Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 333

Breviary Stuff Publications was, according to their mission statement, founded to keep significant works of radical history and ‘history from below’ in print. Bushaway’s By Rite, first published by Junction Books in 1982, has long since been out of print, with secondhand copies both hard to find and expensive. That Breviary has made it possible for a new audience to enjoy this important book is to be applauded. That they have managed to do so at such an accessible price and maintained reasonable production values – the curiously wide pages and poorly reproduced images aside – is testament to their desire to make important works accessible to those who cannot afford the high cover prices of, and I quote, ‘certain academic presses, who publish works on working class history with cover prices that most working class people cannot afford’. Besides corrections, the text remains unaltered from the first edition. This is a good thing, for not only was By Rite well received on its initial publication but also the text has stood the test of time. This is a beautifully written book. Indeed, notwithstanding the subsequent publication of E. P. Thompson’s Customs in Common and the more general writing of custom and customary ceremony into rural history, many of Bushaway’s richly detailed chapters remain at the forefront of our knowledge of the practice of custom in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century countryside.

The book is divided into six substantive chapters preceded by a short analysis of the meanings of custom, the sources for its study, and a brief survey of past attempts to conceptualize custom. This was always the least satisfactory chapter, lacking any wider understanding of alternative – for instance, elite – interpretations of custom or reference to the already vast anthropological literature on customary ceremony. If it was out of the Breviary spirit to substantially rework this chapter, to add a final chapter reflecting on the reception of By Rite and the ways in which the field has evolved would at least have been a worthwhile exercise. But this is a minor grumble – and perhaps in part covered by Bushaway’s essay on popular culture in Harry Dickinson’s Companion to eighteenth-century Britain. The other chapters need no such addendum. Chapter two analyses the customary calendar, focusing in particular upon ways in which church ringers as a clearly defined community group were tied to an essentially secular calendar. The church, as chapter three attests, acted to legitimize the celebration of many secular holidays, partly enforced by law – the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot was marked by a state service in every parish church – and partly by popular assertions that their customs were underwritten by church and state. Nineteenth-century attempts to suppress rambunctious celebrations of 5 November were, so Bushaway relates, often stridently opposed by making this very claim.

Rogationtide perambulations of parish bounds were also occasions to engage in several extra-church customs. Monies were levied, beer demanded, whilst young boys were often ‘bumped’, stood on their heads, or thrown into clumps of nettles in acts of symbolic machismo by the older men. That perambulations continued long after the church had lost interest in supporting the practice was a testimony to its usefulness in helping resist enclosure through muscular performances of territoriality, in asserting the importance of community, and, critically, in supporting the need to maintain customs that served to legitimize the rights and cultures of the poor. As the analysis in K. D. M. Snell’s splendid Parish and belonging attests, knowledge of the physical and political limits of the parish was the wellspring of rural cultural life. In short, the public performance of custom was vital in maintaining social cohesion, not just amongst rural workers but also between the different social classes.

Arguably, the most important contributions to our understanding of the sociology of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English countryside are made in the first part of chapter four and chapters five and six, studies of the ways in which custom underpinned harvest work, social conflict and popular protest, and crime respectively. If we now know rather more about the importance of custom in the urban and dockside workplace thanks to the work of Adrian Randall, John Rule and Leonard Schwarz, chapter four remains the standard reference on custom in the fields and farmyard. Even Peter King’s excellent studies of gleaning add to rather than supplant Bushaway’s analysis. Chapter five’s exploration of the ways in which the so-called ‘Swing Riots’ of 1830 were culturally underwritten and politically justified by doling and processing customs has served to inspire a recent upsurge in interest in Swing, whilst chapter six has inspired this reviewer’s studies of tree- and wood-bound conflicts.

On its first publication reviewers were in doubt as to whether Bushaway’s study was an important book. If the passage of time – and the publication of subsequent studies – has shown By Rite to be a landmark contribution to our understanding of English rural culture, it has in no way dimmed its importance. It remains a compelling analysis of custom and customary ceremony. It is a ‘must read’ for any student of English rural history.