The examples of rough music already cited have probably already indicated to the reader that such practices were often inspired by irregular gender behaviour or sexual practice and it is these offences that I intend to explore here. Before pursuing the causes of the music, however, it is appropriate to first say something further about the performance itself insofar as gender symbolism and gender reversal seem to have themselves played an important part in the punitive enterprise.

The 1744 edition of Samuel Butler's Hudibras contains a depiction of a skimmington (by William Hogarth) that contains two interesting gender elements. Two figures are mounted upon a donkey. One, the object of the crowd's attention, faces backwards. Sitting in front of him on the donkey but facing forwards is a fearsome creature who upon inspection turns out to be a man in women's clothes. This virago is half turned, however, so that she/he can belabour the victim with a ladle. Amidst the tumultuous crowd two motifs are apparent, the display of horns (a traditional sign of the cuckold) and the display upon long poles of womens' apparel. The victim is clearly a henpecked husband punished for his failure to subdue his wife. A hundred years later the people of the Wiltshire villages of Burbage (1835) and Ogborne St George (1840) were still using a similar procedure to penalise their submissive husbands.