By Rite

Political philosophers (such as Gramsci) and social historians (such as E. P. Thompson) have suggested that rural customs and ceremonies have much more to them than the picturesqueness which has attracted traditional folklorists. They can be seen to have a purpose in the structures of rural society. But no historian has really pursued this idea for the English folk materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the period from which most evidence survives.

Bringing together a wealth of research, this book explores the view that such rural folk practices were a mechanism of social cohesion, and social disruption. Through them the interdependence of the rural working-class and the gentry was affirmed, and infringements of the rights of the poor resisted, sometimes aggressively.

By Rite represents the results of detailed research in a wide range of sources, including the local Press, Antiquarian and Field Studies papers, county journals, local collections and archives throughout England and Wales.

Dr Bob Bushaway worked for thirty years as a University manager, part-time Adult Education tutor and was the founding Director of Research and Enterprise Services at the University of Birmingham. He completed his doctoral research at the University of Southampton and has continued to research and publish on English rural life and culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a particular emphasis on popular custom and belief. Bob regularly teaches social history classes for HEIs, WEA and schools and colleges and has continued to publish and perform in the field of folk studies including the supervision of a group of postgraduate research students. He broadcasts regularly and has appeared on TV, including the Channel 4 series About Time. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He lives and works in Birmingham.