On Bearman (2000)

Bearman repeats Sharp’s ideas about folk and the ‘unlettered’. He says Lloyd recast this in terms of ‘class’ which became fashionable so that eg Vic Gammon and others did this. Lloyd read songs as worker protests when B thinks they weren’t. This recasting in terms of class meant people could argue that worker culture had been appropriated by the middle class (eg by Boyes) or even repressed (as in Gammon’s views on the reasons for the decline of gallery music in churches).

Beaman moves on to the concept of ‘peasantry’, another term used by Sharp (though as we have seen Sharp did not see the rural/urban as critical). Some people, B notes, objected to Sharp using the word. Beaman claims that usage not definitions should set the standard by which Sharp’s use of the term should be judged. You could dispute the defn that B goes with. B also thinks that ‘to some extent’ how people saw themselves is important as are the facts of people’s actual levels of education and the boundaries of their world. He says that on such matters sloganizing has replaced proper investigation. Sharp, he says, provides little information though he visited some Somerset informants multiple times.

Beaman therefore attempts a biographical survey of the 311 Somerset people he says Sharp interviewed. He uses various sources including Sharp himself, the 81 and 91 census reports and parish records. He claims to have identified 214 reasonably certainly, to have ages for 278 and occupations for 238 (including 90 married and single women). He finds they had a range of occupations, and concludes – put simply - that it was reasonable for Sharp to describe these people as ‘peasantry’, as even if not actual farmers or farm workers or shepherds etc their jobs were broadly rural and/or they were generally ‘rustic’.

Bearman claims that Harker misdefined people as peasants or not based on their residence, making incorrect distinctions between villages and towns and not realising that some agricultural workers lived in towns eg Somerton. One woman Harker called a town labourer’s wife was in fact wed to an agricultural worker.

Bearman goes on to challenge a view that Sharp’s informants were ‘working class’ by stating some would have been self-employed, others members of professions. This included some of Sharp’s best informants, Bearman says, citing Emma Glover, James Bishop and William Spearing. Higher social level informants included a farmer employing 14 people on his 630 acres. Some were members of the local council. Bearman says such a diverse group cannot be a ‘class’ as defined in a quotation from A L Lloyd he is using because they would not have had a common identity or interests. Moreover, he finds examples of social mobility in both directions.

Then Beaman goes on to discuss the ‘culture’ of these people. He wants to discover if it fits Sharp’s idea of the ‘unlettered’.

Drafted yesterday. Sorry if a bit long.