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The Invention of the Modern World 7.

Spring-Summer Serial 2012.

Chapter 7: CULTURE

 By Alan Macfarlane.

ONE SIGN OF ‘modernity’ is the importance of competitive games and sports. Here we find one of the earliest and most important of British exports, including the games which can claim to be the new world religion – cricket and football. India is united by cricket, and Brazil by football. Games both teach competition and channel it at the same time, express similarity and difference, sharpen the wits, teach team spirit and the joint pursuit of a common goal. Playing games of all kinds was a hugely important and old phenomenon in Britain – we see it in art, literature and other sources from the Middle Ages. To a very considerable extent, the ‘imagined Empire’ of Britain was held together by games.

Games, sport and hobbies are an essential mirror of capitalism. In Britain there are large areas which are fenced off from the direct intrusion of competitive consumer capitalism – sport, leisure, nature, love – in which commercial pres­sures in theory should not dominate. These provide excitement and relaxation, but in a way that is different from the daily grind of ‘work’.

Such relaxation cannot be ‘afforded’ for the majority of people in most societies. Most people have been too hard-worked and ill fed to be able to devote much time to purely leisure activities of no economic benefit, except on special holidays. When I arrived in a mountain village in Nepal, I remember my surprise that the Gurungs had no indigenous sports or games – apart from running and throwing a rock. Nor were there any obvious hobbies.

So one of the distinctive features of modernity is that games, sports and hobbies are widespread and highly valued. We just have to think of what is on international television – the obsession with football, cricket, baseball, snooker, the wide range of sports represented in the Olympics and the vast scale of sports accessories. Modern society is saturated with aspects of Homo Ludens. Where did all this come from?

Many have observed that the English are particularly obsessed with games playing and have been for many centuries. In terms of games, it is well known that many of the world’s competitive team games were either invented, or perfected and institutionalised in England. Paxman gives a good overview:

The word “soccer”, the world sport, is public-school slang for Association Football. Baseball is a form of the English children’s game rounders, American football a version of rugby … Tennis was redeveloped by the Marylebone Cricket Club (i.e. Lord’s) and the first of the world-famous tournaments was held in 1877. Englishmen set the standard distances for running, swimming and rowing competitions and developed the first modern horse-races. Contemporary hockey dates from the codification of rules by the Hockey Association in 1886, competitive swimming from the formation of the English Amateur Swimming Association in 1869, modern mountaineering can be dated from the 1854 attempt on the Wetterhorn by Sir Alfred Wills. The English invented goalposts, racing boats and stopwatches and were the first to breed modern racehorses. Even when they imported sports from abroad, like polo or skiing, the English laid down the rules.1

And this does not even include the most characteristic, namely cricket, about which Paxman writes at length. Nowadays England has some very good computer games companies (e.g. the makers of Grand Theft Auto) and also excellent board games (for example, the very capitalist game Monopoly).

IN THE EARLY eighteenth century, for example, Saussure wrote:

Another amusement which is very inconvenient to passers-by is football. For this game a leather ball filled with air is used, and is kicked about with the feet’. And on the next page he described the other national sport: ‘The English are very fond of a game they call cricket. For this purpose they go into a large open field, and knock a small ball about with a piece of wood. I will not attempt to describe this game to you, it is too complicated; but it requires agility and skill, and everyone plays it, the common people and also men of rank. Sometimes one county plays against another county. The papers give notice of these meetings beforehand, and, later, tell you which side has come off victorious. Spectators crowd to these games when they are important.’ Furthermore ‘square lawns are kept for this purpose, and are called bowling-greens.2

Saussure also noted another characteristically English past-time which he felt distinguished it from elsewhere – and again it is one that requires a good deal of leisure and spare energy. ‘Another great pleasure of the people is the ringing of bells, and it is a source of great delight to them whenever an opportunity of doing this presents itself. I do not suppose there is a country where bell-ringing is brought to such an art as it is here, where bells are always in chime and in harmony…. A good bell-ringer can ring out more than a thousand different peals and chimes … and the people are so fond of this amusement that they form societies among themselves for carrying it out.’3

The English gentleman was above all distinguished by and dedicated to outdoor sports – shooting, hunting for fox or hare, horse-riding. Much of the history of the English countryside is written in the privileged hunting and fishing of animals.

