *Styles, R., ‘Kingswood Coalfield: the Ridgeway Drainage Level’, Gloucestershire Historical Studies 10, 1979: 50-55. *‘Trinity Church, Kingswood’, Gloucestershire Notes and Queries 4, 1890: 273. Trustram, Myrna, ‘Pin making in Bristol in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in Bristol Broadsides Co-op., Placards and Pin Money, Bristol 1986: 24-47. Vintner, Dorothy, ‘Abraham Braine. A Gloucestershire Historian’, in Kingswood and District Local History Society, Forest Heritage, [Bristol] 1968. Wilshire, F.A., The Story of Kingswood and its Church, Gloucester and London [n.d.]. *Wyatt, I., ‘The Cock Road Gang’, in Brian S. Smith (ed.), Gloucestershire Historical Studies 4, duplicated, Bristol 1970: 37-46. *Youngs, F.A., Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England, vol 1, London 1979.

* indicates a work not cited in the text or notes.

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 242

242

Bibliography

Part 2 General Works Abélès, M., Quiet Days in Burgundy, Cambridge 1991. Abrams, Philip, ‘The uses of British sociology, 1831-1981’ in M. Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, Cambridge 1985: 181-205. Ahmed, Akbar and Mynors, James, ‘Fowlmere: Roundheads, Rambo and rivalry in an English village today’, Anthropology Today 10, 1994: 3-8. Anderson, Michael, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire, Cambridge 1971. ———, ‘Household structure and the Industrial Revolution’ in T. Hareven (ed.), Family and Kin in Urban Communities 1700-1930, New York 1977. ———, ‘The relevance of family history’ in Michael Anderson (ed.), Sociology of the Family, Harmondsworth 1980: 33-63. ———, ‘What is new about the modern family: a historical perspective’ in The Family, British Society for Population Studies Occasional Paper 31, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, London 1983: 1-16. Anderson, Perry, ‘Origins of the present crisis’ (1964), in English Questions, London 1992. ———, ‘Components of the national culture’ (1968), in English Questions, London 1992. ———, English Questions, London 1992. Archbishops’ Commission on Rural Areas, Faith in the Countryside, London 1990. Ardener, Edwin, ‘Introductory Essay’, in E. Ardener (ed.), Social Anthropology and Language, London 1971: ix-cii. ———, ‘Remote areas’, in Anthony Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home (A.S.A. Monographs 25), London 1987: 38-54. ———, The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays, Malcolm Chapman (ed.), Oxford 1989. ———, ‘Social anthropology and population’ (1974), in Ardener, The Voice of Prophecy: 109-126. ———, ‘Evidences of creation’ in E. Tonkin, et al. (eds), History and Ethnicity (A.S.A. Monographs 27), London 1989. Bachelard, G., La formation de l’esprit scientifique, Paris 1938. Barrow, Logie, Independent Spirits, London 1986. Beckford, James, Religion and Advanced Industrial Society, London 1989. Bell, C. and Newby, H., Community Studies, London 1971. Bell, M., Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country village, Chicago 1994. Beynon, H. and Austrin, T., Masters and Servants: Class and Patronage in the Making of a Labour Organisation, London 1994. Biersack, A., ‘Local knowledge, local history: Geertz and beyond’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley 1989: 72-96. Blythe, Ronald, Akenfield, London 1969. Bott, Elizabeth, ‘Urban families: conjugal roles and social networks’, Human Relations 8, 1955: 345-84. ———, Family and Social Network, London 1971.

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

Bibliography

4:30 PM

Page 243

243

Bouquet, Mary, Reclaiming English Kinship, Manchester 1993. Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), Cambridge 1977. Braithewaite, J., Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Cambridge 1989. Briggs, Asa, ‘The language of ‘class’ in early nineteenth century England’, in A. Briggs and J. Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History: In Memory of G.D.H. Cole, London 1960. Browne, Sir Thomas, Hydriotaphia. Urne Buriall (1658), London 1906. Bruce, Steve, The Edge of the Union, Oxford 1994. ———, Religion in Modern Britain, Oxford 1995. ———, From Cathedrals to Cults: Religion in the Modern World, Oxford 1996. Buckley, Michael, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, New Haven 1987. Bulmer, Martin, Neighbours: the Work of Philip Abrams, Cambridge 1986. ———, (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, Cambridge 1985. Bush, M.L. (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification, London 1992. Cannadine, David, ‘Cutting classes’, in New York Review of Books 17/12/1992. Carrithers, Michael, Collins, Stephen and Lukes, Stephen (eds), The Category of the Person, Cambridge 1985. Chapman, Malcolm, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture, London 1978. Clark, David, Between Pulpit and Pew. Folk Religion in a North Yorkshire Fishing Village, Cambridge 1982. Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley 1986. Cohen, Anthony P., Anthropological Studies of Rural Britain, 1963-1983: A Position Paper, London 1983. ———, Whalsay: Symbol, Segment and Boundary in a Shetland Island Community, Manchester 1987. ———, ‘The British anthropological tradition, otherness and rural studies’, in Lowe, P. and Bodiguel, M. (eds), Rural Studies in Britain and France, London 1990: 203-21. ———, (ed.), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures, Manchester 1982. ———, (ed.), Symbolising Boundaries: Identities and Diversity in British Cultures, Manchester 1986. Cohen, P., ‘Subcultural conflict and working class community’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2, 1972: Spring 1972. Collingwood, R.G., An Autobiography, Oxford 1939. ———, An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford 1940. Collins, Stephen, ‘Categories, concepts or predicaments? Remarks on Mauss’s use of philosophical terminology’ in Michael Carrithers et al. (eds), The Category of the Person, Cambridge 1985: 46-82. Colls, R., The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield: Work, Culture and Protest, 17901850, Manchester 1987. Condry, Edward, Scottish Ethnography, Association for Scottish Ethnography Monograph No 1, Edinburgh 1983. Conrad, Joseph, Under Western Eyes, J. Hawthorn (ed.), Oxford 1983. Corfield, P. (ed.), Language, History and Class, Oxford 1991.

