Patriotic Performance

Thus far I have employed several broad categorisations in my exploration of punitive performance. I have observed it as one facet of the life of rural or semi-rural communities wherein it was applied to the punishment of general moral offences and I have suggested that there were particular types of ‘resistive’ community in which it was most strongly entrenched. I have noted it as a tool employed to advance the very particular interests of social subgroups such as smugglers and I have also considered it as a feature of particular occupational groups, usually semi-skilled or skilled, semi-autonomous, who were endowed with a long tradition of disciplining their own. It is time, then, to take a brief look at the way that elite groups used punitive performances to advance their own interests. Those interests were often political, but a detailed political study would take me a long way from my purpose here. That purpose is simply to allude to, and to illustrate, the kinds of popular performance that elites were prepared to continue to endorse through the long nineteenth century, whilst contrasting them with the types of activity discussed in other chapters that they were increasingly willing and able to proscribe.

As mentioned in previous chapters, at the beginning of our period elite groups were themselves intimate with popular culture on many levels. The reformation of public space had not yet operated to keep the orders physically apart and, socially, gentlemen were still prepared to speak ‘flash’ and consort with the lower orders (to a degree) whilst patronising bull running, gambling, boxing, cock fighting and other such activities.