I REMEMBER JAPANESE friends noting as a major difference between the English and Japanese the English obsession with hobbies.  ‘We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp- collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, cross-world-puzzle fans’. This is ‘another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life’. He suggests that ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea.”’4

I know all this from my personal experience. The boarding schools I attended were obsessed with games, sports and hobbies. Games were, and are for many people functionally analogous to religion; they give a meaning to existence, an explanation of misfortune and a set of rituals to link people together. A.C. Benson, who had taught at a boarding school, implies that in the later nineteenth century games had become the unifying religion of the British people. ‘It requires almost more courage to write about games nowadays than it does to write about the Decalogue, because the higher criticism is tending to make a belief in the Decalogue a matter of taste, while to the ordinary Englishman a belief in games is a matter of faith and morals.’5

Claudio Veliz notes that in the places most deeply influenced by English culture, whether in Boston, Winnipeg or Auckland, the suburbs are inhabited by great numbers of ‘enthusiastic and well-organized amateur astronomers, cat fanciers, train spotters, country-style dancers, pigeon fanciers, bush trekkers, cake decorators, bird-watchers, gardeners, and vintage car enthusiasts than have ever gathered anywhere and at any time to devote so much time and attention to what are, by definition, characteristically non-profitable “hobbies”.’6

Veliz also suggests that games, sports and hobbies have provided that solution to the break-up of ‘community’, in societies previously held together by religion and kinship. He writes that ‘it is possible, with few and heavily qualified exceptions, to assert that modern sports are a by-product of an English Industrial Revolution that created a need for new community arrangements, a substitute for the proximity, the intimacy, and the Gemeinschaft displaced by advancing industrialism.’7 In fact, the games and hobbies and sports were there well before industrialism.

Furthermore games and hobbies fit perfectly with the class system. Different strata have different games, sports and hobbies. There is an aristocratic set, a middle class set, a labouring set – for example public schools play rugby union, other schools enjoy rugby league. Only the wealthy hunt foxes with hounds, only the working class, on the whole, race pigeons. The upper classes fish for edible ‘game’ fish like salmon and trout; the working class fish for inedible ‘coarse’ fish.

THE QUALITIES WE were meant to learn at school were exactly those which it was thought would fit us for success as entrepreneurs, lawyers, teachers, soldiers – bravery, self-confidence, independence of thought, risk-taking, skills of co-operation, enthusiasm, ability to lose with good grace and the concepts of fair play. We were to learn, through simulation in a context where money would not be won or lost, the cunning and other necessities of a capitalist nature. Taine notes the close association between the obsession with competitive money making and sport through betting on horses. ‘As for the reasons which make horses and horse-racing into a universal national passion, it seems to me that we must look for them in the rustic, athletic life they lead. The rich, and the well-to-do spend a great part of the year in the country … all these attributes of their way of living (moeurs) culminate in the Derby, which is their special festival’. 8

Law cases were another form of competitive game – trying to outwit and vanquish the opponent – but with words rather than with a bat or ball. Likewise many have noted that confrontational politics as practised most overtly in the debates in the House of Commons is like a game. Tocqueville noted: ‘No people carry so far, especially when speaking in public, violence of language, outrageousness of theories, and extravagance in the inferences drawn from those theories. Thus your A.B. says, that the Irish have not shot half enough landlords. Yet no people act with more moderation. A quarter of what is said in England at a public meeting, or even round a dinner table, without anything being done or intended to be done, would in France announce violence, which would almost always be more furious than the language had been’.9

The competitive underpinning of western, particularly English and American, capitalism was particularly apparent to those who encountered it in the middle of the nineteenth century. One of these was the Japanese philosopher and modernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi. When he came to translate a basic treatise on western market capitalism, he was faced with a problem which he describes in his Autobiography – and solved it by using the words for competitive racing and warfare.

