Custom, Festival and Protest in Early Modern England: The Little Budworth Wakes, St Peter's Day, 1596
The myriad forms of ‘popular culture’ have attracted an increasing amount of attention from historians of early modern and modern England. Students of English social relations are now familiar with several episodes of ‘cultural conflict’ in which there was putative friction between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ (or ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’) notions of acceptable behaviour. As the epigraphs to this article suggest, two particular era of ‘cultural polarisation’ have attracted considerably more attention than any others. On the one hand, historians of the Reformation, and especially of its ‘enforcement’ in late Elizabethan and Jacobean local communities, have identified the suppression of traditional, festive culture as one of the ‘cultural reverberations’ of the spread of protestantism. On the other, Edward Thompson has encouraged students of eighteenth-century England to think in terms of a tension between ‘patrician society’ and ‘plebeian culture’, and of the possibilities that this ‘field of force’ raised for ‘class struggle without class’.