Walking the wild side of Merrie England

This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Every January, in a town close to where I live, an obliging member of the community climbs into a specially constructed frame covered in straw. This is closed over the volunteer’s head while their arms and legs protrude, allowing them to parade through the town as a “Straw Bear”.

Evoking the travelling bear-baiters of times past, another performer leads the dancing “bear” on a string through the streets while soliciting donations of money and, in the pubs, beer. The whole proceeding ends, Wicker Man-style, with the ritual burning of the Straw Bear (volunteer safely removed), until it is resurrected the following year.

The Whittlesey Straw Bear is just one example of the many peculiar “calendar customs” that fill Britain’s traditional year, and which are the subject of Liz Williams’s new book Rough Music.

But while there are several books that will take you through the British year and its customs and tell you in great detail about their past, Liz Williams’s is one of the first to discuss the significance of such rituals for contemporary Britain and to concentrate, unapologetically, on their dark and rough side.

The old customs allow us to express our communal desire in ritualised form

Today’s surviving calendar customs are but a scattering of the great variety of traditional celebrations that once existed. Like Britain’s ancient monuments, her calendar customs have come in for quite a battering over the centuries — and, indeed, the best historical evidence we have for them often derives from the zealous efforts of those who wanted to suppress them.

The onslaught began in the reign of Edward VI (1547–53) when the Reformation, hitherto a jurisdictional break from Rome, turned into a full-blown culture war against English traditional life on the grounds that it was suffused with popular Catholicism. The Reformers were not wrong. Folk customs such as rush-bearing, beating the bounds and church ales were ways for the laity to take ownership of a church year ostensibly stage-managed by the clergy.

Yet the Edwardian Reformation was too brief to make much of a difference, and many of these customs survived into Elizabeth’s reign when the culture war abated. But the battle was reignited by James I’s Book of Sports (1618), which stipulated the recreations permissible on a Sunday and provoked the ire of Puritans, who believed that it didn’t go nearly far enough. The Puritans finally had their way from 1642, and the English Civil War and the Commonwealth era (1649–60) saw a sustained and severe assault on traditional culture as both “popish” and “pagan”.

But it is unfair to blame the decline of England’s traditional rural culture entirely on the Puritans. As Williams notes, the earliest evidence we have for many of the customs we consider “traditional” actually comes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — and while some reach back to the Middle Ages, many customs may actually have begun in the Reformation era.

For the Reformers made the error of removing the church’s involvement in traditional culture, and thereby pushed traditional culture out of the church and into a wholly secular sphere. Out went the blessing of ploughs on Plough Monday and the “Loaf Mass” at Lammas when the priest gave thanks for the harvest; in came midwinter guising and “harvest home” with its corn dollies and magical first sheaf. The lesson, perhaps, is that if you remove religion it will simply be replaced by magic. Either that or, as Williams might prefer, it is replaced by a secular cult that shades into a kind of revived paganism.

Are britain’s traditional customs “pagan”? It is a question often asked, and Williams addresses it head-on in Rough Music. But it is not easy to answer. The early folklorists were entirely convinced that virtually all folk customs were of immemorial antiquity and reached back to the Neolithic period, so confident were genteel amateur folklorists in the capacity of England’s enigmatic “slack-jawed yokels” to preserve the pristine memory of atavistic fertility rites.

Folklorists today take a more measured approach. Consider the Straw Bear, for example: a moment’s reflection should make it obvious that it can be no older than the arrival of the first “dancing bears” in England, in the late Middle Ages — and it is probably younger than that. Historically speaking, most of the folk customs we know and love today had their heyday between the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the high Victorian era, when concerns about propriety and public order put paid to most of them.

The Victorians abolished most of Britain’s fairs, introduced stricter licensing laws, clamped down on vagrancy and begging, and generally made folk life impossible. A few customs lingered as late as the 1930s, but petered out with the Second World War.

There are notable exceptions, but the vast majority of today’s folk customs are revivals that started between the 1960s and 1990s. As Williams notes, their meaning today is by no means the same as it was in earlier eras. Midwinter guising and mumming customs existed to collect much-needed money for the performers at the hardest time of the year. No modern mummer (so far as I know) expects a meaningful income from performing. Today’s revived folk customs are, instead, proud expressions of local identity and communal cohesion — as well as attracting the odd tourist.

Some of the rougher customs have died out, such as the “Rough Music” that gives the book its title (the making of a racket outside someone’s house to shame them for adultery or cuckoldry), and customs such as “blacking up” in Molly and Morris Dancing have been amended to comply with contemporary sensitivities. But some pretty deranged customs still persist, from the health-and-safety-free Cooper’s Hill cheese-rolling in Gloucestershire to the violent “Haxey Hood” football game in Lincolnshire.

And they have to: folk customs that are only picturesque and charming have little lasting appeal and central to Williams’s argument is that transgression is at the heart of the folk calendar. These are (and have always been) ways of mocking the establishment, defying humdrum drudgery, and doing something risky that makes you feel alive.

In Williams’s view, the recentness of revivals does nothing to undermine their authenticity. To quote the title of another of her books, such revivals are “miracles of our own making”: they derive, just as their antecedents did, from the needs of the community. And many of those needs are shared with our ancestors. Farmers and gardeners want things to grow. We all want good weather. We need rain. And the old customs, even in revived form, allow us to express our communal desire for these things in ritualised form. Is this “paganism”?

It is a question open to debate, but as organised religion declines it is striking that many people are at ease with the confected deity of the Green Man, regardless of their religious or spiritual commitments, or lack of them. After all, paganism is something we do rather than something we believe.