Theory and Evidence

Author(s): E. P. Thompson and Raphael Samuel

Source: History Workshop, No. 35 (Spring, 1993), pp. 274-276
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289239
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 READERS' LETTERS
THEORY AND EVIDENCE
Dear Editors, - Raphael Samuel has got
me puzzled. In 'Reading the Signs, 2'
(HWJ 33), he writes:
In history, as in anthropology, choice
of context or setting is crucial in
establishing (or insinuating) the
'meaning' which readers are invited to
glean from an individual episode or
event.... Thus E. P. Thompson, in
his well-known 'Sale of Wives' paper,
now reprinted in Customs in
Common, chooses to position the
ritual (a wife being sold in the market
place to the highest bidder, with a
halter round her neck) as a form of
unofficial divorce, usually by consent, traffic in women, then a traffic between
and leavened by a rough plebian
humour. He might as plausibly have
situated it in relation to wife-beating,
or (taking a cue from classical anthro- appear in the evidence and how did these
pology) the traffic in women, or -
returning to the sombre figure of
Henchard in The Mayor of Caster-
from tossing a coin but from intermittent
bridge from which he took his original
cue - as a fit of blind and drunken
stupor.
In fact my essay on wife sales is not
'reprinted' but is published for the first
time in Customs in Common, and it
differs a good deal from the talks given
fifteen or more years ago of which
Samuel has a hazy recollection. Those of
us who served our historical apprentice-
ship under the influence of R. G. Coll-
ingwood are not astounded by the recent
discovery that facts do not 'speak for
themselves' and that 'choice of context
or setting' are crucial, although we pre-
ferred to talk about the questions put to
the evidence.
Our preference emphasized the pro-
cess of dialogue between questions
(theoretically formed) and evidence: nor
did we see the evidence as silent and
inert to be manipulated into any form
the questioner proposed. Nor can the
'choice of context or setting' be decided
by the flip of a coin. In the case in point I
came to my hypothesis of 'unofficial
divorce' not - as Samuel confidently
affirms - from The Mayor of Caster-
bridge but from the instances which kept
popping up in the newspapers when I
was researching The Making of the
English Working Class, which seemed to
reveal rule-governed performances. If
the wife sale might 'as plausibly' be
situated in relation to wife-beating,
where is the evidence? (Another chapter
in Customs in Common has a good deal
to say about wife-beating, but I know of
no case giving rise to a wife sale.) If it
could 'as plausibly' be related to the
which groups and governed by what
rules? If 'as plausibly' to fits of blind and
drunken stupor then why does this not
drunks all conform to the same rules of
performance?
My own hypothesis did not come
research over twenty-odd years with the
help of many friends. Other researchers
- Lawrence Stone, Bridget Hill and
Menefee - have reached similar con-
clusions, although with differing em-
phases. Writing history demands an
engagement with hard evidence and is
not as easy as some post-modernists
suppose.
No doubt my own hypotheses will be
contested and revised. My point is to
contest Samuel's suggestion that all de-
pends upon selecting 'plausible' assump-
tions. It is not at all clear where 'Reading
the Signs' is going. A Note to Part One
(HWJ 32, p. 107) suggests that the
author is not clear himself and is 'facing
both ways'. A Note to Part Two suggests
that a Part Three is in progress but it is
not clear where this will be published. At
present it varies between sharp and
perceptive analysis and a conducted tour
of the outsides of books in fashion. In the