05-Bibliography

244

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 244

Bibliography

Critcher, C., ‘Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class’ in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds), Working Class Culture: Studies in History of Theory, London 1979: 13-40. Crossick, Geoffrey, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society, London 1978. Currie, Robert, Methodism Divided, London 1968. Davie, Grace, Religion in Britain since 1945, Oxford 1994. Davie, N., ‘Chalk and cheese? ‘Fielden’ and ‘forest’ communities in early modern England’, Journal of Historical Sociology 4, 1991: 1-31. Davies, Elwyn and Rees, Alwyn, Welsh Rural Communities, Cardiff 1960. Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘The rites of violence: religious riot in sixteenth century France’ in Past and Present 59, 1973: 51-91; reprinted in Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford 1975. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Mille Plateaux, Paris 1980. Dennis, Norman, Henriques, Fernando and Slaughter, Clifford, Coal is Our Life (1956), London 1969. Desan, Suzanne, ‘Crowds, community and ritual in the work of E.P. Thompson and Natalie Davis’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley 1989: 47-71. Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, London 1966. Down, Martin, ‘The shape of the rural Church’, Theology 1984: 164-72. Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), London 1915. ———, The Division of Labour (1893), London 1991. ———, Sociologie et philosophie, Paris 1924. ———, ‘L’Individualisme et les intellectuels’, Revue bleue, 4e série, X: 7-13. Dyhouse, Carol, ‘Working class mothers and infant mortality in England 1895-1914’, Journal of Social History 12, 1978: 248-64. Emmett, Isabel, A North Wales Parish, London 1964. Ennew, Judith, The Western Isles Today, Cambridge 1980. Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other, New York 1983. Farndon, Richard (ed.), Localising Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing, Edinburgh and Washington 1990. Firth, Raymond (ed.), Two Studies of Kinship in London, London 1957. Flanagan, Kieran, The Enchantment of Sociology: a Study of Theology and Culture, Basingstoke 1996. Flandrin, J.-L., Families in Former Times, Cambridge 1979. Fox, Robin, The Tory Islanders, Cambridge 1978. Frankenberg, Ronald, Village on the Border, London 1957. ———, Communities in Britain: Social Life in Town and Country, Harmondsworth 1966. ———, ‘A social anthropology for Britain?’, in R. Frankenberg (ed.), Custom and Conflict in British Society, Manchester 1982: 1-35. Funkenstein, Amos, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Princeton 1986. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York 1973. ———, ‘Blurred genres. The refiguration of social thought’, in C. Geertz, Local Knowledge, New York 1983.

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

Bibliography

4:30 PM

Page 245

245

Gilbert, A.D., Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change 1740-1914, London 1976. ———, The Making of Post-Christian Britain: A History of the Secularisation of Modern Society, London & New York 1980. Gilley, Sheridan and Sheils, W.J. (eds), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from pre-Roman Times to the Present, Oxford 1994. Glass, R. and Frenkel, M., ‘How they live at Bethnal Green’, in Britain Between East and West, London 1946. Gluckman, M., ‘Gossip and scandal’, Current Anthropology 4, 1963: 307-16. ———, ‘Psychological, sociological, and anthropological explanations of witchcraft and gossip: clarification’, Man 3, 1968: 20-34. Goldthorpe, J.H. et al., The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, Cambridge 1968. Goody, J. (ed.), The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups, Cambridge 1956. Hall, Stuart, ‘Cultural studies and the Centre: some problematics and problems’, in S. Hall et al. (eds), Culture, Media, Language, London 1980: 15-47. Hall, Stuart and Whannel, Paddy, The Popular Arts, London 1964. Halsey, A.H., ‘Provincials and Professionals: the British post-war sociologists’, in M. Bulmer (ed.), Essays in the History of British Sociological Research, Cambridge 1985: 151-164. Hareven, T. and Plakans, A. (eds), Family History at the Crossroads, (Special Issue of the Journal of Family History), 1987. Harris, C., Hennage, New York 1974. Harris, C.C., The Family and Industrial Society, London 1983. Harrison, B., Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872, London 1971. Harrison, R. (ed.), The Independent Collier: The Coal Miner as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered, Sussex 1978. Hastrup, Kirsten, ‘Studying a remote island’, in K. Hastrup, Island of Anthropology. Studies of Icelandic past and present, Odense 1990. Hempton, D., Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850, London 1984. Herzfeld, Michael, Anthropology Through the Looking Glass, Cambridge 1987. Heyck, T.W., ‘The Decline of Christianity in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Albion 28, 1996: 437-53. Hill, Polly, The History of Isleham Fen in the 1930s, Cambridge 1990. Hobsbawm, E., ‘Methodism and the threat of revolution in Britain’, in E. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, London 1968: 23-33. Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth 1958. Howe, Leo, ‘The ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’: practice in an urban local Social Security office’, Journal of Social Policy 14, 1985: 49-72. Howell, David, The Armour of God, pamphlet, [Crowhurst, n.d.]. Hunt, Lynn (ed.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley 1989. Jackson, Anthony (ed.), Anthropology at Home (A.S.A. Monographs 25), London 1987. James, M.R., The Collected Ghost Stories, London 1964. Jenkins, Timothy, ‘Metaphor and Religious Language’, Journal of Literature and Theology 3, 1989: 219-41. ———, ‘Fieldwork and the perception of everyday life’, Man 29, 1994: 433-56.

