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Religion and the Decline of Magic. By Keith Thomas. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
1971. xii + 716 pp. 800
The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, A Seventeenth-Century Clergyman. By
Alan Macfarlane. Cambridge University Press. 1970. xiii + 241 pp. 275
two boys at 15. These interesting findings (pp. 92-8) are supplemented by the
very useful Appendix B, which brings additional evidence from conventional
historical and demographic sources to argue that this pattern was widespread,
and most marked in middling economic groups, excluding the wealthy and
the very poor. But Macfarlane is inhibited from a full exploration of this
problem by the supposition that the relevant fact, in the sending out of
children, must be the onset of puberty: 'it is surely more than a coincidence
that it was exactly at this age that they all left home to be subjected to outside
discipline and freed from the incestuous dangers of crowded living.' (p. 92)
(By a similar logic of 'coincidence' one might argue that the progressive
raising of the legal minimum age for factory children in the 19th century was
occasioned by a rising age at puberty). 'Incestuous temptations' (p. 205) is
not, as an explanation, a satisfactory substitute for an examination of the
traditions of education and of 'house-keeping', the institution of apprentice-
ship, and the manifold other factors contributing to the upbringing of
adolescent children at that time.
Macfarlane's preoccupation with the incestuous dangers to which the
Reverend Ralph Josselin's household was exposed were perhaps prompted
by reminiscences of Melanesian islanders; but he is able to call also upon the
findings of sociologists in the 1950s and 1960sin Britain and the U.S.A. Thus
he brings to bear upon the relationship of Ralph Josselin to his wife the
category of 'joint-role relationship', which (in the terms of 1957) was defined
as entertaining together, sharing friends and the care of the children, taking
'joint decisions over matters previously discussed together' (shall we go to
Majorca again this year, darling?), and participating 'generally in one
another's activities'. On the basis of the most slender evidence - Josselin and
his wife fell over together while pulling down a tree (and from this it is
inferred that they 'helped one another in the farm work'), they discussed
together the suitability of their daughters' suitors (from which it is inferred
that 'all important decisions were jointly taken') - Macfarlane comes up
triumphantly with the portentous judgement that 'this marriage could be
classified sociologically as a "joint-role relationship" and described as an
emotional success'. (pp. 108-10.)
If this is indeed so, one can only add: 'so much the worse for sociology'. An
instrument designed for unpicking the inwardness of mid-20th-century
marital adjustments cannot be applied without modification to 17th-century
Essex. There is no evidence that Josselin consulted his wife on any of his
important property transactions, or that he gave way to her judgement on any
of his political or religious decisions, or that they did indeed in any sense share
the 'farm work', or that Mrs. Josselin took any comparable part in disciplin-
ing the refractory adolescent or adult children, or that he consulted her about
his sermons, or that they ever took a holiday together in Majorca. (We do
know that he bequeathed to her some land and personal effects, together with
'three or foure Roomes of the Mancon house wherein I now dwell together
with free ingresse, egress, and regress out of the same'.) Macfarlane has in
fact got into a bad muddle here, by bringing to the problem too lumpish and
unsubtle a category.
THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT 45
Perhaps these muddles, which are inevitable when two disciplines impinge
upon one another, can be fruitful: certainly the related - and even more
profound - muddle about 'patriarchalism' cries out for some resolution. In
this case the anthropological inclination towards a strongly characterized
typology leads Macfarlane, in an extraordinary passage of verbo-synthesis
(p. 117), to assimilate Laurence Stone's comments on patriarchal father-son
relationships to reports from Turkey, Melanesia, the Gold Coast, and the
Ruanda ('among the Ruanda the father even had access to a son's wife') - all,
presumably, comparable 'patriarchal' societies - then to demonstrate that, in
contrast to these, Josselin showed affection and concern for his sons (and
failed to discipline his younger son), and eventually to emerge with the
suppositious disproof of the views (held by 'some historians') that Puritan
fathers were 'austere' and showed 'patriarchal aloofness'.
The questions here are too large and too complex to pursue at this point.
