The Pattern Under the Plough

by George Ewart Evans

  1 Ab ambiendis arvis.

  2 V.G., 1, ll. 339–50.

  3 L. Whistler, The English Festivals, London, 1947, p. 152.

  4 It reached Britain early in the eighth century.

  5 W. E. Tate, The Parish Chest, p. 74.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Ipswich and East Suffolk Record Office, Betts-Doughty Papers, HD 7 9/A F 4/4/1.

  8 Miss Susan Smith (born 1892), Wortham.

  9 A.F.C.H., p. 26.

  10 That is, before the setting up of a county police force when the parish constable had no authority outside his own parish.

  11 Charles Woollard (born 1892).

  11

  The Rough Band

  ALSO connected with the house in East Anglia was another custom called here the Rough Band. It was known throughout the British Isles as Rough Music, but each region seems to have had its own particular additional name: it was called the Kiddly Band1 in Cornwall from one of the utensils most used by the band – a kiddly or pan, and it took part in the shivaree or wedding junketings there until the ’twenties. Its activities were known in Glasgow as sherricking. In other districts people called it Riding the Stang, Riding, Stag Hunting2 and so on. The custom lasted until well into this century in East Anglia; and here is an account taken from a Suffolk village to illustrate what the Rough Band’s activities were:

  ‘A family used to live down by the forge: it doesn’t matter much if I tell you their names; they’re all dead now. But the woman was very short. We used to call her Mrs Dot. She was a Londoner and she had a brother who’d come up from London to live with her. He were a man some bit over sixty. After he’d been living there for some time he took up with a young girl who lived next door, daughter of a man who worked on Mr Durrand’s farm. And though she were no more than eighteen he started courting her. Then we heard the couple were going to get married – had to, I reckon. Well, I was a lad just left school at this time; and when us lads heard about the wedding someone said: “Let’s give ’em the Rough Band.” So about twenty on us went down to the blacksmith’s which was not far from the house where they were having the wedding party – dancing and singing and all manner of what-not going on.

  ‘Now the blacksmith about that time had been repairing a lot of Dutch ovens. Everybody in the village had a Dutch oven, a big square oven with its sides made of iron sheets. Sometimes these sides used to get burned through, so they got the blacksmith to fit a new one. Well, there were half a dozen of these ovens lying about the smith’s yard. We collared these and a few tin baths that were hanging up behind some of the cottages. But before we went out of the blacksmith’s yard, a couple of the lads went along quietly to the house to prepare for us. As you know, the front doors in this village have no door-knobs or latches, just a big old fashioned twisted iron ring. It was dark, of course and the lads got a longish stake and fitted it through the ring, tying it so the ends of the stake were flush against the wall on each side of the door – which now couldn’t be opened from the inside. Then the lads slipped round the back of the house and placed two bush faggots on the path just outside the back door.

  ‘When they’d done this the Rough Band started. We took the owd baths and irons and started off round the village hitting blazes out of these tins and things with pokers, pieces of owd iron – anything we could get hold on. The whole village was out in no time to see what was up, but they could see it was the Rough Band and said nothing. Then we stopped outside the house where the wedding party was, and hit those owd things so you could hear the din for miles. Of course, those inside the house heard as soon as we started; but when they tried to open the front door they couldn’t and the first man out through the back went sprawling very nigh down to the bottom of the garden path. But when we heard him swearing and shouting we knew the rest of the party would soon be after us. So we dropped the tins and things and made a run for it. I remember it well: the next morning when I went past the house the Dutch ovens, the baths and the rest of the stuff were still lying on the roadway.’

  The Rough Band played on occasions such as the above, a marriage which the village considered reprehensible, or in cases of adultery, incest, wife-or husband-beating. Although its playing was nearly always reserved for sexual offences, unpopularity of any sort sometimes called out Rough Music. In one Suffolk district3 it was used to ‘drum a man out of the village’ if his offence had been a gross one. Another sign of social disapproval in the case of wife-beating was the scattering of a bag of chaff on the front path of the house belonging to the offending man. Chaff, as an informant explained, is one of the less useful products of corn-threshing which in the dialect is usually thrashing.

  The Rough Band has died out completely in East Anglia, as far as can be ascertained; but it is the sort of custom that may well be revived sporadically for some time to come. Before it finished, its form was considerably modified; and in East Anglia, at least, the Rough Band lost its old punitive function: it appeared outside the house at almost any kind of village wedding:4 ‘We didn’t use to have big halls and things like that: when my brothers and I got married we packed as many as we could into the house. We had a really happy sing-song, you know; and the people used to come and give us a Rough Band. They’d say: “Oh, So-and-So is getting married; we’ll have to go and give him a Rough Band.” They’d pick up anything and they’d go down round the house and give us this sing-song, rattling tins and old pails or anything you get hold of to make a noise with. As soon as the people in the wedding-party heard, they’d say: “Hello, some of the blokes outside are giving us a Rough Band; we’d better call them in and give ’em a drink.” That was the thing to do.’ In these weddings, as soon as the Rough Band had taken their portion of the wedding meat and drink, they dispersed; and latterly the custom seems to have been softened into a mild form of blackmail, a method of obtaining a few cheap drinks.