05-Bibliography

246

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 246

Bibliography

Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society, Oxford 1971. ———, Languages of Class, Cambridge 1983. Joyce, P., Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1840-1914, Cambridge 1991. ———, ‘A people and a class: industrial workers and the social order in nineteenth century England’, in M.L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500, London 1992: 199-217. Kerr, M., The People of Ship Street, London 1958. La Fontaine, Jean, ‘Power, authority and symbols in domestic life’, International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 5, 1990: 187-205. Laing, S., Representations of Working-Class Life 1957-1962, London 1986. Laqueur, T.W., Religion and Respectability. Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture 1780-1850, New Haven 1976. Lash, Nicholas, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’, Cambridge 1996. Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost – Further Explored, London 1983. Laslett, Peter and Wall, Richard (eds) Household and Family in Past Time, Cambridge 1972. Lecourt, Dominique, Marxism and Epistemology, London 1975. Leonard, Diana, Sex and Generation: A Study of Courtship and Weddings, London 1980. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, La Pensée sauvage, Paris 1962. (E.T. The Savage Mind London 1966). Littlejohn, J., Westrigg: The Sociology of a Cheviot Parish, London 1964. Lockwood, David, ‘Sources of variation in working class images of society’, Sociological Review 14 (3), 1966: 249-67. ———, The Blackcoated Worker (1966), Oxford 1989. Luhrmann, Tanya, ‘Witchcraft, morality and magic in contemporary London’, International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 1, 1986: 77-94. ———, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic and Witchcraft in Presentday England, Oxford 1989. Lukes, Stephen, ‘Conclusion’, in Michael Carrithers et al. (eds), The Category of the Person, Cambridge 1985: 282-301. Lyon, David, The Steeple’s Shadow. The Myths and Realities of Secularisation, London 1985. Macfarlane, Alan, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transmission, Oxford 1978. Marcus, George and Fischer, Michael, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Chicago 1986. Martin, David, A Sociology of English Religion, London 1967. ———, A General Theory of Secularisation, London 1978. ———, Reflections on Sociology and Theology, Oxford 1997. Matza, D. and Sykes, G.M., ‘Juvenile delinquency and subterranean values’, American Sociological Review 26, 1961: 712-719. Mauss, Marcel, ‘A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self ’ (1938), in Michael Carrithers et al. (eds), The Category of the Person, Cambridge 1985: 1-25. ———, The Gift (1925), London 1970.

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

Bibliography

4:30 PM

Page 247

247

McKibbin, Ross, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880-1950, Oxford 1990. McLeod, H., Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City, London 1974. Merry, S.E., ‘Rethinking gossip and scandal’, in D. Black (ed.),Towards a General Theory of Social Control, vol. 1, Orlando 1984: 271-302. Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Oxford 1990. Miller, W.B., ‘Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency’, Journal of Social Issues 14, 1958: 5-19. Mitson, A., ‘The significance of kinship networks in the seventeenth century: south-west Nottinghamshire’, in C. Phythian-Adams (ed.), Societies, Cultures and Kinship 1580-1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History, Leicester 1993: 24-76. Mogey, J.M., Family and Neighbourhood: Two Studies in Oxford, Oxford 1956. Moore, Henrietta, Feminism and Anthropology, Cambridge 1988. Moore, Robert, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics, Cambridge 1974. Newby, Howard, The Deferential Worker, London 1977. New Left Review, ‘Weekend in Dinlock: a discussion’, New Left Review May/June 1960. Obelkovich, J., Religion and Rural Society in South Lindsay 1825-75, Oxford 1976. Oxford, Frances, ‘Epilogue’, to M. Strathern, Kinship at the Core, Cambridge 1981. Paine, R., ‘What is gossip about? An alternative hypothesis’, Man 2, 1967: 278-85. ———, ‘Gossip and transaction’, Man 3, 1968: 304-308. Paneth, M., Branch Street, London 1944. Parsons, T., Essays in Sociological Theory, London 1949. Paul, Leslie, The Deployment and Payment of the Clergy, London 1964. Perry, Michael, Deliverance, London 1987. Pitt-Rivers, Julian, People of the Sierra (1954), Chicago 1971. ———, The Fate of Shechem, Cambridge 1977. Putnam, H., Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge 1981. Rapport, Nigel, Diverse World-Views in an English Village, Edinburgh 1993. Razi, Z., ‘The myth of the immutable English family’, Past and Present 140, 1993: 3-44. Rees, Alwyn, Life in a Welsh Countryside, Cardiff 1950. Rescher, Nicholas, Empirical Enquiry, London 1982. Rex, John, ‘British sociology 1960-80 – An essay’, Social Forces 61(4), 1983: 999-1009. Richards, Audrey, ‘Introduction’ to M. Strathern, Kinship at the Core, Cambridge 1981. Robin, Jean, Elmdon, Cambridge 1980. Russell, Anthony, The Clerical Profession, Oxford 1980. ———, (ed.), Groups and Teams in the Countryside, London 1975. Said, Edward, Orientalism, New York 1978. Scott, Joan and Tilly, Louise, ‘Women’s work and the family in nineteenth century Europe’, Comparative Studies in Local History 17, 1975: 36-64.