Fukuzawa described his difficulties with translation: ‘when I came upon the word “competition” for which there was no equivalent in Japanese, and I was obliged to use an invention of my own, “kyoso”, literally, “race-fight”. When the official saw my translation, he appeared much impressed. Then he said suddenly, “here is the word ‘fight’. What does it mean? It is such an unpeaceful word”.’ Fukuzawa tried to explain, but the official refused to take the translation to his superior because the word fight was not conducive to peace. Fukuzawa then commented acidly. ‘I suppose he would rather have seen some such phrase as “men being kind to each other” in a book on economics, or a man’s loyalty to his lord, open generosity from a merchant in times of national stress, etc. But I said to him, “if you do not agree to the word ‘fight,’ I am afraid I shall have to erase it entirely. There is no other term that is faithful to the original.”’10

Yet alongside this very unpeaceful ‘race-fight’ with which Fukuzawa translated the quintessence of capitalism, there was another more peaceful and co-operative side. Competitive capitalists when trying to catch the largest fish, grow the largest vegetable, collect the largest set of stamps or race the fastest sailing boat, need people to be competitive with. They need to collaborate and share and compare, so all these activities were centred round friendships, groups, clubs and mutual recognition of skills and achievements.

THE MULTIFARIOUS CLUBS, associations, hobbies and sports were given extra strength by the presence of those quintessentially English phenomena, the English inn and pub. The inn and the public house where a person could meet ‘friends’ are both an expression and a cementing of the patterns of association.

The prevalence of large inns throughout English towns and countryside, where people could stay the night and find food and drink, is a central feature of English social history, much celebrated, for example, in the novels of Charles Dickens. As I know from my own experience, if one travels around England, even if there are kin living near one’s route, one often goes to stay in an inn or ‘bed and breakfast’ rather than ‘putting the family to trouble’.

At the next level was something equally notable, the ubiquity and centrality of the alehouse and pub where drink could be bought and conversation with friends or strangers was possible.  This was supplemented from the middle of the seventeenth century as the new drinks of coffee and tea became popular by the tea and coffee houses found in cities and towns

Harbison notes the oddness of a ‘public place’ which yet feels exclusive, cosy and intimate, where strangers can become temporary friends, where a semi-family atmosphere can emerge.:

There is a remarkable English institution more homey than any home can sensibly be and more old-fashioned, an institution public in a way peculiar to itself. Americans, who forget that pub comes from public, take it for a special sound signifying coziness and contentment, and it becomes an idea so potent no single embodiment can live up to it… Though every European country had village inns, elsewhere they have become gleaming cafés, while in England they are more villagy than ever, more like burrows.11

People with a relatively large disposable income and spare time, not basing their lives on exclusive kinship or caste groupings, needed places to meet and associate. Close friends might come into one’s house. But having a bounded, protected, half-public, half-private space in another person’s house gave people who were unrelated a chance to meet and chat. In effect, every village and town had for many centuries one or several ‘community centres’ at its heart – the village inn, tavern or alehouse.

In the late eighteenth century Rochefoucauld noted the importance of inns as a place for club meetings. ‘The third kind of club is of greater advantage to the class of small labourers whom we call peasants. Here again the meeting-place is an inn, but a village inn or the smallest inn in a town. There the club meets for dinner once a year… These clubs are to be found in every part of England; every country district derives some benefit from them. In the inn in which meetings are held there is a box locked with two keys, with a little slot into which the club members put their money.’12

Burke notes their importance.

The taverns have been and still are centres of political debate, of argument on technical developments in literature and painting, of discussions on moral philosophy and religion, of gossip (and no doubt slander) and of all that piquant or pungent and always extravagant pleasantry which the most staid Englishman can release in his hours of ease. And they still are a part of the social life of a large section of the community, not only as rendezvous for recreation but as Lodges of the various Friendly and benevolent Societies and of Slate Clubs [a group of people who save money in a common fund for a specific purpose – usually distributed at Christmas], and as the headquarters of clubs covering all manner of interests from angling and pigeon-fancying to chrysanthemum-growing and archaeology and bowls.

