ABSTRACT
I used to give a lecture with the title ‘Scenes at the Deathbed of Merry England’. But what if there was no deathbed? Have we done a Mark Twain with this subject? In 1994, Professor Ronald Hutton published a book, replacing all earlier treatments of the subject, called The Rise and Fall o f Merry England.1 But can we be so sure that Merry England really did fall? My book The Birthpangs o f Protestant England included a chapter called ‘The Protestant Town’, which compared the cultural history of English towns from the later Middle Ages to the eighteenth century to an hourglass. The bulging upper part of the glass was packed with the ‘rich, tumultuous, irrepressible’ street life of pre-Reformation England. The lower half was filled up with the ‘formidable variety’ of public rituals and ceremonies which flourished in the eighteenth century, described by the historian of this ‘urban renaisssance’, Peter Borsay. But ‘in between there was a narrow neck, through which the sand fell finely but with considerable force: the force of the Protestant Reformation, which destroyed so much and limited and restricted what was left’; as if, in the early seventeenth-century town, there was nothing left to do but attend sermons and behave yourself.2 The puritan Book of Discipline, dating from the 1580s and given force in the 1640s, contained a chapter on holidays (or holy days) consisting of just seven words: ‘All holidays are conveniently to be abolished.’ But the Book of Discipline was an extreme case, the 1640s an exceptional decade.