05-Bibliography

248

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 248

Bibliography

Shorter, E., The Making of the Modern Family, London 1976. Sigal, Clancy, Weekend in Dinlock, London 1960. Sillitoe, A., Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, London 1958. Simmel, Georg, ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’ (1908), in Kurt Wolff (tr. and ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Illinois 1950. Skultans, Vida, Intimacy and Ritual, London 1974. Slater, E. and Woodside, M., Patterns of Marriage: A Study of Marriage Relationships in the Urban Working Classes, London 1951. Smelser, N., Social Change and the Industrial Revolution, London 1959. Spring Rice, M., Working Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions, (1939), London 1981. Stacey, Margaret, Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury, Oxford 1960. Stone, L., The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, London 1977. ———, ‘Family history in the 1980s’, in T. Rabb and R. Rotberg (eds), The New History, Princeton 1982: 51-87. Storch, R. (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth Century England, London 1982. Strathern, Marilyn, Kinship at the Core, Cambridge 1981. ———, The Gender of the Gift, Berkeley 1988. ———, “Negative strategies in Melanesia’, in R. Farndon (ed.), Localising Strategies, Edinburgh and Washington 1990: 204-16. ———, After Nature, Cambridge 1992. Sumner, C., The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary, London 1994. Szreter, Simon, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940, Cambridge 1996. Taylor, Charles, ‘Language and human nature’, in Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers 1, Cambridge 1985: 215-47. ———, ‘Social theory as practice’, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers 2, Cambridge 1985: 91-115. Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class, London 1963. ———, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present 50, 1971: 76-136. Also in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common, chapter iv, Harmondsworth 1991. ———, Whigs and Hunters, London 1975. ———, ‘On history, sociology and historical relevance’ [review of Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics], British Journal of Sociology 14, 1976: 387402. Tilly, Louise, ‘Individual lives and family strategy in the French proletariat’, Journal of Family History 14, 1979: 137-52. Tonkin, Elizabeth, McDonald, Maryon and Chapman, Malcolm (eds), History and Ethnicity (A.S.A. Monographs 27), London 1989. Underdown, D., Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660, Oxford 1985. Valenze, D., Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England, Princeton 1985. Viazzo, Pier Paolo, ‘Anthropology, Family History and the Concept of Strategy’, in R. Wall and D. Sato (eds), Economic and Social Aspects of the Family Life Cycle, Cambridge, forthcoming.

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

Bibliography

4:30 PM

Page 249

249

Wallis, R. and Bruce, S., ‘Religion: the British contribution’, British Journal of Sociology 40, 1989: 493-520. Wallman, S., Eight London Households, London 1982. Ward, W.R., The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, Cambridge 1992. Wearmouth, R.F., Methodism and the Struggle of the Working Classes 18501900, London 1954. ———, The Social and Political Influence of Methodism in the Twentieth Century, London 1957. Williams, Bernard, Descartes, London 1978. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780-1950, London 1958. Williams, W.M., The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth, London 1956. ———, A West Country Village: Ashworthy, London 1963. Willis, Paul, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, London 1977. Willmott, Peter, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, in M. Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, Cambridge 1985: 137-50. Wilson, Bryan, Religion in a Secular Society, London 1966. ———, Religion in a Sociological Perspective, Oxford 1982. Wrightson, K., ‘Household and kinship in sixteenth century England’, History Workshop Journal 12, 1981: 151-157. Yeo, Stephen, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis, London 1976. Young, Michael and Willmott, Peter, Family and Kinship in East London, London 1957. ———, The Symmetrical Family, London 1973. Zweig, F., Men in the Pits, London 1948.

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 250

INDEX Abélès, M., 214 Abrams, Philip, 91, 139 agricultural labourers, 51 Ahmed, Akbar and Mynors, James, 71 Anderson, Michael, 138, 139, 140 Anderson, Perry, 21, 91 Anglican Church (Church of England), 30, 32-33, 36-37, 97, 103, 149, 151, 177. See also parish church anxiety, 193-95, 200, 201, 209 Archbishops’ Commission on Rural Areas, 73 Ardener, Edwin, 21, 91, 92, 140, 143, 145, 157 Auden, W.H., Heavy Date, 1, 14 Austen, Jane, 34 Avon, County of, 90

boundaries, 84-90; purification of, 100-101 Bouquet, Mary, 72, 92 Bourdieu, Pierre, 91, 220 Braine, Abraham, 93, 142, 146, 149, 151, 156, 157, 158, 187 Braithewaite, J., 213 Briggs, Asa, 188 Bristol (formerly New) Observer, 213 British Legion, 99, 131, 170, 171 British Regional Geology, 92 Browne, Sir Thomas, 154, 158 Bruce, Steve, 27-35, 38, 39 Buckley, Michael, 21 Budget, Samuel, 105, 212 Bulmer, Martin, 91, 139, 220 Bush, M.L. (ed.), 188, 189

Bachelard, G., 232, 223, 236 banal/exotic, 7, 15, 80-83 bands, 95, 96, 97, 175, 217 banners, 95, 96, 97-98, 217 Baptist Church, 30,149, 176; Baptist chapel, 63 Barrow, Logie, 224, 225, 227, 228, 231, 235, 236 Beckford, James, 38 behaviour, ‘street’/‘estate’, 135-36. See also family: three- and two-generation Bell, C. and Newby, H., 71, 91 Bell, M., 72 Bethnal Green Study, 111-12. See also Young and Willmott Beynon, H. and Austrin, T., 107 Biersack, A., 156 Blythe, Ronald, 71 boot-making, 113-14, 164 Bott, Elizabeth, 139

Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely County Council Planning Department, 72 Cannadine, David, 188, 189 Carrithers, Michael, Collins, Stephen and Lukes, Stephen (eds), 186 Cennick, John, 104 Census, 88, 164 Chapman, Malcolm, 21, 92, 214 Charleton, Robert, 114 children, 115-21; adolescence, 117-18; babies, 124-25; after mother’s death, 128-29. See also Sunday schools Christian beliefs, 28, 34 Christian Brethren, 151 Christian Exorcism Study Group, 227 Church of Christ (Evangel Mission), 97, 103, 107 churches and chapels, 95-102, 131; history of founding, 102-107; as landmarks, 107; nineteenth century

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 251

Index history of building, 151; as locuses of respectability, 170-77; penumbral organisations, 178-82; relation to politics, 186-88; splits and building, 102-107, 212-13, 217, 219. See also Sunday schools Churches: membership, 28, 29-31; as political settlements, 31, 36; church attendance, 28; with respect to class, sexes, 33 claim and recognition, 179, 194; and concealment, 162-63. See also separation and dependency Clark, David, 213 clergy, 32; numbers, ageing, 28; social composition, 34-35; clergy, rural: vicar, 56, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67; social position, 43, 44; numbers, ageing, 44 Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. (eds), 91 coalmining, 84, 87, 93, 113, 137, 16364, 207; Ashton study, 110-13, 192; the miner as stereotype, 111, 137; Kingswood colliers, 145-48; preaching to the colliers, 148-52. See also Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter Cohen, Anthony P., 72, 92 Cohen, P., 213 Collingwood, R.G., 21, 237 Collins, Stephen, 186, 187 Colls, R., 138, 158, 188, 189 Comberton, Cambridge, village of, 43-73; definition of parish, 45; definition of village, 45-49; Comberton Village Plan, 49; population development, 49, 50; employment, 49, Comberton study, 16. See also St. Mary’s, Comberton committees, 204-13 community studies, 8, 19, 21, 80-83, 91-92, 123, 140, 155, 207; Institute of Community Studies, 91-92 compulsion, 202, 203 Condry, Edward, 21, 92 conflict, 109-113, 191-214; of domestic with productive values, 110, 136, 207; within the values of respectability/voluntary organisations, 180-82, 204-213. See also violence, lawlessness, criminal behaviour Congregational Church, 97, 102, 104, 151, 176, 212 Conrad, Joseph, 3, 21 Conservative Party, 185

251 conversion, 161, 173-74; of savages/Indians, 148-52, 153 Corfield, P.(ed.), 188 Cornwell, John, 93, 187 cosmologies, 227, 234; explanations of the nature of matter, 231, 232-34, 235 counter specification, 82 criminal behaviour, 148, 196-201, 213 Critcher, C., 92 Crossick, Geoffrey, 187, 188, 189 Currie, Robert, 108 Davie, Grace, 35-38, 39 Davie, N., 140 Davies, Elwyn and Rees, Alwyn, 91 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 107, 157 Dearnley, I.H., 93, 156, 187 death, 128-29 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 235 Deleuze, Gilles, 234 Deliverance, 227, 228, 232 Dennis, Norman, Henriques, Fernando and Slaughter, Clifford, 91, 137, 138, 213 Desan, Suzanne, 157 Devil/Satan, 229 direct speech, lack of, 79; discretion, 161 display, 172 distinction, wish for, 3, 4, 5. See also flourishing domestic sphere/sphere of production, 110, 136 Douglas, Mary, 107 Down, Martin, 73 Durkheim, Emile, 10, 21, 29, 39, 186 Dyhouse, Carol, 138 Eayrs, George, 108, 157, 158, 187 economy of fantasies, 20, 59-60, 69-71, 215 Eliot, George, 61 Eliot, T.S., The Dry Salvages, 221 élite, local, 164-68, 169-77; and politics, 183-85, 191, 192; and working of committees of voluntary organisations, 204-213 Ellacombe, Revd H.T., 142, 156, 158 Emmett, Isabel, 91 empiricism, 10, 13; empirical approach, 230 Ennew, Judith, 92 epistemological obstacles, 224, 236 ethnography, of English culture, 3-21 passim, 14-15, 20, 21; ethnography

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 252

252 in post-war Britain, 80-83, 91-92; ethnographic present/past historic tense, 15 events, richness in, 144-45, 152 exorcism, 227, 228; the demonic and exorcism in the Bible, 229 experience, appeal to, 224, 230, 232-34 Fabian, Johannes, 92, 158 family, 83, 109-140, 161, 165, 175, 193, 218; theory of, 109-113; strategies, 113-23; mother-daughter tie, 123-29, 216-20; and locality, 12937; familial values in lives of women, 115-17; children, 117-21; men, 12123; three-generation, 127-29; cf. twogeneration, 135-37; the emergence of the modern, 138-39, 140 farmers, 54, 55 Farndon, Richard (ed.), 91 Feast, Michael, 108,157,158, 187 feckless, fecklessness, 83, 101, 137, 161, 174, 191-214 passim, 191-201, 202, 205, 218; and the rowdy, 99; and conflict, 109-113; place within political values, 184-85. See also respectability fertility, 112 festival, popular, 95, 99-100 Firth, Raymond (ed.), 91, 92 Flanagan, Kieran, 39 Flandrin, J.-L., 138 Flook, Daniel, 105, 114 flourishing, aspiration to, 13-14; social flourishing, 31, 32, 38. See also distinction, wish for Foreman, R., Barker, B. and Stephenson, S., 72 Foucault, Michel, 154 Fox, Robin, 71 Frankenberg, Ronald, 21, 71, 91, 204, 206, 207, 210, 214 Friendly Societies, 99, 131, 170, 171 Funkenstein, Amos, 21 Fussell, Abraham, 104, 114 Gardner-Smith, P., 72 garment manufacture, 164 Geertz, Clifford, 91, 156, 157, 220 gerontocrats, 204-206, 209, 217; gerontocracy, 131 Gilbert, A.D., 38, 189 Gilley, Sheridan and Sheils, W.J. (eds), 72 Glanville, John, 104

