Tradition and Agrarian Protest in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales

Thomas Pettitt have published articles in Folklore that advance the suggestions made over twenty years ago by Mr Smith.2 Both Simms and Pettitt concentrate on the role of traditional drama in a diversity of social protests spanning considerable periods of time, and provide a number of observations no less valuable for the historical generalising they necessarily involve. Pettitt points out the need for studies of these matters from the perspective of the social historian as well as that of the folklorist. The essay presented here is an attempt to do just that through a study of the folklore elements within some significant agrarian disturbances in England and Wales during the nineteenth century. This research and the conclusions arising from it will hopefully add something useful to our knowledge of an area that has continued to attract scholarly interest. The specific aims of this essay are to discern and examine the ways in which folkloric elements informed the development and determined the forms of notable incidents of English and Welsh agrarian protest between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the middle of the nineteenth century. More importantly, in the process of doing this I hope to demonstrate some fundamental connections between a particular social group, certain aspects of the folklore that group generates or espouses, and the uses to which that folklore is put in the context of resistance to perceived oppression. Before continuing, a number of the assumptions and ideas which underpin the work should be clarified. The most important of these is the existence, in England and Wales, of a folk culture possessing a concept of moral order distinct from that which, from the mid-eighteenth century, increasingly informed the machinations of government and the general administration of public order. In the context of the eighteenth-century food riot, E.P Thompson has identified this alternative concept of order as the 'moral