But they cry out for research, and for research more subtle than is offered in
this book. Patriarchal values need, by no means, imply aloofness or lack of
affection; but the degrees by which patriarchalism shades into paternalism
require scrupulous definition. Macfarlane does not propose that matriarchal
values dominated the Josselin household, and, presumably, there may be a
weak, equivocal, un-self-confident patriarchal authority? (Patriarchalism
need not necessarily imply that the father has access to the son's wife.) The
point is that if anthropologists are right to propose this kind of question,
they carry with them no bag of conjuring-tricks which enables them to
provide answers by short-cuts and out of tid-bits of abstracted information.
Only when the evidence is studied within its whole historical context - the
rules and expectations of inheritance, the role of influence and interest, the
norms and expectations not of 'society' but of different social groups - can it
bring fruitful results.
The great merit of Macfarlane's book is that it poses questions; it teaches
historians to look very much more closely, and in new ways, at familiar
evidence; it brings familial relationships into the centre of scrutiny; and it
offers, in a significant way, the unit of one man's life, and of one man's
economic fortunes, as a focus of study. In attending to certain demerits my
comments are ungenerous: the author does not propose infallibility, and is at
times disarmingly tentative, and invites criticism or confirmation. The demerits
have been singled out because they are characteristic not of Macfarlane alone,
but of many current attempts to apply anthropological or sociological or,
indeed, criminological or demographic concepts to history.
The difficulties are of several kinds. (1) It is generally true that anthro-
pology, sociology, and criminology, have evolved either as unhistorical
disciplines, or with an inadequate historical component, or with an actively
anti-historical bias. Hence they cannot offer - what Mr. Thomas asked for in
the T.L.S. - 'an historical typology'. The discipline of history is, above all, the
discipline of context; each fact can be given meaning only within an ensemble
of other meanings; while sociology, let us say, may put many questions to
historical material which historians had not thought of asking, it is most
unlikely that any 'sociological concept' can be taken, raw, from 20th-centuny
46 MIDLAND HISTORY
the test of its historical relevance, he would have come up with ludicrous
results; it is immediately evident from a glance at his footnotes on certain
pages that the societies under comparison are grossly dissimilar, and that if
comparable material had been available from, say, 19th-century India, where
popular superstition and an oral tradition co-existed with sophisticated
religious institutions and literacy, its use would have been preferable. Indeed,
for a study of this scope and significance Thomas's comparative range is
limited, precisely because he is wary of generalizations which escape from the
discipline of context: even when considering witchcraft, his glances at Europe
and New England are brief and tentative and, more seriously, he avoids even
a Scottish comparison.
We cannot then say that this is a comparative method, nor is it an anthro-
pological method except in the sense that the mind of the historian has been
informed, his perspectives extended, his awareness of significancies aroused,
by a reading of anthropology. This is probably the proper way in which
such influences, as between disciplines, should be taken through. One hopes
that some anthropologists will return the compliment.
What, then, are we to make of the millennial Mr. Thomas of The Times
Literary Supplement (1966)? Is it just that he does not practise what
he has preached? This is partly so; or, rather, he is too good a historian
to have submitted himself to the 'systematic indoctrination' of the social
sciences for which he called, and has accepted from them a far more selective
influence. But there is perhaps one area in which Thomas (1966) can be felt as
an inhibition upon Thomas (1971): his uncritical deference, at the level of
theory, to quantities. In his preface he apologizes for his failure to provide
'exact statistical data'; in the absence of such materials he has had to 'fall
back upon the historian's traditional method of presentation by example and
counter-example', although the computer has made this technique 'the
intellectual equivalent of the bow and arrow in a nuclear age' (the inadequacy
of the thought betrays itself here in a most uncharacteristic cliche). He
laments that there is 'no genuinely scientific method of measuring changes in
the thinking of past generations' (see also the text p. 449). This chimes in well
with the millennial note of 1966, and with the assertion:
A great proportion of the statements made in a history book are
ultimately statistical in their implications. All historical propositions
relating to the behaviour of large groups, for example, about illiteracy or
religious activity, are susceptible of treatment in this way, and indeed
permit of no other. (My italics.)