  But the original Rough Music was a most effective way of ostracizing a person from the village community: and in some districts where a couple had been subjected to this music it was as good as an ultimatum to them to leave the village altogether. Whatever the offence, the punishment of Rough Music was both drastic and cruel. For this reason some argue that it is a very ancient custom whose dynamic is to be sought in pagan times when people believed that fertility was undivided and that the same power controlled the crops, the increase of animals and of human-kind. Therefore, relations between the sexes were critical, not only in themselves, but for the potential good or ill they had for the growth of the crops. It is for this reason, as Jung reminds us, that a Swiss peasant – up to fifty or sixty years ago – would embrace his wife in the freshly ploughed furrows to ensure that the seeds he had sown on the land would give an abundant yield. And it could well be argued that some deep irrational drive is still operating in regard to society’s attitude towards sexual offences; for we still count them as a sin above, say, greed and selfishness and pride, qualities that have done infinitely more harm down the years – one would have thought – than any amount of illicit or socially disapproved sex.

  But whatever the theories about its remoter origins it would be safe to infer that the custom is historically of long standing in the British Isles. It is clearly at the back of one of Bottom’s witticisms in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.5 His perfervid wooing by Titania, who in addition to being another man’s wife was also inverting the woman’s role in courtship, was the kind of situation which would have brought out an appropriately Rough Band in the old rural community. It will be recalled that in answer to Titania’s question: ‘What, wilt thou hear some music, my sweet love?’ Bottom boasts: ‘I have a reasonable good ear in music: let’s have the tongs and bones.’ We can assume that Bottom’s quip was meant to be delivered with a salty gesture at the audience who would instantly take his meaning. For the First Folio stage direction is: Tongs, Rural Music. The tongs were either smith’s tongs or the ordinary fireside implement; the bones were the sawn-off ribs of an ox used up to recent years – teste me ips
o – by country boys as clappers. They were also part of the black-and-white minstrels’ properties and the bones gave their name to one of the stock minstrel characters. But more to the present purpose, we have A. L. Rowse’s evidence that the rattle of bones was a necessary accompaniment of the Cornish Kiddly Band or Shivaree up to this century.

  1 Robert Johnson, 62 Clinton Road, Redruth; and A. L. Rowse, A Cornishman at Oxford, London, 1965, p. 74.

  2 E.O.S., p. 287.

  3 From George Garrard, born 1891, formerly of Stowupland and Gislingham. ‘Drumming out’ was also an Essex custom.

  4 Mrs. Grace Flack, Depden, Bury St Edmunds.

  5 Act IV, Scene 1.

  Part Two

  THE FARM

  12

  Magic on the Farm

  IT HAS been pointed out more than once1 that there were two religions in Britain for centuries after it had been ‘officially’ Christianized. These were the religion of the Church, and the old pre-Christian religion or cult followed by many of the people,2 especially those in the remoter rural areas; and anyone who has lived for a length of time among the older generation of country people, survivors of the old rural community, will have recognized that the official religion of this country had not even at this late date penetrated very deeply into their psyche. Many of them cherished beliefs – beliefs, moreover that they acted upon – dating from a period well before the coming of Christianity. From one aspect this is not surprising, for these beliefs, most of which came from the old chthonic cult whose main concern was the fertility of both animal and soil, spoke directly to their condition: they clung tenaciously to their old practices which long before had become identified with their own remoteness.3 For unless the soil gave abundant crops and the animals multiplied the primitive was lost; and the old beliefs and the practices that grew out of them were specifically aimed at preventing this. This is one of the reasons why early Christianity was forced to adopt and transmute some of the old pagan ceremonies and bring them within its ritual. But many of the old practices remained outside the Church and continued obstinately alongside its own, surviving into the twentieth century, unobtrusive yet resilient in a rural underground that, during the time the old traditional society flourished, was rarely suspected much less disclosed.

