ABSTRACT
The considerations just reviewed strongly suggest that early-modern relations of gender were neither fixed nor timeless. It is seductively easy to portray seventeenth-century England as a man's world. Women were seemingly debarred, too, from holding public office and from voting in Parliamentary elections. Similarly, 'the gender order was never challenged explicitly, and the inferiority of women never denied': Amussen, 'Gender, family and the social order', 216. The skimmington was one of several forms of 'rough music' deployed in England from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. 'Rough music' in general and skimmingtons in particular were akin to the 'charivari' of France and to analogous rituals elsewhere in Europe. Correspondingly, historians concerned with early-modern gender themes are now increasingly finding that the results of their investigations cannot be fitted into any of the stories that the author have surveyed.