Index Glass, R. and Frenkel, M., 137 Gloucestershire, County of, 78, 84-84, 88, 90 Gluckman, M., 21, 213 Goldthorpe, J.H. et al.,187 Goody, J. (ed.), gossip, 132-33, 150, 192, 201-204 Great Chain of Being, 229, 233 Hall, Stuart and Whannel, Paddy, 92 Hall, Stuart, 91, 92 Halliwell, J.O., 92 Halsey, A.H., 91 Hareven, T. and Plakans, A. (eds), 138 Harris, C., 72 Harris, C.C., 138 Harrison, B., 188 Harrison, R. (ed.), 137 Hastrup, Kirsten, 220 health, alternative healing practices, 223-25, 227, 232, 233, 234, 236 Hempton, D., 189 Herzfeld, Michael, 156, 158, 189 Heyck, T.W., 39 Hill, Polly, 71 Hobsbawm, E., 189 Hoggart, Richard, 91, 92 honour: plebeian, 193; aristocratic, 200201 house church, 97, 176 housing, 88, 165, 169-70; rural, 45-49, 51, 52-53, 59; infilling, 48; residence, 55 Howe, Leo, 189 Howell, David, 236 Hunt, Lynn (ed.), 107, 156, 157 Huntley, R.W., 92 identity, 79, 82, 99, 101, 141, 153 imponderables, 225, 227, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237 incomer, 50-60; as opposed to villager, 50-53; two senses of term, 50-52; incomer’s model of the village, 53-58; incomers’ involvement with church, 65-69. See also villager indigenous voices, 29, 31-35, 36 individualism, 159 industrialisation, 114 infant mortality, 112 informants, good and bad, 161-62 International Labour Party, 184 invention of culture, the, 154. See also plebeian values

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 253

Index Jackson, Anthony (ed.), 157 James, M.R., 229, 236 Jenkins, Timothy, 21, 187 Jennings, J.K., 93 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 188, 213 Joyce, P., 188, 189 Kerr, M., 137 kin, 129-37; and non-kin, 130-31; and the registration of change, 135-37 Kingswood (district of East Bristol), 77220 passim, 223, 224, 225, 234, 235; geological, 84; geographical, 8488; administrative, 88-90; population table, 89; town of, 86-88; relations with Bristol, 84-90; Urban District Council, 88-90; District Council, 8890, 101, 156, 158, 187; Kingswood and District Christian Council Children’s Committee, 95; Kingswood and District Local History Society, 156; Kingswood Association for the prosecution of thieves, housebreakers, etc., 148; Kingswood Chapels Survey, 103, 151 (see Spittal and Dawson); Kingswood Chase, 85-86, 142, 14548; Kingswood forest, 84-85, 142; lawlessness, 145-48; disafforestation, 84, 85, 146; pre-feudal unit, 85; Kingswood School: colliers’ children’s school, 103, 104, 105; school for sons of preachers, 105, 212; Kingswood study (cf. Comberton study), 69-71 Kingswood Whit Walk, 6-8, 9, 10, 14, 16-17, 19, 77, 95-102, 140, 161, 163, 177, 183, 217-20; models for, 99-100; tableaux/themes, 96. See also route of the March Labour Party, 185 Laing, S., 139 language, 161; paradoxes of, 3, 4; accent, 85; dialectal studies, 92-93; pronunciation (and morals), 150; languages of class, 167-68 Laqueur, T.W., 188, 189 Lash, Nicholas, 21 Laslett, Peter and Wall, Richard (eds), 139 Laslett, Peter, 139 lawlessness, 143, 145-48. See also conflict, criminal behaviour, violence Lawrence, D.H., 122-23 Lecourt, Dominique, 236 legitimacy, 101, 147, 153

253 Leonard, Diana, 139 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 145, 157 Liberalism, 112; Liberal Party, 185; convergence with Methodist values, 189 light engineering, 164 Lindegaard, Patricia, 157 Littlejohn, J., 91, 138 local history, 20, 78, 83, 101, 107, 14158 passim, 141-45, 153-56, 216. See also route of the March, territory local industries, 164-65 local particularity, 10-11, 20, 77-220 passim, 77-84, 131, 141, 216, 217; local geography, 51, 52, 133; local knowledge, 112, 124, 141; mythic quality of public knowledge, 143; local personality/character, 100, 166-68, 206. (See also gerontocrats, respectability); local society, characteristics of, 129-37 localising strategies, 80-83. See also outsider; reflexivity Lockwood, David, 137, 189 Lovell, Joseph, 187 Luhrmann, Tanya, 235 Lukes, Stephen, 186 Lyon, David, 38 Macfarlane, Alan, 138, 139 macrocosm/microcosm, 233 making sense, 7, 9, 10, 11, 25-27, 84, 223 Malcolmson, Robert, 93, 145, 147, 148, 152, 157, 158 Manchester Department of Social Anthropology, 21 Marcus, George and Fischer, Michael, 158, 186 marriage, 109-113; and courtship, 11819; residence upon marriage, 119-20; non-marriage, 120-21; working-class marriage, 137-38; divorce, 120-21 Martin, David, 35, 38, 39 Matthews, W., 157 Matza, D. and Sykes, G.M., 213 Mauss, Marcel, 159,186, 219, 220 McKibbin, Ross, 188 McLeod, H., 189 men: husband-wife bond, 109-113, 206; place within family, 121-23, 216; place in voluntary organisations, 180; son-in-law, 125-26 Merry, S.E., 213 mesmerism, 224, 228, 232 Methodism, Methodist: chapels, 73, 95, 97, 98, 102-103, 112, 129, 143, 176,