This is of course the mumbo-jumbo of those latter-day astrologers who stem
from Conjuror Bentham, whose spells are woven each quarter in the Economic
History Review, and who for 200 years have been trying to persuade us that
nothing is real that cannot be counted. It is difficult to refute it without
immediately calling down on oneself accusations of being a black (as opposed
to white) witch; one who does not believe in counting, who rejects the
computer, who is unaware that increasingly sophisticated techniques are
enabling it to count in areas (such as 'social distance', the history of crime, of
family relations) where counting had not before been possible; one who rejects
THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT 49
examples, goes some way towards answering this objection, and hence
vindicates his method. What one wishes is that he had supplemented it with
a few case-studies, of wise men, of conjurors, of witches, at critical points in
his argument - stopping the movie and holding onto a long, clearly-focused
still of this victim within this or that social context.
These two limitations, (I) the failure to give to literary evidence its full
weight, and to handle poetic meanings with an appropriate critical discipline,
and (2) the absence of micro-study, are sufficiently grave to make Religion
and the Decline of Magic fall short of greatness. The limitation is felt, here
and there, along the way; but, most of all, in a failure to synthesize his own
findings, to present an integrated view of popular religious beliefs, or to draw
together the book into a satisfying conclusion.
In his early chapters, where he discusses the 'Magic of the Medieval
Church', and religion and the people, there are passages which have a quaintly
bookish, rationalist air. A dozen of the superstitions recorded with surprise
in fact survive in this country to this day (one need only ask old people in the
West Riding to find the belief that unchristened children 'don't get on').
Thomas is curiously apologetic as to the complicity of the Church in this
'magic', and is at pains to show that reputable theologians were not respons-
ible for popular belief. But reputable priests understood, and, in Catholic
rural societies, understand it perfectly well: to the degree that the ritual
calendar year chimes in with the agrarian calendar, the authority of the
Church is strengthened. Moreover, despite his sympathetic handling of the
irrational in popular belief, he tends to have two yardsticks for the irrational,
according to its intellectual reputability. 'Even after the Reformation' (he
writes) 'organized religion continued to help men cope with the practical
problems of daily life by providing an explanation for misfortune and a source
of guidance in times of uncertainty.' (p. 151). But in fact he has shown that
most of the explanations were false, and the guidance misguidance. In what
sense, then, could it help men 'cope with practical problems'? Anthropology
(Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski) comes to his aid: religion provided
'appropriate rites of passage', it was a 'ritual method ofliving' (p. 76). Popular
magic, by contrast, offered not a system but fragmentary remedies: 'it never
offered a comprehensive view of the world, an explanation of human
existence, or the promise of a future life. It was a collection of miscellaneous
recipes, not a comprehensive body of doctrine' (p. 636).
It is a helpful distinction; but one is not finally convinced, at a popular
level, that it was so. Thomas scarcely takes into his categories other social
functions of religion; for example, the imposition upon the people by the
established Church of a rigmarole best calculated in inculcate the values of
deference and of order. Religion need not only provide a socially-neutral
'ritual method of living'; it may seek to enforce that particular ritual method
of living which makes the people most serviceable and least disobedient to their
masters. But once a class dimension is introduced, the problem of intellectual
reputability assumes a different form. For in so far as the common people
sensed that they were being 'got at' by the Church, to that degree the elements
of an anti-culture will have formed, assimilating these doctrines, rejecting
52 MIDLAND HISTORY
those, knitting together Christian ritual with surviving pagan beliefs, trans-
lating doctrine into a symbolism more appropriate to their own life experience.
Keith Thomas cites with apparent surprise the case of an old man, a life-
long attender at sermons, who thought God 'was a good old man', Christ
'was a towardly young youth', that his soul 'was a great bone in his body',
and that, after death, 'if he had done well he should be put into a pleasant
green meadow'. (p. 163). Thomas comments that this case illustrates the
'inadequacies of popular education' and 'popular religious ignorance'.
