The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750-1850 by John Rule

Author:John Rule [Rule, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781317871972
Google: -SasAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-21T01:22:03+00:00

Chapter 9

Popular Recreation

Two differing approaches to eighteenth-century leisure put forward by Professor Plumb and by E. P. Thompson can serve as convenient approaches to the subject, although neither was intended as a response to the other. We can also look at a third approach by Hans Medick which seems in some respects to suggest interesting links between the other two. Thompson is concerned specifically with the recreational culture of the lower orders, deliberately labelling a distinctive ‘plebeian culture’. The pastimes of the ‘plebs’ included those nonliterate ‘rude’ sports such as wrestling, cudgelling, football, quoits, bell-ringing, bear- and badger-baiting and cockfighting. Such activities revolved around the agricultural calendar, weekly markets and hiring fairs, or in the case of manufacturing workers were associated with ‘St Monday’. Thompson presents this culture in the eighteenth century as not only distinctive, but vigorous. Professor Plumb is interested in the commercialisation of leisure, the early development of a leisure industry. This is seen as among the most evident indicators of an eighteenth-century revolution in consumption dependent upon the increase in the number of people having both spare time and some money to indulge recreational pursuits. He is interested in the spread of literature, the arts, theatre and promoted sports like prize fighting and horse racing. All these entertainments involved spending by consumers. He has argued that the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a great increase in the provision of such activities as the basis of a leisure culture, which although belonging essentially to the middle class was in the process of downward extension to a significant degree.1

These two views, the one emphasising the perpetuation of the traditional and vulgar, and the other commercialisation, are capable of co-existence to the extent that one describes a predominantly rural-based culture while the other relates mostly to towns. The point of conflict is Plumb’s assertion that the new bourgeois culture was, from the late seventeenth century, driving both the proletarian vulgar culture and that of the patrician elite into small enclaves, for Thompson asserts that for a variety of reasons the traditional pursuits of the people were especially strong and resilient in the eighteenth century. Not until the nineteenth, and then by identifiable forces, were they weakened. His plebeian culture of the eighteenth century encompasses more than simply popular recreational forms, although these play an important and integrated role in his model of a popular culture which represented a whole way of life in which recreations were a necessary part. He finds for the common people of the eighteenth century a ‘comparative freedom’ which invigorated popular culture: ‘This is the century which sees the erosion of half-free forms of labour, the decline of living-in, the final extinction of labour services and the advance of free, mobile, wage labour.’2 Capitalism’s need for a labour force responsive to the money wage and mobile to follow the needs of the labour market, necessarily meant an interim period in which old forms of control eroded before newer forms of social control and of industrial discipline reformed the basis for hegemony.

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