Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Inventing Law and Doing Justice
- 1 Law, Symbolism and Punishment
- 2 Localism, Justice and the Right to Judge
- 3 The Forms of Rough Music
- 4 Sex, Gender and Moral Policing
- 5 Defending Economic Interests
- 6 Political Resistance
- 7 Resistive Communities
- 8 Performance and Proscription
- Aftermath
- Select Bibliography
- Index
5 - Defending Economic Interests
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Inventing Law and Doing Justice
- 1 Law, Symbolism and Punishment
- 2 Localism, Justice and the Right to Judge
- 3 The Forms of Rough Music
- 4 Sex, Gender and Moral Policing
- 5 Defending Economic Interests
- 6 Political Resistance
- 7 Resistive Communities
- 8 Performance and Proscription
- Aftermath
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the previous chapter I considered those instances of rough music that were mainly said to have been inspired by inappropriate conduct in the fields of sexual or gender relations. Wife-beaters, wife-sellers, husband-beaters, adulterers, old men who snatched away young women – these were the people who offended the parish. However, the case of the Westonbirt ‘groaning’ has already suggested that manifestations of rough music might not always have been the result of disinterested moral outrage. In this chapter I intend to focus more on rough music or street justice employed not so much as an expression of general sentiment, but rather as a tool of particular constituencies of opinion or vested interest. The broad conflicts between the orders will be dealt with in Chapter 6. Here, I shall focus on individuals or smaller interest or occupational groups who often deployed the same symbolism and theatrical practice as we observed in the previous chapter but who, in protecting their own situations or advancing their own causes, turned the culture of public shaming and retribution against rather different targets. In order to do so, however, they had to seize control of public space and direct the behaviours of those within it. Some understanding of how they were able to do this may in part be gleaned by a brief consideration of the flammability of the crowd in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Informal Justice in England and Wales, 1760–1914The Courts of Popular Opinion, pp. 107 - 126Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014