Book Review:

Review of Liz Williams's Rough Music: Folk Customs, Transgression and Alternative Britain, Reaktion Books, 2025. 336 pp. Hardcover (ISBN:  978-1836390602). Kindle (ASIN: B0DSWC7WL4).

A reader learns early on in Rough Music that Liz Williams hangs out with the local druids, and no doubt is one herself. And anyone paying attention to the musical or zine realms in the last several years knows that folk traditions, ancient or not-so-ancient, have been having another resurgence. Many such revivals in the past two-to-three centuries, and surely longer, suggest this may be a feature: that continually dying out and being reborn is how the folk tradition breathes. But what of the more antisocial and transgressive aspects of these rituals and customs? Do some ritual workings require complete abandonment and lawbreaking as integral principles? How much danger is tolerable in transgression?

Williams examines these issues and more, laying out Britain’s past and current folk landscape in brief sections covering everything from Morris dancing to Mystery Plays to the origins of Halloween. These are interspersed with brief interviews with modern folk practitioners, including mummers, Druids, wassailers, neo-Pagans, and some who don’t consider themselves Pagan or “New Age” in any way: they are locals participating in local custom. Williams seems to have used a standardized questionnaire for each interviewee and, while brief and to the point, they’re often dropped in without much or any introduction in the chapter text. Given the range of beliefs and practices in the individuals interviewed, these dialogues may have benefitted by being shaped more to each interviewee and integrated more holistically into the chapters. However, hearing the practitioners describe firsthand their participation in these rituals (and Williams’ own descriptions of her participation) personalizes what, in the hands of a different author, could have been a colder, outsider’s view.

Rough Music, as with much of its subject matter, moves at a lively pace, though occasionally some of Williams’ more intriguing historical episodes breeze by a bit quickly. In her chapter on Morris dancing (“Morris and Molly”), Williams makes passing mention of a poaching group calling themselves “Servants of the Queen of the Fairies.” In 1450, this group killed 82 deer on the Duke of Buckingham’s land and, in performing this action against aristocratic property and hunting laws, dressed not only in women’s clothing but also in blackface. Moreover, this mass poaching was, according to Williams, apparently a reaction to the enclosure of local common land. This reviewer would have read an entire chapter on that particular caper, which illustrates the overlap of transgression, class-based protest, land rights, and British folk custom with regards to 15th-century gender and racial concepts.

Ritual in and as protest would persist through the centuries. Williams charts the anti-monarchist origins of the Stonehenge Free Festival of the 1970s-1980s: the infamous bacchanal born out of the Windsor Free Festival, an encampment held in Windsor Great Park or, as Williams refers to it, “the Queen’s back garden.” The Windsor festival met its end in 1974, at which time the hippies took it to the stones. The gathering at Stonehenge, organized around the summer solstice, enjoyed ten years of LSD, Druidry, and music by the likes of Hawkwind until 1985, when it was prohibited by the Thatcher government. In June of that year this prohibition resulted in one of Britain’s most violent festival incidents: “The Battle of the Beanfield.” Police in riot gear attacked the convoy of New Age Travelers attempting to breach the now fenced-off Stonehenge, bashing them with truncheons and setting fire to their caravans, resulting in multiple hospitalizations.

Turbulence and damage can accompany the released inhibitions of folk gatherings of all kinds, and the violent element of folk festivals didn’t always stem from the establishment beating back peaceful, if transgressive, revelers. Severe injuries and sometimes fatalities are not uncommon. Incidents such as broken bones and lacerations from rolling down a steep hill chasing after a 7-to-9-pound wheel of cheese, a woman killed after being hit in the head by the Padstow Obby Oss (a large and heavy wooden hobby horse paraded as part of the Padstow May Day celebrations), and other such incidents, have given rise to increased safety regulations. Injuries, along with ever-increasing crowds—the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling event sees numbers as large as fifteen thousand people—-pose questions about the integrity of what used to be small, local events in the face of national and even international attention. How many people is too many for a cheese rolling?

Some rituals enacted a different sort of violence: we come to the book’s title in Williams’ penultimate chapter, “Skimmity Riding.” Variously known as “Skimmington Rides” or “Rough Music,” this public-shaming practice has deep roots in misogyny, as effigies of women conducting extra-marital relationships, and sometimes effigies of the women’s husbands, were paraded through the village on long poles. These effigies were often accompanied by a racket of noisemakers and instruments. Now obsolete in its original form, Skimmity Riding kept the effigies and public shaming, morphing into a vehicle for political protest in the 19th century. As with other ritual-as-protest in Rough Music, the later Skimmity practices provided an expressive outlet for disempowered groups with no other recourse.

Organizationally, Williams may have placed her full discussion of the use of blackface in British folk ritual in the book’s early chapters, rather than halfway through in Chapter Seven (“Bonfire Night: Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot”). Alongside folk custom’s role in protest, another of Rough Music’s compelling through-lines is that it documents the (if uneven and nonlinear) shift away from racist, misogynist, and exclusionary practices into new, more inclusive ritual forms. There’s a potentially powerful message in that evolution that could have been more explicitly foregrounded, particularly in this era of Britain’s political history with the rise of Reform UK and the global fascist turn more broadly. Additionally, the widespread and historic practice of cross-dressing and gender subversion in these rituals is a fascinating and important area of inquiry not fully given its due.

Williams does, however, suggest in closing that these traditions should continue to bring dated practices to a close and that participating in local rituals and customs can occur without toxic nationalism: most of these customs are rooted not in exclusion and xenophobia, but in community with one’s fellow revelers. Perhaps it is significant that these rituals call their current practitioners at our particular moment in history. In a time of ever-intensifying geopolitical realities on a burning planet, it can feel as though we’ve all got an appointment with the Wicker Man. Is the being-in-community of ritual the antidote some seek for 21st century isolation and angst? What transgressions or sacrifices might these new rituals demand? What gifts could they bestow? The questions Rough Music presents aren’t weighed down by over-analysis. Instead, Williams takes us on an entertaining, conversational trip through England’s regional customs and their continuing resurgence and reshaping, never lingering overly long in one place.

Suitable for both the playful revolutionary and the armchair Morris dancer.

-18 Aug. 2026