The inn or pub was also used for legal and political meetings. ‘It was regularly used, and sometimes still is, as a Coroner’s Court, as a Churchwardens’ Court, as a Court for the election of borough officers, and even Quarter Sessions have been, as late as mid-Victorian times, held at the inn … the election of borough officers was almost always held at the inn, and was always followed by a dinner debited against the town’s rates.’13

 

THE ENGLISH ARE widely known as a nation of pet-keepers, as well as shopkeepers.14 Kate Fox writes,

Keeping pets, for the English, is not so much a leisure activity as an entire way of life… An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but his dog is the real king…. They get far more attention, affection, appreciation, encouragement and “quality time” than our children, and often better food…. We had the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals long before the establishment of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children…’15

This tradition of pet-keeping seems to go back a long way. Keith Thomas points out that ‘pet-keeping had been fashionable among the well-to-do in the Middle Ages’.16 We learn of lapdogs, birds, rabbits, hounds, caged birds, squirrels and monkeys, for instance.17 About the rest of the population we have little evidence, but as soon as they become visible in the records, pets are widespread. Thus Thomas concludes that ‘it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that pets seemed to have really established themselves as a normal feature of the middle-class household’.18 Thomas Ady in 1656 listed rats, mice, dormice, rabbits, birds, grasshoppers, caterpillars and snakes, as both ‘lawful and common among very innocent and harmless people’ as pets. He even told of a Gentleman who ‘did once keep in a Box a Maggot that came out of a Nut, till it grew to an incredible bigness’.19 The range was very wide, therefore, and it may be mistaken, as Thomas argues, to believe that taste in pets grew more catholic in the eighteenth century.20

It is more difficult to obtain some idea of the incidence of pets, but two indications of the extent of the keeping of domestic animals can be given. In his seventeenth century pictorial encyclopaedia for children, Comenius gave a picture of a house and its animals; these included the dog, cat, and squirrel, ape and monkey which ‘are kept at home for delight’.21 Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year describes how almost every house in London had a dog and several cats,22 though here, as elsewhere, we face difficult problems of defining what exactly a ‘pet’ is. If it is regarded as non-utilitarian, like a flower garden, we nevertheless find that by the sixteenth century in the large middling ranks of society many had rabbits, weasels, ferrets, monkeys, parrots, squirrels, muskrats, toy dogs, and other pets.23 If it is certainly the case that by ‘1700 all the symptoms of obsessive pet keeping were in evidencs’,24 it could well be argued that strong indications of such an obsession were present several centuries earlier, as soon as we have sufficient documentation to be able to note pets. It is clear from this that the phenomenon developed well before urbanization and industrialization could have had much effect. Widespread pet keeping is a by-product of something deeper than the changes of the eighteenth century.

At one point Thomas links the psychological function of pets to their attractiveness within a modern, atomistic, kinship system.25 This intriguing suggestion could be broadened. In the majority of societies, a combination of early marriage, constant childbearing, the close physical and emotional presence of numerous kin, together provide the emotional satisfactions which many people now find in their pets. As we shall see, this individualistic kinship and marriage system is old in England, probably dating in its central features to at least the thirteenth century if not before. It is not difficult to see that pet-keeping and a fondness for nature are early and related phenomena. Just as English children were luxuries, regarded as superior pets,26 so English pets were luxuries, regarded as alternative children. Another theory is that they give members of ‘the lonely crowd’ some warmth and a simple uncomplicated relationship: ‘for many of us, they represent our only significant experience of open, unguarded, emotional involvement with another sentient being.’27

The boundaries between the animal and the human, and between the exploitation and preservation of species are complex. We see in England over the centuries that through a careful classification of the world into tame and wild, edible and inedible, it was possible for our ancestors, as it still is for us, to be meat-eaters, bear-baiters and fox hunters and yet greatly devoted to particular animals and concerned with animal cruelty.

IF WE TURN from animals to plants, we may consider the ‘Gardening Revolution’. It is indeed true that the English are unusually enthusiastic domestic gardeners. Fox suggests that ‘Gardening is probably the most popular hobby in the country – at the last count, over two-thirds of the population were described as “active gardeners”,’28 It is also true that the content of their gardens altered dramatically over the centuries. We are told that ‘in 1500 there were perhaps 200 kinds of cultivated plant in England. Yet in 1839 the figure was put at 18,000’. But because there were few cultivated species to choose from before 1500, this does not mean that flower gardening was uncommon. There were commercial plant sellers from at least the thirteenth century and we are assured that ‘more flower-gardening had gone on in the Middle Ages than is sometimes appreciated’, even though the ‘repertoire seems to have been fairly limited’.29