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 254

254 212, 223, 224, 234; history in Kingswood, 102-107; conversion of Kingswood, 148-52; reading of local history, 155; with respect to local character, 172; with respect to class, 173, 174; effects on political leadership, 184, 189; convergence with Liberal values, 189; Union, 107, 214; Arminian, 105; Bible Christians, 107; Calvinistic, 104; Independent, 97, 106, 176; Magic, 106; New Connection, 105, 107; Primitive, 103, 106, 107, 151; Protestant, 105; Tent, 150; United Methodist Free Churches, 102103, 105, 106, 107, 151, 176; Wesleyan, 105, 106, 107, 151, 176; Wesleyan Reformers, 105 Milbank, John, 21 Miller, W.B., 213 Mills, A.D., 93 Mitson, A., 140 mode of registration, 154, 155 modernity, modernisation, 26-28, 35; narrative of decline, 28-31, 32, 33; decline of beliefs, 34-35; transition to, 8, 136-37 Mogey, J.M., 137 Moore, John S., 92 Moore, Robert, 137, 138, 188, 189, 214 Moravian Church, 97, 102, 104, 105, 149, 151, 176, 212 Morgan, Revd William, 149 Moss, Fred, 107, 207, 213 mothers, 96; mother-daughter tie, 12329, 216-20. See also women. mutual misunderstanding/misinterpretation, 16, 156, 185, 215 New Age movements, 19, 27, 28 New Left Review, 213 new religious movements, 19, 27, 28 Newby, Howard, 72 Newton, Isaac, 232 Newtonianism, 232 Nonconformist religion, 63, 98, 103, 143, 149, 172, 185, 223, 224, 234; political consequences of, 189 Northern Ireland, 33-34 notables, 146, 147, 217, 220. See also outsiders Obelkovich, J., 188 occasional offices, 128-29, 175, 178. See also rites of passage

Index occult knowledge and practices, 223-37 passim orders and classes, 188 outside gaze, 4, 7, 11-12, 16, 79-84, 97, 183, 212-13, 216. See also outsiders outsiders, 133, 202; relative, 134, 207208; and voluntary organisations, 180-82, 207-213; and gerontocrats, 209. See also notables outworking, 113-15, 164. See also local industries Oxford, Frances, 54, 72 Paine, R., 213 Paneth, M., 137 parish church, 100, 102, 103, 104-105, 149, 151. See also Anglican Church Parish Council, 55, 57 Parsons, T., 138 particularity, see local particularity Paul, Leslie, 43, 71 Pentecostalism, Pentecostalist Church, 97, 173, 174, 176, 223 Perry, Michael, 227, 228, 230, 233, 236 personality, personhood, 78, 83, 100, 101, 107, 159-89, 191-214; person as predicament, 159-63; congruency of personality and institutions, 162-63; personal qualities, 171; person and politics, 182-83; persons and bodies, 187; personality and precedence, 191-214 Pevsner, N., 72 pin-making, 113, 164 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 161, 162, 187, 193, 200, 201, 213 plebeian values, independence of, 16566, 171, 173, 177, 181, 183, 188, 191; against thesis of ‘embourgeoisement’, 187 politics, 182-86; political organisations, 131 prayer, 174, 175 Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 30 Presbyterian Church, 104, 151 psychic phenomena, 226, 228; classification of, 228-32 Putnam, H., 237 Rapport, Nigel, 72 Razi, Z., 140 Rees, Alwyn, 91 reflexivity, 18, 79-84 religion, 3-21 passim; suspicion of the category, 4-5, 8; history of the term,

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 255

Index 9; as a category, 70; subversion/expansion of the category, 12-13; definition, 13-14, 29; in modern Britain, 25-39 passim; comparison with European context, 37; non-Christian religions in Britain, 28; implicit/folk, 44, 70 reputation, 132, 159-89 passim, 161, 166, 193-95; placing someone, 132; people without reputation, 199, 202; assured, 199; two models of, 191-95 Rescher, Nicholas, 186, 187 residues, method of, 227, 228, 233 respectability, 20, 78, 83, 98, 100, 113, 137, 159-89, 191-95, 201, 216-20; the autonomy of values of, 165-66; generated in a skilled élite, 164-68; producing conflict within voluntary organisations, 204-13; penumbra to, 178-82, 195. See also feckless restraint, 159-89 passim, 166 revival, 175-76 Rex, John, 91 Richards, Audrey, 92 riots, 147, 148 rites of passage, 28, 30, 32, 36. See also occasional offices, well-formed/illformed lives Robin, Jean, 71 Roman Catholic Church, 30, 32, 97, 176, 208-209 route of the March, 101-17, 176-77, 212-13, 219. See also local history, territory royal authority, 146-48 Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 72, 108 Russell, Anthony, 60, 61, 71, 72 Russell, James, 93 Said, Edward, 154, 158 Salvation Army, 97, 99, 107, 177; band, 96; citadel, 99, 103, 106 Saniger, William, 107 scale, 9, 10, 16, 18, 20, 21, 230, 233 scientific thought, development of, 224; libido of scientists, 236; scientific language, 230-32; popular science, 232-34 Scott, Joan and Tilly, Louise, 138, 139 Scripture, 229, 233-34 secrets, secrecy, 3, 17, 223-37; secret societies, 160-63, 172; theory of the secret, 225-27; virile-paranoiac form, 234