Possibly so: but it is also a glimpse into that process of translating doctrine
into a more meaningful, an altogether more relevant symbolism - of accepting
from the Church only so much doctrine as can be assimilated to the life-
experience of the poor. Thomas also cites the 14th-century shepherd who,
asked ifhe knew who the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were, replied; 'The father
and the son I know well for I tend their sheep but I know not that third
fellow; there is none of that name in our village.' This, again, he attributes to
'popular ignorance'. But would it really have helped this shepherd to have
coped 'with the practical problems of daily life' if he had memorized some
theological catechism about the Holy Ghost? It is curious that a historian of
so rational a cast of mind should imply, in so many ways, that the sophisti-
cated magic of theology was reputable, but that the symbolic magic of the
poor was not.
The image ofthe soul as a 'great bone' laid after death in 'a pleasant green
meadow' implies, at a poetic level, so much: the assimilation of both death
and paradise in the single image of rest from daily labour, the modest,
taciturn, expectations of eternity. According to Chafin's Anecdotes of Cran-
bourn Chase an 18th-century game-keeper had more luxurious fantasies. He
had heard the parson talk about a place that he called Paradise; 'it seemed to
be a desperate pleasant place ... but if there was but a good trout-stream
running down Chicken Grove Bottom, Fernditch Lodge would beat it out
and out'. One could multiply such examples, and one might well collect
others today. But one cannot usefully analyse them in terms of intellectual
reputability. 'Ignorance' is far too blunt an analytic tool, for ignorance may
indicate evasion, or translation, irony in the face of the Church's homilies, or,
very often, active intellectual resistance to its doctrines. Folk-lore gives us
repeated instances where the people, clinging to their own rituals of passage,
knew better what was 'real Christianity' than did the parson. Of a wife-sale
in the late 19th century a West-countryman said: 'You may ask anyone if
that ain't marriage, good, sound, and Christian, and everyone will tell you
it is.'
Can we reconstruct this mixture of popular religion and folk-lore, and
discover how systematized it was - how far its parts were related to the
occupations and life-experience of its adherents - how far it also offered (no
less than Christian doctrine may have done to the literate) a 'comprehensive
view of the world' and a 'ritual method of living' for West Country villagers,
Cornish tinners, or Aberdeen fishermen? This problem some anthropology
might help us to answer: we might even be aided by observation in contem-
porary Calabria or Southern Ireland. It cannot be answered, however, from
THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT 53
the pamphlet collections of the Bodleian, since one is dealing above all, in
folk-lore and in folk-ritual (even the ritual of a bread riot or ofa rough music)
with an orally-transmitted culture. And hence (one must repeat) the import-
ance to the historian of popular culture of all the techniques of literacy. Just
as an earlier benighted generation of historians supposed that they were
numerate because they had performed their Maths Schools Certificate, so the
present generation suppose that they are literate because they have an a level
in English. But the literate historians of the future will perhaps require some
training in linguistics; they will be familiar with the use of dialect dictionaries;
and they must certainly read their texts with a sensitivity to poetic as well as
rational or numerate meanings. Both dialect and old Welsh and Gaelic are
studded with words which point not only towards forgotten tools, measures,
things, but also towards forgotten modes of thought and habits of work.
The Welsh buchedd (I am told) is untranslatable, in a literal sense, because it
entails not only the notion of a man's life, but also of the quality of his life,
his life as it was lived, his 'way'. The translator's difficulty signals a large change
in customary consciousness. It will be at this difficult and expert level that,
in the end, an analysis of the symbolism of popular magic and of witchcraft
must be made.
One substantial comment remains, which I had intended as the theme of
this article. One cannot read Religion and the Decline of Magic, nor Hill's
Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, without noting that
both studies point, insistently, towards that great vacancy which is where
18th-century social history should be. Both here, and in some of Laslett's
work, there is a sense of hiatus: 17th-century custom is contrasted with the
practices of industrial (i.e. 19th-century) society. But what happened in
between? And if magic (and 101 other things) were in decline, why was the
decline so long?