  As Max Weber wrote:4 ‘Peasants have been inclined towards magic. Their whole economic existence has been specifically bound to nature and has made them dependent on elemental forces. They readily believe in a compelling sorcery directed against spirits who rule over or through natural forces or they believe in simply buying divine benevolence. Only tremendous transformations of life-orientation have succeeded in tearing them away from this universal and primeval form of religiosity.’ Such a transformation has, of course, occurred during the last fifty years. Yet farming, even today, with all its mechanical, chemical and bio-chemical aids and complex subsidies and advisory services, is still tied to nature; and nature is the tremendous variable that has always to be taken into account. The weather, the haphazard movement of disease, whether of soil, plant or animal, are still unpredictable factors that cannot be absolutely controlled. Under the old, recently displaced farming, in conditions that had remained essentially unchanged for centuries, how much more apparent these variables were. A farmer might take all the care and make all the preparations humanly possible and yet be still aware of huge tracts of possibilities where he knew he was powerless. It was out of this awareness that the peasant clung to the old practices, irrational though many of them were: what he could not control at least he would attempt to placate. Therefore, he took precautions to appease the unknown powers, to fend off the evil ones he had perhaps unwittingly provoked: he poured his last drop out of the harvest cup onto the ground; he carried the green branches on the last load of corn; he made a corn-dolly to bring indoors and keep until the following year; he refused to begin work on a new job on a Friday; he hung a hag-stone over his stables – all for luck, as he would say, or to prevent ill-luck from entering onto his farmland. For where technique is limited – and the basic techniques in farming remained the same for centuries – chance or luck plays a proportionately larger part; and chance has to be propitiated.

  To say that these extra precautions could have had no possible effect on the farmer’s situation is not to condemn them outright or to deny their usefulness in the social context in which they were practised. For, even though they did not and could not influence external reality in any way whatsoever, they had real pragmatic value: they helped to create a subjective climate that was ultimately beneficial. These old practices, irrational though they were, did at least give the operator the necessary heart; and unless a man, in the face of so many difficulties and uncertainties, had that heart, the conviction that there was a fair chance of his succeeding, he would probably not begin his enterprise at all. The primitive was as sound a psychologist as we know, and very rightly considered his own doubts and fears as threatening as any hostile environment; and it was to remove his own uncertainties that most of his irrational practices were mobilized.

  The farm, therefore, is the last resort of magic not by accident: it has earned this title because farming is – or was before successive governments elected, or were compelled, to play God – an essentially chancy business. As in acting in the theatre, or deep-sea fishing, a man did his job and waited: and reward or approval could be given or withheld by nature, by the whim of a fickle public, or by the seemingly haphazard movements of tide, wind and weather – all perhaps regimented by some remote but placable being. In these three occupations the area ruled by chance has always been formidable, and as we should expect the old beliefs die hardest precisely in these fields.5

  But apart from all this, the farmer and farm-worker of the old pre-machine era in East Anglia had an attitude to the land that is characteristic of the primitive husbandman all over the world. It was enshrined in the proverb: A farmer should live as though he were going to die tomorrow; but he should farm as though he were going to live for ever. Between the farmer and the soil there was a bond that amounted, on his part, almost to veneration: the soil was something to be nursed and treated with the utmost consideration. This attitude was only one remove from animism and addressing the earth as Mother; and although in up-to-date farming countries it has been bawled out of court very loudly as muck and mysticism, it is still held in its original form by the farmers in the undeveloped countries; and those who have attempted to bring some of their methods up-to-date have found out this to their cost, as Margaret Mead has recorded.6 In parts of India and the Middle East the primitive farmer regarded agriculture as a just partnership between himself and the cherishing earth. He considered it poor payment for the earth’s generosity to inflict fertilizers and the iron plough upon it, and he refused to make use of the improvements which were offered to him free. It was only after he had been educated out of his primitive attitudes that any success in improving his farming technique became apparent.

  Although no one can defend the outdated attitude of the primitive farmers and the farmers of the ‘old school’ and their resistance to change, it is understandable in the light of its origins; and it may still have its uses as a point of reference for the scientific farmer of today. And one would like to think that in his less harassed moments he would be able to pause and ask himself the question: ‘Who is nearer the truth?7 The old school type of farmer with his near-veneration for the land as a living partner who must be nursed and humoured? Or the modern farmer who treats the land as an inert medium into which he can pour chemicals with impunity?’

  If we grant that this old and world-wide attitude towards the soil existed in Britain up to the beginning of this century, it is understandable that many of the beliefs that grew out of this ancient seed-bed should remain active also. Some of them have lasted up to the present day in the minds if not in the practices of the generation that has survived the passing of the old traditional farming and the community which it nourished. Examples of these old
beliefs and customs will be discussed in the following chapters.

  1 Notably by M. A. Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, Chap. 1, and G. G. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, passim.

  2 G. G. Coulton, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 76: ‘There is no doubt that the whole of the Church was on the lord’s side. We have seen how Aquinas would have kept the peasant down.’

  3 Pagani that is the dwellers in the pagus, the village or remoter country areas.

  4 Essays in Sociology, London, 1961, p. 283.

  5 A recent newspaper report shows that farmers still believe and practice sympathetic magic in its most ancient form: ‘An effigy of Mr Fred Peart, Minister of Agriculture, was burned yesterday by Mayfield farmers on one of a chain of bonfires due to be lit at dusk across East Sussex. They built the fire on a hill near the village. The effigy, dressed in a black coat, striped trousers and a bowler hat, was placed on top; and as it burned the farmers fired their shotguns at it.’ (East Anglian Daily Times. 15th April, 1965.) It was thus that primitive agriculturists used to deal with the god who omitted to send them rain.