This repertoire was limited by what was native to England and Europe, but it is symptomatic of the innate enthusiasm that as soon as it became possible to vary the plants by importing exotic species from newly discovered America and the widening contacts with Africa and Asia, people enthusiastically did so. William Harrison in the later sixteenth century marvelled at the English garden which had been ‘wonderfully’ increased in its beauty not only with flowers but also with ‘herbs, plants, and annual fruits’ which ‘are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americas, Taprobane (Ceylon), Canary Isles, and all parts of the world’. As a result ‘there is not almost one nobleman, gentleman, or merchant that hath not great store of these flowers’. Harrison, an Essex vicar, concluded by boasting a little of his own garden  ‘Which is but small and the whole area thereof little above three hundred foot of ground, and yet, such hath been my good luck in purchase of the variety of simples, that, notwithstanding my small ability, there are very near three hundred of one sort and other contained therein, no one of them being common or usually to be had’.30

The enthusiasm for gardening, from the small cottage garden to the large garden of the gentry house, which is such a striking and characteristic feature of England even up to the present, was clearly indicated from the earliest detailed records of the sixteenth century. We are told that ‘Elizabethans did not spend any more time indoors than necessary, for they were lovers of gardens if they loved their homes’, and Pearson provides extensive accounts of the gentry and merchant gardens of the time.31 Contemporary treatises on gardening began to be published as soon as printing became common, for instance, Thomas Hill’s A Most Briefe and Pleasaunt Treatyse, Teachynge Howe to Dress, Save and Set a Garden in 1563. The poetry of the Elizabethans, and in particular Spenser and Shakespeare, as well as the central motif of the Garden of Eden as the fount of innocence and pleasure, all indicate the widespread absorption with natural beauty in the shape of flowers and trees. As the philosopher Bacon argued in his essay ‘Of Gardens’ in the early seventeenth century, ‘God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which, buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks’.32

Such appreciation was not limited to the wealthy. There is evidence that middling folk were keen gardeners. Writing of the English yeoman in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century, Mildred Campbell concluded that ‘already gardens, that happy result of the Englishman’s climate and his skill, added beauty and colour for a part of the year to the farm and village scene’. She alludes to the record made by a neighbour of all the flowers that were in bloom in the garden of a certain ‘Goodwife Cantrey’, a Northamptonshire yeoman’s wife, on 28 July 1658. These included ‘double and single larkspurs; double and single Sweet Williams; three kinds of spiderwort; lupin in four colours; purple and white “scabious”; marigolds; Life Everlasting; London pride; “hollioakes” (hollyhocks); and many other well-known favourites.’ She also had a wide range of medicinal plants like fennel, camomile, rue and white lilies. 33

It is, of course, difficult to know how widespread gardening and the love of flowers was, but Thomas gives several pieces of evidence to suggest that it was indeed spread down to very ordinary people in the seventeenth century. He quotes John Worlidge who in 1677 wrote that ‘in most parts of the southern parts of England’, there was scarce a cottage’ which was without ‘its proportionable garden, so great a delight do most of men take in it’. A few years earlier, a book on flower gardening intended chiefly for ‘plain and ordinary countrymen and. women’ had been published and the first impression was sold out in three months.34 We can be sure that the widespread and enthusiastic interest in flowers and gardens is present well before the growth of cities and industrialism in the second half of the eighteenth century. Again, we must try to explain it by something that is present in England before the seventeenth century.

As for the aesthetics of the English garden, this also expresses something special. Pevsner devotes part of one of his lectures on the Englishness of English Art to English landscape gardening. ‘The English Garden… is asymmetrical, informal, varied, and made of such a parts as the serpentine lake, the winding drive and winding path, the trees grouped in clumps, and smooth lawn… The English garden is English in a number of profoundly significant ways not yet touched upon. First the simplest way: formally the winding path and the serpentine lake are the equivalents of Hogarth’s Line of Beauty, that long, gentle, double curve… Hogarth … says that they “lead the eye a wanton kind of chase.”‘35 It is full of surprises and concealments, whereas ‘On the Continent neither naturalness nor surprise in gardening appeared before the great invasion of the mid eighteenth century.’36 I have found in my own experience that the pattern of irregular, concealed, natural garden, with surprises, winding paths an irregular pond, all give me special delight.37

I HAVE SUGGESTED that England was not characterized by sharp divisions or oppositions in its geography, class, urban-rural, or other aspects. Rather there was a strong overlap or continuum between different parts. It is worth examining this in relation to the anthropological idea of the ‘Great’ and ‘Little’ traditions, or the high and low culture discussed by historians such as Peter Burke.38 Strong oppositions or gaps occur in peasant societies, where there is a great difference between an urban, literate, upper-class culture and that of the oral village community. So you find a thriving ‘folk’ culture in many parts of China, India, Latin America and much of continental Europe, including parts of the Celtic fringe.