Thomas is cautious at this point. He is at pains to qualify his description
of the decline of this or that superstition with indications of 18th- or 19th-
century survivals. But in general he leaves the reader with the impression that
in the mid-17th century reputable intellectual opinion discarded more and
more areas of 'magic', parting company with a popular culture in which
magics survived, but as fragmentary survivals, which must, inevitably,
decompose over the decades even if decomposition was sometimes a surpris-
ingly lengthy process. His final chapter discusses some ofthe possible processes
of disseminating enlightenment: literacy, communications, new technology,
new aspirations, a capitalist agrarian stance attaining to the control of natural
forces.
But, as he warns us when discussing witchcraft (in the words of John
Selden): 'The reason of a thing is not to be enquired after, till you are sure the
thing itself be so. We commonly are at what's the reason of it? before we
are sure of the thing.' And the thing, in this case, is the reality of the
'decline' in the popular culture of the 18th century. I am myself chiefly im-
pressed by the extraordinary vitality, the robustness, of popular culture
(and of rituals of a kind which hitherto have been largely the preserve of
folk-lorists) in that century. Moreover, one appears to confront a system of
54 MIDLAND HISTORY
beliefs with its own coherence, even if this is most clearly seen in relation to
particular occupational groups.
One may suggest, very tentatively, that the presupposition of a unilinear,
progressive process of 'decline' may be unhelpful. The Fascism of this century
reminds us that progressive enlightenment does not always move in one way.
And while no analogy is intended from this, it may set us on our guard
against the impression that 18th-century intellectual development was
necessarily unilinear (did magic 'decline' or did it change its form?) or that
changes in reputable literate belief necessarily communicated themselves to
the poor and the illiterate by a process of seeping-down (see e.g. Thomas,
pp.646-7).
If the polite culture abandoned magic, this marked a dissociation, not only
of sensibility, but between the polite and the vulgar cultures. Finding little
relevant in the symbolism of the polite doctrinal sermons of the enlighten-
ment, people may have reacted by withdrawing the more determinedly into a
vivid symbolism of their own. ('No other preaching will do for Yorkshire',
John Nelson told Wesley 'but the old sort that comes like a thunderclap upon
the conscience. Fine preaching does more harm than good here'.) From the
standpoint of the common people, the magic and charisma of the established
Church had been immeasurably weakened by the commencement of the
18th century, although it maintained its sociological presence in the village.
Hence the feasts, the sports, the songs and the rituals of the people developed
independently of the calendar of the Church. One encounters a culture which
at times appears as almost pagan; it is not so much scepticism or indifference
(absence from Church) as an alternative system of beliefs and sanctions. (The
rituals around the gallows may provide one example.) I can see no inherent
reason why this system of belief may not have been more vigorous in 1750
than in 1650.
Moreover, this might help us to understand the true character of Wesleyan-
ism as explicitly a movement of counter-enlightenment. In returning to his
pastoral duties to the poor, Wesley perforce must leap a gap of sensibility
between two cultures, even though leaping that gap meant reaffirming scores
of superstitions which Thomas confidently describes as being in 'decline'.
Among these were bibliomancy, old wives' medical remedies, the casting of
lots, the belief in diabolical possession and in exorcism by prayer, in the
hand of providence, in the punishment (by lightning-stroke or epilepsy or
cholera) of ill-livers and reprobates. Dr. J. G. Rule, in an unpublished study
of the Cornish tinners (University of Warwick Ph.D., 1970) has shown
exactly this process at work: Wesleyan superstition matched the indigenous
superstitions of tinners and fisherman who, for occupational reasons which
are examined, were dependent upon chance and luck in their daily lives. The
match was so perfect that it consolidated one of the strongest of Methodist
congregations.
When one describes this popular culture as a system of belief one is not so
much employing rational tests as the notion developed by such critics as
Hoggart and Williams of a consistent structure of feeling, a whole way of
apprehending the world. Nor was this mode of apprehension limited to the
THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT 55