E.P. Thompson explains the charivari’s motivation in eighteenth-century Britain:
"Publicity was of the essence of punishment. It was intended, for lesser offences, to humiliate the offender before her or his neighbours, and in more serious offences to serve as example (480).
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A rough music was a licensed way of releasing hostilities which might otherwise have burst beyond any bounds of control … The argument that rough music rituals were a form of displacement of violence – its acting out, not upon the person of the victim, but in symbolic form – has some truth … Rough music did not only give expression to a conflict within a community, it also regulated that conflict within forms which established limits and imposed restraints’ (486).
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... the rough music charivari ‘announces disgrace, not as a contingent quarrel with neighbours, but as judgement of the community. What had before been gossip or hostile glances becomes common, overt, stripped of the disguises which, however flimsy and artificial, are part of the currency of everyday intercourse … The victim must go out into the community the next morning, knowing that in the eyes of every neighbour and of every child he or she is seen as a person disgraced. It is therefore not surprising that rough music, except in its lightest forms, attached to the victim a lasting stigma’ (487–8)
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‘Even where no “court” of judgement existed, the essential attribute of rough music appears to be that it only works if it works: that is, if (first) the victim is sufficiently “of” the community to be vulnerable to disgrace, to suffer from it: and (second) if the music does indeed express the consensus of the community – or at least of a sufficiently large and dominant part of the community … to cow or to silence those who, while perhaps disapproving of the ritual, shared in some degree the same disapproval of the victim’ (491–2).
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‘Rough music could also be an excuse for a drunken orgy or for blackmail … It is a property of a society in which justice is not wholly delegated or bureaucratised, but is enacted by and within the community … And the psychic terrorism which could be brought to bear … was truly terrifying’ (530).
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Rough music belongs to a mode of life in which some part of the law belongs still to the community and is theirs to enforce … It indicates modes of social self-control and the disciplining of certain kinds of violence and anti-social offence … which in today’s cities may be breaking down. But when we consider the societies which have been under our examination, one must add a rider. Because law belongs to people, and is not alienated, or delegated, it is not thereby made more ‘nice’ and tolerant, more cosy and folksy. It is only as nice and tolerant as the prejudices and norms of the folk allow. Some forms of rough music disappeared from history in shadowy complicity with bigotry, jingoism and worse … For some of its victims, the coming of a distanced (if alienated) Law and a bureaucratised police must have been felt as a liberation from the tyranny of one’s ‘own.’ (530–1) - quotes from E. P. Thompson, Customs in common. New York: New Press, 1993.
All quoted in Pauline Greenhill, Make the Night Hideous: Four English-Canadian Charivaris, 1881–1940. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
