In 1626 an English fanner, Robert Moxam,
wrote that ‘William Merrydeth, servant unto
William Hollowaie of Marden, and John Broadbanke,
servant unto one William Lavington...with many
others in a disorderly manner came through town
of Marden with guns, drums, coalrakes, ovenlugs
and staves, setting upon a horseback two young
fellows, one of them arrayed and clothed in woman’s
apparel; and. . . when they came over against
this informer’s door they there made stand
beating up the drums and shooting off their guns
there in a scoffing and disorderly manner.’1
This was an early example of ‘rough riding’
or ‘rough music’ that Moxam describes
as a type of shaming ritual. These rituals were
often related to wife battering and cuckoldry.
Those who took part saw themselves as preserving
what they believed to be essential in maintaining
communal morality.
Rough music was at times elaborate. E P
Thompson writes in his seminal study that the
ritual ‘might include the riding of the
victim (or proxy) upon a pole or a donkey;
masking and dancing ... mime or street drama upon
a car or platform; the miming of a ritual hunt;
or (frequently) the parading and burning of
effigies; or, indeed, various combinations of all
these.’2 Neila
Warner at the Berkshire Record Office found some
case-papers describing the practice as applied in
Berkshire and how local residents reacted to a
case of suspected wife beating.
'...a custom almost universally prevails in
villages and rural districts whenever a quarrel
takes place between a man and his wife and the
husband resorts to violence against his wife for
the labourers and other idle inhabitants of the
parish & neighbourhood to assemble together
equipped with flags, horns, bells, pieces of iron
& all kinds of sonorous instruments with
which they resort towards the evening to the
house where the unfortunate couple reside and
create all the noise and disturbance in their
power much to the chagrin of the unhappy husband
and greatly to the annoyance of the quiet &
orderly inhabitants of the village &
neighbourhood where these scenes took place.’3
William Goble of Bearwood was subjected to this
treatment in 1839. On Saturday 17 August William
had a quarrel with his wife at the end of which
he is said to have struck her two or three times
with a thin stick. He was apparently angry
because for several nights she had persisted in
going to the house of a neighbour where she
stayed until two in the morning. On Monday 19
August he went to Sonning for the day and
returned at seven in the evening to find his wife
very unwell, with a Doctor Wheeler in attendance.
Soon afterwards a group of 18 men and boys
gathered outside the house to make ‘rough
music’ for half-an-hour. On five further
evenings in August the gatherings increased,
until a mob of 40 took part. The result was an
acrimonious exchange between Mr. Goble and the
‘musicians’. One, Richard Chap,
reminded him, ‘this is always the rule where
a man beats his wife’. William Goble denied
the charge. The doctor who attended his wife
testified that in his opinion ‘the
indisposition of the wife did not arise in any
way from the ill-treatment of her husband.’
The mob were not satisfied and carried on with
the ‘music’. Eventually Robert Howard,
a gardener working for a local landowner, John
Walter, who lived close to the Goble residence,
arrived with two companions to complain about the
disturbance and to ask the mob to desist. When
his plea failed, he and his associates seized
some of the ‘musicians’ by their
collars in an effort to disperse them by force,
although apparently no actual blows were struck
on either side. The struggle continued for half
an hour, after which the mob left.
On Monday 2 September, there were again 40
people outside Goble’s house and Robert
Howard sent for the Constable, George Blake, to
disperse them. A half-hearted attempt to carry on
the persecution was made by a few people the next
day, but there was little disturbance and they
soon moved away.
The strength of feeling in the community is
further demonstrated in an anonymous letter to
one of John Walter’s men which stated,
‘if I was your wife you should not have a
bit of sugar in your tea. I would put a turd in
to see if that would sweeten it’.
The gentry are generally thought to have
turned a blind eye to ‘rough music’,
and in this particular case there is a suggestion
that another landowner, Mr. Simonds, may actually
have been behind it, since he apparently found
William Goble obnoxious and wished to drive him
from the neighbourhood. There were certainly
several of his labourers among the ringleaders.
The authorities in Wokingham deliberated over
a prosecution of the ringleaders for nuisance and
riot, but eventually decided that there was not
enough evidence to present a case with any fair
expectation of obtaining a conviction as no act
of violence was intended or committed. They also
feared that the case might come to be regarded as
one between John Walter, the owner of the
Bearfield estate (and also owner of The Times)
and Mr. Simonds.
<image to be inserted here>
A typical example of
‘rough riding’ with the husband riding
with his back to the donkey’s head and being
railed by men and women
Another case took place at Billericay, Essex,
a year before the one in Berkshire; this time it
reached the petty sessions and apparently ‘afforded
considerable amusement’ to the community.
Francis Hole, ‘a sporting gentleman of small
fortune’ is said to have made himself ‘obnoxious
to most of the inhabitants in the parish and
neighbourhood’. A group of local men and
women seemed to have hatched a ‘rough music’
session in the local public house, the Shepherd
and Dog. They paraded outside Hole’s
residence in the morning and according to one
witness ‘mingled soft sounds of clarinets
with the rough tones of saucepan lids and tins
with stones in them’. The ‘rough music’
was played with the clear intention ‘of
forcing the complainant out of the village’.
A local farmer gave evidence for the defendants
so it was apparent that there was considerable
support for their campaign to oust this unpopular
resident.
According to witnesses they were determined to
evict him with a ‘little bit of music and
indulge in village jollity’. It was clearly
a day of general rejoicing in the village, but
the defendants were found guilty and fined a
shilling each and costs. However, a considerable
fund was raised locally and their fines were paid
immediately.4
As we have seen ‘rough music’ was
not a specifically Berkshire pursuit. Thompson
writes that it is a generic term for a wide
variety of popular rituals in which an
embarrassing punishment is meted out in public to
individuals who have offended the community. He
states that the term was coined in the late
seventeenth century and is the equivalent of the
French ‘charivari’, Italian ‘scampanate’
and German ‘haberfeld-treiben, thierjagen,
or ‘katzenmusik’. In parts of Britain
it was also called skimmity-ride.
In his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge,
Thomas Hardy describes a skimmity-ride where
effigies of the two victims of an unfortunate
liaison were mounted on a donkey and accompanied
by the ‘musicians’. The lady became so
distraught that she died.
References and further reading
1 Ingram, Martin. ‘Ridings, Rough Music
and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’
in Barry Reay, ed. Popular Culture in
Seventeenth-Century England, 1985
2 Thompson, E P. ‘Le Charivari anglais’,
Annales (économies, sociétés, civilizations),
27e année (1972). Customs in Common. Chapter
8 ‘Rough Music’, pp 497-531. (1983)
3 BRO D/EWL/L3
4 The Times quoting the Chelmsford
Chronicle, 29 October 1838, 6e
with any queries
