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Funny you can be so lonely with all these folks around. When I come out of the country hither to the City methinks I come into another world, even out of darkness into light. The popular culture of cities and towns is, by its nature, a derived culture. Towns were a relatively late development; they could arise only when agriculture had been sufficiently developed to yield a surplus for their support, and the ratio of urban to rural population in traditional societies has always been low. Towns derived not only their basic food supply from the countryside, but also their population. Urban death-rates were generally higher, and birth-rates lower than in the countryside, and the net reproduction rate was for much of the time less than unity. There thus had to be a migration from the country to the town, and the vast number of locative personal names, indicating a village or place of origin, gives some idea of the distances covered by the migrants. Many towns had no precisely known point of origin. They had grown in response to human needs, and in some form or other seemed to have existed from time immemorial. Some had been established by the Romans, had decayed and had been abandoned, leaving only an infrastructure of roads and the rumour that there had once been a city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operationally defined, a culture is a constantly recurring assemblage of artefacts. To present the culture as a system, it is useful to consider not only the preserved artefacts, but the members of the society that produced them, the natural environment they inhabited and other artefacts (including the non-material ones such as language and projective systems) which they made or used. Every culture, every era exploits some few out of a great number of possibilities. Changes may be very disquieting, and involve great losses, but this is due to the difficulty of change itself, not to the fact that our age and country has hit upon the one possible motivation under which human life can be conducted. ‘Culture’ is a word with many shades of meaning, all of them deriving in some way from its Latin root, cultus. Whether as a noun or as an adjective, cultus implied cultivation and a sense of growth, and, however used, ‘culture’ has always suggested a degree of sophistication and refinement. Today it can be taken to indicate people of education and taste as well as an assemblage of pots and artefacts from a prehistoric site. In the context of this book it is used to denote the body of ideas which a people holds about itself and its environment, together with the tools and artefacts by means of which its members relate to one another and to the world which they inhabit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To exist, one had to belong to an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild; there was no security except in association, and no freedom that did not recognise the obligations of a corporate life. One lived and one died in the style of one's class and corporation. Few people lived alone, or, indeed, had any desire to do so. Everyone looked to membership of a group for mutual help in bad times and support in old age. Even the state in medieval England required people to be linked in small groups or tithings, so that each could vouch for the others' good behaviour. It is not that man is a particularly sociable animal: association has been forced upon him by the physical conditions in which he lived. Almost everyone is, by the accident of birth, a member of a family, of a more extended kinship group and also of a local or village community. One might leave the latter, and, perhaps with difficulty, gain acceptance in another, but family and kinship could not be replaced. Members of a family and families within a community were bound together by ties of mutual dependence. Although no family or community was ever without its internal frictions and disputes – the records are full of them – as a general rule they were never pursued to the point at which they interfered with the operation of community institutions and the performance of the agricultural routine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern man's originality, his newness in comparison with traditional societies, lies precisely in his determination to regard himself as a purely historical being, in his wish to live in a basically desacralized cosmos … his ideal no longer has anything in common with the Christian message, and … it is equally foreign to the image of himself conceived by the man of the traditional societies. Traditional society merged into modern at some indeterminate period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One cannot be precise to the decade or even the century. It did not result from the Industrial Revolution, though the Industrial Revolution was part of the transition. It did not consist only of material innovations, numerous and important though these were. It was marked by a change in mental attitudes to society and to the world; in short, by cultural change in its most profound sense. This book has surveyed the ways in which popular culture in Britain has changed and developed during a period of more than two thousand years. This change has arisen from innovations which have been consciously adopted, used and diffused through at least some segment of society. Innovations have, very broadly, been of two kinds. First, there have been those which effected a fundamental change in the ways in which goods were made or people reacted to their environment. Each had long-term consequences, preparing the way for other innovations sometimes in very different fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… the traditional beliefs and customs of the medieval and modern peasant are in nine cases out often but the detritus of heathen mythology and heathen worship … village festivals … are but fragments of naive cults addressed by a primitive folk to the beneficent deities of field, wood and river. Les fêtes, les jeux, la danse, la musique, le théâtre, les repas de noces ou de funerailles et surtout l'activité rituelle des groupes de la jeunesse locale et des défunts du village ont pour fonction … de redéfinir fréquemment pour chacun le sens d'appartenance au groupe. In chapter 8 brief mention was made of the games and rituals with which people in a local community enlivened their dull lives and induced a sense, if not of well-being, at least of camaraderie. It is appropriate to examine the assumptions and beliefs, the