Early Modern Notes

A quick Google for ‘Lady Skimmington’ produces this odd little titbit.

In Peter Ackroyd’s Albion, we read:

“In Wiltshire bands of peasants protested against the enclosure of common land by dressing as women and calling themselves ‘Lady Skimmington’; it was a way of breaking class barriers as well as sexual boundaries and testifies, perhaps inadvertently, to the English love of mixing or mingling different forms. Two male weavers in female disguise, calling themselves ‘General Ludd’s Wives’, led a crowd in destruction of looms and factories in Stockport; the riots against turnpike tolls and other taxes were led by men in drag and became known as the ‘Rebecca riots.’”

He goes on to point out that this kind of thing would not have happened in mainland Europe, the penalty for transvestism in France being public burning. [my emphasis]

I could hardly believe at first that that was an accurate version of what Ackroyd had said, but it’s repeated here, too. (I missed out on reading Albion: the origins of the English imagination, I must confess. I did mean to, but I was probably caught up in thesis writing at the time and then… forgot.)

Because you don’t need to read much early modern French history to know that exactly these forms of ritual transvestism were widely employed there, and indeed throughout Europe. (I think there’s a considerable gulf between the transvestism that might have got someone executed and the temporary cross-dressing of many festivals and rituals, somehow.) In fact, here’s an opportunity to turn to Natalie Zemon Davis for a few examples. Men dressed as women, sometimes going by titles such as ‘Mere Folle’, to head up the ‘Abbeys of Misrule’ that organised community shaming rituals (against adulterers, husband- and wife-beaters, unsuitable marriages, etc); the English ‘skimmington’ was simply one of many such forms across Europe: “charivaris, scampanete, katzenmusik, cencerrada, rough music” (other British variants included ‘riding the stang’ and the Welsh ceffyl pren).

And just as in England and Wales these forms could be adapted to use in political and other protests, so in France: in Dijon in 1630, “Mere Folle and her Infanterie were part of an uprising in masquerade against royal tax officers” and “in the Beaujolais in the 1770′s, male peasants blackened their faces and dressed as women and then attacked surveyors measuring their lands for a new landlord”. And Davis gives further examples for England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland.*

Some of the Amazon reviews notice that Ackroyd’s book was indeed weak on any European comparison or context. However, a lot of the ‘serious’ reviewers (say, these) simply gush about Ackroyd’s scholarship for his arguments about all the eccentric peculiarities of the English (a sceptical view) without noticing this apparent lack. But how can you argue that anything about a culture is unusual or specific if you don’t compare it, accurately, to others?

And a couple more complaints, while I think of it. It’s a bit curious to find the Rebecca Riots (south-west Wales) being used to illustrate a thesis on the ‘English’ imagination. But of course, the way he writes it, you can’t tell that they are a very localised Welsh phenomenon. (I wonder why, when he takes the trouble to locate the other two examples?) And you’d never know from reading that passage, either, that these episodes span over 200 years of history.

Is the whole book this sloppy? Why didn’t he stick to what he’s good at and write a novel about the theme? At least then it wouldn’t have the spurious authority of “twenty-one pages of endnotes”.

Nice to have got that rant out of my system.

………….

* Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on top’, in her Society and culture in early modern France (1965).