The richness of local traditions of song and dance, of local costumes, of regional foods and drinks, of customs concerning courtship, weddings and deaths, of material culture such as furniture and tools, and of folklore as shown in myths, legends, stories and proverbs, as well as local dialects, can be seen in many books on oral cultures, and physically manifested in the great ‘Folk’ museums of France, Italy, Portugal, Austria and Scandinavia.

In England, however, there does not seem to have been such a sharp separation between high and low. England was from at least the medieval period a geographically unified, stratified society, with an interweaving of the country and the town, with widespread penetration of writing, money, national language and laws into all of the countryside.  This explains why the mentality, morality and material culture that has survived does not show a strong difference between a high and a low culture or a Great and a Little tradition.

Of course there are small elements of local particularity. There are people singing ‘folk songs’ in some Suffolk pubs, a difference in the way a house is thatched or decorated, a certain local accent, a way of making eel traps, a local cheese, a local dance (often relatively recently invented, as was Morris dancing in the seventeenth century). Yet these are mild and relatively small variations compared to what we find in classic peasant or tribal cultures.

For if we look through the list of features of oral, ‘folk’ culture noted above, from dancing to folklore, and check these against English evidence, we draw an almost complete blank. An English ‘folk’ museum, such as that in Cambridge, is in reality a museum of working class life, with an entirely different feel to the continental museums of rural culture. English folk song, as one of its major analysts, A.L. Lloyd, writes, ‘is the musical and poetic expression of the fantasy of the lower classes – and by no means exclusively the country workers.’39 If we examine the work of the British folklorists, we find that it is almost entirely concerned with Celtic, Continental or non-European tribal folklore.40


A video of the lecture on which this chapter is based:

2012 Serial Index: Introduction and Contents | Preface | Bibliography.

Chapter 7 of The Invention of the Modern World by Alan Macfarlane.

© 2012 Alan Macfarlane. All rights reserved.

NOTES (please see the bibliography for citation details):

 

  1. Paxman, English, 194.
  2. Saussure, Foreign, 294-5.
  3. Saussure, Foreign, 295.
  4. Orwell, Lion, 39.
  5. Benson, College, 266. The Decalogue is the Ten Commandments, the central text of Christianity.
  6. Veliz, Gothic, 108.
  7. Veliz, Gothic, 131.
  8. Taine, Notes, 35.
  9. Tocqueville, Memoir, II, 353.
  10. Fukuzawa, Autobiography, 190.
  11. Harbison, Spaces, 27-8.
  12. Rochefoucauld, Frenchman, 245.
  13. Burke, English Inns, 44.
  14. This is based on Macfarlane, Culture, chapter four.
  15. Fox, Watching, 234.
  16. Thomas, Natural, 110.
  17. Salzman, English, 100-2.
  18. Thomas, Natural, 110.
  19. Ady, Candle, 135.
  20. Thomas, Natural, 110.
  21. Comenius, Orbis, 55.
  22. Defoe, Journal, 137.
  23. Pearson, Elizabethans, 19.
  24. Thomas, Natural, 117.
  25. Thomas, Natural, 119.
  26. Macfarlane, Marriage, 54-6.
  27. Fox, Watching, 235.
  28. Fox, Watching, 129.
  29. Thomas, Natural, 226.
  30. Harrison, Description, 265, 270-1.
  31. Pearson, Elizabethans, 58ff.
  32. Bacon, Essays, xlvi.
  33. Campbell, Yeoman, 241.
  34. Thomas, Natural, 228.
  35. Pevsner, Englishness, 174.
  36. Pevsner, Englishness, 176.
  37. See Macfarlane, Letters, 276-7.
  38. Burke, Popular.
  39. Lloyd, Folk, quote on back cover.
  40. See Dorson, Peasant.
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