mentalité of ordinary people, which subsumed these activities, and, in so far as this is possible, to trace their origins as far back as practicable. The world-view of traditional peoples was underpinned by the tacit assumption that there were forces external to mankind which could in some way shape human destiny. Both the regularities of nature, the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the movements of the planets and the procession of the seasons, no less than its irregularities, like the apparent randomness of weather and the incidence of epidemic disease, called for explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Times of great sickness and illnes, agues abounding more then in all my remembrance, last yeare and this also; feavers spotted rise in the contry; whether it arise from a distempered and infected aire I know not, but fruite rottes on ye trees as last yeare, though more, and many cattle die of ye murraine. People in pre-industrial Britain saw themselves as living always in ‘the valley of the shadow of death’. Life was dominated by the prospect of death. Disease was rampant; malnutrition general, accidents frequent, and the expectation of life short.1 Nowhere was this expressed more powerfully that in medieval iconography and illustration. And, since the only examples that most people were ever likely to see, at least before the later sixteenth century, were to be found in their local parish churches, it is to wall-paintings and stained glass that we must turn in the first instance. They all display a restricted number of motifs. Window-glass was made and the designs composed in urban workshops, but wall-paintings were spread over the rendered interior walls of churches by craftsmen who travelled from parish to parish with their limited repertoire of motifs which they repeated with little modification from one church to another. Representations of mortality These motifs were redolent of death. The wheel of fortune was a symbolic representation of the ages of human life, ending with death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The family is the first refuge of the individual when the state fails him. The family was an open-ended, low-keyed, unemotional, authoritarian institution which served certain essential political, economic, sexual, procreative, and nurturant purposes. In 1676 the Reverend William Sampson was inducted into the living of Clayworth in Nottinghamshire. From the first he kept a diary in which he recorded significant events within his parish. Very wisely, he began by compiling a list of his parishioners. He counted 401 heads, and noted that there were ‘no popish recusants … nor are there (thanks to God) any other dissenters’. Twelve years later he compiled a second list, this time with greater care and ‘according to ye Order of Houses & Families, down ye North side of ye town, & up ye South-Side, and lastly those of Wyeston’, a hamlet nearby. In his second census he was at pains to give the occupations and interrelationships of those who made up the 91 households within the parish. The result is a complex pattern of familial structures. Of the 91 households the great majority were nuclear, each consisting of parents and children with at most a servant living in. Thirteen were headed by a widow or widower with children. There were only four single-person households, three of them widows, one with a servant living in. There was little evidence in Clayworth that the extended family included grandchildren and other relatives, but in no less than 26 there were servants, some of whom must have been farm labourers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Such a run of wet seasons as we have had the last ten or eleven years would have produced a famine a century or two ago. In traditional Britain the choice of foodstuffs was severely limited. Most people ate only what their local area produced, and even then, they largely confined themselves to what it could produce most easily and abundantly. The volume of the crop was more important than its quality, for they lived for much of their lives on the edge of starvation. It was cereal crops which, under conditions prevailing in traditional societies, yielded most abundantly and most reliably, and it was on the breadgrains that most people depended for the greater part of their food supply. The bread throughout the land [wrote William Harrison] is made of such grain as the soil yieldeth, the gentility commonly provide themselves sufficiently of wheat for their own tables, whilst their household and poor neighbors in some shires are enforced to content themselves with rye or barley; yea, and in time of dearth, many with bread made either of beans, peason, or oats, or all together and some acorns among … The factors governing diet, that is the variety and the relative abundance of foodstuffs, were many. Among them the local soil and terrain were of foremost importance. Without anything beyond an empirical knowledge of agronomy and soil science, people had learned to adapt their cropping systems as far as was practicable to local conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methods of construction filtered down in the course of time from one stratum of society to another. There can have been few occasions in the course of recorded history when physical standards of well-being fell as sharply and as profoundly as they did after the legions had been withdrawn from Britain. But it may be questioned whether this was equally true of all levels of society. It is possible that the end of Roman rule was as little marked on the western and northern fringes of Britain as its establishment had been some four centuries earlier. There is, indeed, good evidence to suppose that the material culture of the late pre-Roman Iron Age continued with little significant change, not only through the centuries of Roman rule but also into those of the Anglo-Saxon conquest which followed. In cultural terms, the end of Roman rule was marked by the elimination of the upper strata of late Roman society. Villas were abandoned because the economic structure which had supported them had disintegrated. Towns ceased to be centres of urban life because their crafts and trade were no longer needed by a society increasingly rural and self-sufficient and because the machinery of government, which had centred in them, had disappeared. In Britain, there ceased, in any cultural sense, to be an élite. Material standards fell. It was not that villas and public buildings were no longer built; those that already