History Workshop Journal Issue 35 (? History Workshop Journal 1993

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 Readers' Letters 275

latter mode it that the only

shows
- as in the passage which I have contes-
ted - to the modish subjectivism and
idealism now so current. This fashion is
likely to be with us for the next twenty have liked to argue - if there had been
years, and it would be sad if Raphael
Samuel or History Workshop gave in to
it. Sad and wholly unnecessary, for the
choice which is offered to us between
gross positivism and 'plausible' idealism
is wholly false. Theory and evidence
must always be in dialogue with each
other.
E. P. THOMPSON
Wick Episcopi,
Worcester
RESPONSE
It is always perilous to attempt to col-
lapse an argument into a parenthesis and
I am sorry that, in doing so, I seemed to
suggest that the positive construction
which Edward Thompson chooses to put
on his 'Sale of Wives' cases, as genial
exemplifications of divorce by consent,
was decided upon cavalierly, as by a flip
of the coin. My thought was the reverse -
that like any piece of historical reasoning
and research, it was a child or creature of
its time. Politically it belongs, surely, to
that liberal hour of the 1960s when
multiple, or plural relationships were
being widely canvassed as a release from
the coils of matrimony, and when, as
Lawrence Stone puts it in Roads to
Divorce (pp. 406-7), 'just as the great
waves of sexual liberation and radical
life-style were breaking over the West'on
a the proceedings, questioning, say,
Bill was successfully piloted through the
House of Commons, converting the idea
of 'no-fault divorce' into the law of the
land. 'Abandoning the ancient principle
of matrimonial fault, there was now to
be substituted the principle, first enunci- He might have offered a Freudian read-
ated back in the 1640s by John Milton,
just groundof
signs for a divorce
capitula
was as a relief from the irremediable
breakdown of a marital relationship'.
Historiographically, too, I would
space to do so - that the 'Sale of Wives'
paper was over-determined. Why,
having stumbled on sale of wives cases,
did Edward Thompson start collecting
them rather than, say - to take the
example of some of the other disturbing
cases which intrude themselves on the
researcher - wife-beating cases,' or
rape. And why, if marital breakdown
was the point of interest, did he not
pursue it through other sources - the
records of the overseers of the poor, for
instance, with their often poignant docu-
mentation of the plight of the abandoned
and the deserted? Partly, it may be,
because the 'new wave' social history of
the 1960s was pre-feminist, but also
because it was intoxicated with the idea
of ritual. Like the 'charivari' of Natalie
Zemon Davis's Society and Culture in
Early Modern France, 'Sale of Wives'
derives much of its excitement from its
affinities with those 'social dramas'
which the symbolic anthropologists of
the time interpreted as rule-bound,
'tools to prize open the secrets of a
community's moral code' (Customs in
Common, p. 510).
The decision to reproduce 'Sale of
Wives' with its original argument intact
was also, I believe, over-determined.
Had Edward Thompson's interest been
in the subjection of women, as it might
have been if he had wanted to follow one
major line in recent research, he might
have chosen to put a less favourable glow
the jokey condescension which under-
pins the newspaper reports - his main
documentation - and using record link-
age (where that was possible) to try to
follow the subsequent fate of the wife.
ing of the evidence, in terms of fantasies

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 276 History Workshop Journal
of male omnipotence, or a Levi-
Straussian one in terms of the traffic in
women. In the field of folk-lore, whose
use by historians he has done so much
to pioneer, he might have considered
the iconographic affinity of the wife's
halter to the 'scold's bridle'; or, as an
act of street theatre - which is how he
positions it - the possible kinship of the
'sale of wives' to that eighteenth-
century addition to folk misogyny, the
Punch and Judy show. That he chooses
to stay with his original illumination
may have to do not only with the
weight of the evidence, however scru-
pulously sifted, but also with the
fundamental design of the book. Cus-
toms in Common counterposes the tyr-
annies of time-thrift and industrial
work discipline with the spontaneities
and generosities of the prior society, or
what he calls (p. 15) 'pre-capitalist
human nature'. In 'The Sale of Wives',
as in 'Rough Music' and 'The Moral
Economy of the English Crowd', he
wants to show the rationality of forms
of behaviour which would have been
dismissed in the past as primitive,
superstitious or barbaric. In a context
like this he can hardly use the wife
sale, as Thomas Hardy does in The
Mayor of Casterbridge, to illustrate the
darker undersides of village life; it
must stand, rather, as one of those
rule-bound rituals by which the com-
munity preserved its integrity in face of HISTORY, THE NATION AND THE
the hostile pressures of the wider so-
ciety.
My recollections are not hazy. Like
others,2 I remember the 'Sale of Wives'
paper as one of those electric occasions
when Edward Thompson, rejoicing in
his discoveries, and exuberantly defying subtly misleading. Take, for example,
the proprieties of the profession, perma- this paragraph of Raphael Samuel's
nently enlarged the map of historical
knowledge, bringing whole new classes
of evidence into public view and setting a
generation of young researchers on new
tracks. It is no disrespect to this to
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discuss them, as one would any other
major work, as a product of their histori-
cal time.
RAPHAEL SAMUEL
Spitalfields
NOTES
I So far as I can see, the only reference to
wife-beating in Customs in Common is on
p. 493, where it appears as one of the moral
offences that were 'rough-musicked'. It is
husband-beating wives, though, who in this
chapter seem really to rouse the writer's
historical interest.
2 The novelist Philippa Gregory points
out, in a tribute to 'the radical historian who
introduced her to the English tradition of
dissent', the occasions on which it was deliv-
ered were electric.
Far away on the stage, his thick mane of
white hair luminous under the lights, he
gave a buoyant talk on the tradition of the
sale of wives as dramatised by Thomas
Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge. He
argued that it was a way for working
people with no hope of obtaining legal
divorce to end a marriage. The wife went
with her husband to market, a concealed
cord around her waist, and was handed
over to the 'buyer', often her lover. The
sale was over, the marriage dissolved.
('Heroes and Villains', Independent, 5
Dec. 1992.)
SCHOOLS
Dear HWJ, - As a veteran campaigner
may I offer some comments on History,
the Nation and the Schools?
Both Raphael Samuel and Stephen
Yeo are guilty of using words which are
(HWJ 30, p. 77):
On the issue of 'skills' versus 'know-
ledge', too, the Working Group -
declaring that the debate is 'irrelevant'