255 secularisation, 35; debate, 38-39; secular society, 36 self-concealment/self-display, 3, 16. See also outside gaze, self-definition self-definition, 7, 8, 16, 224-25; of institutions, 30, 31-35 separation and dependency, 100-102, 169-77, 193-95, 217 Shorter, E., 138 Sigal, Clancy, 123, 139, 192, 213 sight, metaphor of, 3, 4 Sillitoe, A., 123, 139 Simmel, Georg, 160, 162, 186, 187, 213, 235 simulacra, 4 Skultans, Vida, 235 Slater, E. and Woodside, M., 137 Smelser, N., 138 Smith, Adam, 137 Smith, Albert Hugh, 93 social fact, 16, 38, 70-71; total social fact, 219, 220 social science, 3-21 passim; social theory, 25, 35, 38; sociological account, 28, 37; social anthropological approach, 5-6, 6-7, 9-12, 18; cf. sociological approach, 5, 6, 15; social anthropological studies of rural life, 71-72; social anthropology as translation, 159-60; sociology of religion, 9, 16, 18-19, 2539 passim, 69-70; parallels of social science with religion, 9, 12-13, 14, 25, 32, 35, 38; fieldwork method, 10; kind of knowledge produced, 11-12, 18, 20. See also ethnography Socialism, 112, 223, 224, 234; and respectability, 183-86; socialist reading of local history, 155 Society for Psychical Research, 228 spiritualism, 223-25, 227; spiritual beings, 229, 233; spiritualist church, 176 Spittal, Jeffrey and Dawson, David, 108, 158 Spring Rice, M., 137 St. Mary’s Church, Comberton, 43-73 passim, 45, 47, 62-69; annual fête, 63, 65, 66-67; conflicts in church life, 64-69; fund raising, finance, 66-69; Sunday school, 68-69; building repairs, 43, 64, 66; Parochial Church Council, 65 Stacey, Margaret, 91 statistical approach, 29-31, 32, 33, 36; surveys, 33-35

05-Bibliography

1/21/09

4:30 PM

Page 256

256 stereotype, 77, 142, 152, 191-92; stereotype of the country church, 4445, 60-71; elements composing, 6062; welfare as part, 61, 62 Stone, L., 138, 139 Storch, R. (ed.), 188 strategies, cf. structure, 83-84 Strathern, Marilyn, 26, 38, 51, 53, 71, 72, 91, 92 Street, Doreen, 138 Sumner, C., 213 Sunday schools, 28, 95-102, 150, 151, 178-82, 206 supernatural, the, 28, 29 swearing, 110-11, 150, 174, 196, 197, 205 Szreter, Simon, 138 Taylor, Charles, 21, 38 temperance/intemperance, 95, 150, 166, 171-72, 173, 174, 177, 18182, 191, 196, 199, 205 territory, 78, 101, 107, 129-37, 175; local space with respect to local history, 141-58. See also local history, route of the March Thompson, E.P., 91, 92, 107, 147, 157, 173, 188, 189 thrift, 166, 171, 173, 177, 179, 182, 191, 195 Tilly, Louise, 138 Tonkin, Elizabeth, McDonald, Maryon and Chapman, Malcolm (eds), 157 trade unions, 99, 112, 168; banners, 9798; trade unionism, 223 translation, 229 Trollope, Anthony, 34 Trustram, Myrna, 93, 138 turnpike roads, 147 Underdown, D., 140 uniformed organisations, 96, 99, 178, 179, 182 United Reformed Church, 97, 102, 104105, 176, 212 unskilled worker, the, 185-86 Valenze, D., 188, 189 Viazzo, Pier Paolo, 138 Victoria County History 72, 73, 90 village life: changes, 43, 59; notion of ‘the village’, 45, 53-55, 56-58, 69; village welfare schemes, 54, 55

Index villager: core families, 51, 56-58, 59; interest group model of village, 5658; view of church, 62-64. See also incomer Vintner, Dorothy, 156 violence, 152, 153, 192, 196-201, 220. See also conflict, criminal behaviour, lawlessness vital symbols, 34, 35 voluntary organisations: membership cf. personality, 162-63, 204; collective morality, 170-77; negotiation of status through membership, 178-82; leadership of, 179-80; conflict in the workings of, 204-213; as locus of definition, 211. See also personality, gerontocrats Wallis, R. and Bruce, S., 39 Wallman, S., 139 Ward, W.R., 188 Wearmouth, R.F., 189 well-formed/ill-formed lives, 159, 16668; rites of passage as key to, 178. See also respectability, feckless, conflict, rites of passage Wesley, Charles, 150 Wesley, John, 103, 104, 149, 150, 152, 155, 157, 212 Whit Walk – see Kingswood Whit Walk Whitefield, George, 103, 104, 149, 150, 152, 212 Wilkes, Revd Mark, 149 Williams, Bernard, 187 Williams, Raymond, 91, 92 Williams, W.M., 71, 91 Willis, Paul, 92 Willmott, Peter, 91, 92, 220 Wilshire, F.A., 156, 157, 158, 187 Wilson, Bryan, 38 Wittgenstein 237 women, 98, 109-140; male-female relationship, 109-13; centrality to family, 113-23, 216-20; and work, 113-17; and honour, 200. See also mothers worship, hymns, 175 Wright, A.P.M., 72 Wrightson, K., 139, 158 Yeo, Stephen, 188 Young, Michael and Willmott, Peter, 91, 137, 139, 140 Zweig, F., 137