Ronald Hutton - The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain

The Stations of the Sun

A HISTORY OF THE RITUAL YEAR IN BRITAIN

Ronald Hutton is Professor in History at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1989), The Restoration, A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658-1667 (1993), The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (1994), and The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999).

The Stations of the Sun

A HISTORY OF THE RITUAL YEAR IN BRITAIN

Ronald Hutton

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Ronald Hutton 1996

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First published 1996 by Oxford University Press
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1997
Reissued 2001

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ISBN 0-19-285448-8

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TO LISA

as promised
twelve years ago

T HERE is a peculiar charm to be found in the reading of a book such as this. It is redolent of the English countryside, its inarticulate love of ancient things, its immemorial speech, its stubborn resistance to the encroachments of changing Time. So wrote the reigning president of the Folk-Lore Society, Professor S. H. Hooke, in 1936. The work which he was commending consisted of a large collection of information about English calendar customs made by a former president, A. R. Wright, edited after his death by a colleague and published by the society in three volumes. A comparable edition for Scotland was brought out during the following few years. The result was a huge, though very far from complete, amount of raw material for a history of the ritual year in Britain, presented in individual entries according to source and almost devoid of comment or analysis. Today, over half a century later, they still represent the staple work on the subject. No attempt to employ and to assess the data comprehensively, and to write such a history, has ever been made.

There have, on the other hand, been a great many studies of individual calendar customs or groups of them, and until recently almost all embodied the attitudes expressed by Professor Hooke. First, such activities were of the countryside, part of an agricultural society much older than, and being destroyed by the expansion of, urban and industrial culture. Secondly, they were immemorial, preserved unchanging over the centuries. Thirdly, they were inarticulate, the people who performed them often being incapable of explaining their true significance, so that this task had to be undertaken by scholars. Fourthly, they were ancient, a term which was most often taken by folklorists to mean that they were survivals of pre-Christian religious practices, which could in large part be reconstructed by a study of them. All of these notions enjoyed some academic respectability at the beginning of the twentieth century, having been propounded in England most prominently by Sir Edward Tylor, Sir Laurence Gomme, and Sir James Frazer. By the 1930s the consensus among historians and anthropologists had turned decisively against them, but those disciplines did not evolve new conceptual approaches to the study of folklore. Instead, they abandoned the whole subject to enthusiasts from other disciplines (or none), who continued to interpret calendar customs in the old terms, and who dominated the discussion of folk rites and practices, and the public perception of them, until the 1970s. In that decade the very popular series of books on county folklore edited by Venetia Newall, for Batsford, treated seasonal customs as survivals from an almost wholly amorphous past, with virtually no sense of chronological perspective. So did coffee-table volumes upon the subject like those by Homer Sykes, Brian Shuel, and the Readers Digest team. Other works from these years, such as Ralph Whitlocks In Search of Lost Gods, played up the theme of pagan origins without any further attempt to investigate it; the search consisted of no more than a portrayal of surviving customs.

It was during the 1970s that my own interest in folklore caused me to project a study of the British ritual year which challenged the attitudes encapsulated by Professor Hooke on every count. It seemed clear that, far from being definitively rural, many seasonal pastimes had flourished in or around industrial towns. It was equally plain that some had altered their form and content during the time over which they had been recorded, in response to changing social needs. Their purpose at particular moments was therefore all-important, and their practitioners had often been extremely articulate in explaining this. Finally, the claim that they were relics of ancient pagan religions needed to be examined from historical evidence, not just asserted from supposition or analogy. By 1981 I had mapped out a plan of research and discussed it with colleagues and publishers, but did not wish to commit myself wholly to it at that stage. For one thing I had also undertaken major research projects into the history of the Restoration period. For another, the sheer scale of study involved, and the number of fields with which it overlapped, meant that too rapid a pace was likely to produce a shamefully inadequate result. I decided therefore to work upon both big ventures, Restoration Britain and the ritual year, for a decade, testing my ideas as they developed by giving papers and publishing essays. This scheme was pursued until 1985, during which time my research for the book on rituals yielded an article upon early modern popular culture for History Today and an essay in the volume edited by Christopher Haigh under the title The English Reformation Revised