existed were not even maintained in usable condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Except in summer, the traditional house was cold and draughty, and at all times dark and gloomy. Its doors and windows admitted more air than light and gave little protection against the intruder. For most people their security lay in the paucity of goods worth stealing. People spent much of their time out of doors. Houses were for eating and sleeping, and only during the dark days of winter would people have spent much time within them. In the course of the later Middle Ages and early modern times, however, household furniture increased; domestic comforts, like cushions and curtains and decorated walls, became more common, and by small increments a house was slowly turned into a home. The central hearth Before the sixteenth century most homes had only a single hearth, centrally placed within the hall. A midde the halle flor A fier, stark and store Was light and brende bright. It was usually made of small stones set on edge, but sometimes of stone slabs, and occasionally of fire-hardened clay. Here a fire smouldered and was rarely allowed to go out because there was no ready means of lighting it again. Should it be extinguished, it had generally to be relighted with embers carried from a neighbouring house. This was a hazardous undertaking, and the rolls of the coroners's courts occasionally contain references to the disastrous consequences of the careless handling of a burning brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I know not how it may be with others Who sit amid relics of householdry, That date from the days of their mothers' mothers, But well I know how it is with me Continually I see the hands of the generations That owned each shiny familiar thing In play on its knobs and indentations, And with its ancient fashioning Still dallying. A comfortable and well-furnished home was for most classes of society a product of the nineteenth century. The history of the home, like that of the house, has been one of innovation at the higher and richer levels of society and of imitation at the lower. This downward spread of standards of comfort, if not always of good taste, was made possible by a rising level of real wealth, and in this there can be little doubt but that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries marked a turning-point. It was then, for the first time at least since the beginning of the Middle Ages, that the real incomes of the rural classes – yeoman, copyholder, husbandman – showed any appreciable increase, giving them a disposable surplus and a discretionary power over its use. It was during this period that the forms of domestic life which have remained with us ever since were first developed. Tables, benches and chairs, cupboards and sideboards began to assume their familiar shapes. The solar or parlour developed distinct from the hall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The civilization of Roman Britain was neither merely provincial nor merely cosmopolitan, neither Celtic nor Roman simply, but a fusion of the two, though an imperfect and unstable fusion, whose elements were mixed in varying proportions in different social strata and in different parts of the country. The Roman invasion of ad 43 had been presaged, not only by Julius Caesar's forays a century earlier, but also by the growing commercial and cultural ties between Britain and the nearby continent. It was, indeed, the closeness of these ties and the fear that an independent Britain might stimulate rebellion in Gaul that led to the Claudian invasion. The course of the conquest of much of Britain which followed gave further emphasis to that threefold division of the island that has already been mentioned (p. 6). By ad 47–8 the Romans had overrun south-eastern Britain and had established a military base near the present town of Colchester as well as forts elsewhere to hold the conquered territory. Their advance was halted, if only momentarily, along the line of the Jurassic escarpment. From its edge they could, metaphorically at least, look down on to the clay-floored and forested Midlands. Along this line they built a series of segments of roads, later linked to form the Fosse Way. It became a military road from Lindum (Lincoln) to its original south-western termination on Lyme Bay, later moved to Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… The true centre of a people's interest and passion can be judged by the nature of the buildings to which they will devote most labour and most material. With these Iron Age tribesmen it was not ancestral tombs, not temples, to which they showed this passion but military fortifications. Danebury is a hilltop amid the rolling chalk downland of northern Hampshire, and, like many such hills in Wessex, it is crowned by the banks and ditches of a prehistoric settlement. Danebury is no larger, no better preserved than dozens of such hillforts in southern Britain (Fig. 1.1). What makes it different from others is that it has been excavated, thoroughly if not completely, using the most up-to-date archaeological techniques. The result is that we know a very great deal about the people who cut the ditches, built the ramparts, and erected their huts within the security which they offered. We can handle the tools they used; we can walk the fields they cultivated; we can, up to a point, understand how they tilled the land and evaluate their food supply. In short, archaeology reveals much of the material culture of these distant people. But there is much that the excavation of Danebury does not tell us, and there are many subjects that are only faintly illuminated. We know little of the social structure of its inhabitants, and almost nothing of their customs, cults and religious beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author wishes to express his thanks to the many friends who have assisted him in the preparation of this book. In particular he is indebted to Dr Martin Millett of the University of Durham for his critical reading of the first three chapters; to Mrs E. L. Wetton for much sound advice, and to Mrs Christine North, Cornwall County Archivist, for her help with documentary sources. But errors and prejudices are all his own. The colophons at the head of each of the twelve substantive chapters represent the ‘labours of the months’, in order, beginning with January at the head of chapter 1. They have been drawn from the late Anglo-Saxon manuscript British Library Cott. Jul. A. vi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]