One night in the Sussex Weald, I was fortunate to hear Alun Howkins sing the ballad When This Old Hat Was New. Alun was a brilliant social historian, and an expert interpreter of English folklore. He was given to bursting into song all of a sudden, his powerful voice speaking to a compendious stock of ballads that he had at his fingertips. When This Old Hat Was New, which I think was one of Alun's favourites, is a song about the oppression of the rural poor in the period c. 1770–1900. Those were the times with which he was most familiar. And yet, as an early modern social historian, preoccupied as I have been with the social changes that overtook England in the years before 1770, there was something that I recognised in this ballad. It stuck in my mind for years after. I started teaching with it, and as I did so, I started to think with it.

Let us start with the version of the ballad that Alun sang to me. I am pretty sure that it is the song that he reproduced in an article he co-authored with Ian Dyck in History Workshop Journal in 1987. The first stanza of the version of the song reproduced by Howkins and Dyck (printed in the early nineteenth century by Ward of Ledbury) opens as follows:

Subsequent stanzas, each with the concluding refrain ‘when this old hat was new’, assess the changes that were at work in nineteenth-century rural England. They speak of the growth of litigation and the decline of trust amongst neighbours; of the refusal of charity to the hungry poor; of rural unemployment; of happier days when rural labourers had been respected; of feasts that farmers used to provide to harvest workers; of the growth of aggressive acquisitiveness amongst the farmers; of the loss of the commons, given originally (the ballad says) to the poor by the Romans; and of the crushing spiritual and material effects of large-scale enclosure.

This chapter discusses the ways in which speech was related to class and gender. It shows that boundaries between public and private were blurred in early modern communities, and that reputation was central to people’s lives. National, regional and local identities receive attention, especially the meaning of ‘Country’, alongside attitudes to foreign communities. Urban neighbourhood receives attention, especially the issue of the extent to which neighbourly values obtained in small districts of towns and cities, and the extent of urban anomie. Dispute settlement is studied, especially informal settlements made within communities. Gender and neighbourhood receives attention, in particular masculine artisanal identities, women’s networks and mutual support, and neighbourly reactions to male domestic violence.

This chapter deals with the processes of exclusion and inclusion that defined community. It deals with popular hostility to religious change, especially the ‘disciplinary revolution’ that Puritans attempted to impose. It discusses witches as the reverse of neighbourly ideals, and hostility to perceived antisocial practices such as informing. The place of the established poor is scrutinized, as are measures against the mobile poor. Dearth, famine and disease are assessed as acid tests of communal solidarities, and it is shown that in many communities the poor were excluded from ideas of neighbourhood during times of food scarcity or the circulation of infectious disease. The role of wealthier villagers and townsmen in the government of small communities receives attention. The focus of the chapter is on the hard edge of neighbourhood.

This chapter discusses the collective basis for communal life in early modern England, showing that contemporaries were strongly averse to division (including religious conflict). Rather, Christian social values encouraged an organic sense of community built upon reciprocity and common interest. Paternalism simultaneously reinforced the social order while providing the poor with tangible benefits. Charitable giving was underwritten by Christian social codes. The clergy and gentry had powerful social expectations made of them, especially to provide for the poor. The collective consumption of alcohol underwrote many social rituals, forms of commensality and festivity, and much of the plebeian social world was centred upon the alehouse. Rituals such as Rogationtide, along with other forms of festivity and play, articulated powerful social norms.

This chapter discusses the widespread belief in early modern England that neighbourliness was dead and charity grown cold. It assesses the melancholy that was built on a nostalgic sense of lost social virtues. Yet, contradictorily, it shows that even as contemporaries lamented the end of neighbourhood, they simultaneously celebrated and asserted neighbourly values. The chapter therefore balances evidence for social atomization against ongoing investment by early modern people in Christian discourses of charity and good neighbourhood, which generated powerful senses of local reciprocities and continued social bonds that included gifts of cash, food and shelter to the poor; communal feasting and festivity; and Christian values of friendship.

A spectre haunts Towneley Hall: the spectre of lordship. It takes the form of a boggart – that is, a supernatural presence – crying regret at having enclosed the nearby commons of Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough, bordering the Lancashire town of Burnley. This chapter begins with the identification of the sorrowful boggart and with what this might have to say about early modern social relations. The first part of the chapter tells the story of the enclosure of Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough in the early sixteenth century. It goes on to consider the subsequent contestation of that enclosure over the course of the sixteenth century. The second half of the chapter deals with the significance of curses and ghosts in the history of enclosure, and with the local memorialisation of these enclosures. It touches on a particularly chilling practice of anti-enclosure protest noted by John Walter: that of cursing enclosing lords to a ghostly afterlife, the incarnation of spectral lordship.

Whitaker couldn't establish the identity of the encloser: ‘the offence has been remembered long after it had been redressed, and even when the name of the offending party was forgotten’. Whitaker was wrong: the name of the boggart was not forgotten. His inability to name the ghost of Towneley Hall was corrected a generation later by the Victorian antiquarian Thomas Turner, who identified the boggart as Sir John Towneley. Turner had this to say of Sir John: