The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England

In a recent article for Past and Present Mark Jenner presented a rich and provocative reading of political symbolism in literary and ritual representations of the collapse of republican government in England. He illuminates a moment in which street carnival and scatological texts, in a variety of generic forms, came together to denigrate the degenerate 'Rump' parliament by invoking scatological insult and images of cannibalistic dismembering, and through a gendering of the failed state.¹ The article contributes an imaginative, scholarly and sophisticated addition to the literature and offers a methodological example by combining literary, political and medical approaches to the study of history.²

Jenner argues that, although such approaches are increasingly regarded as important for understanding the extent and nature of popular politics, 'understandable aesthetic reasons' have led to the 'languages of popular and not-so-popular politics' for this period being inadequately studied and 'methodologically [un]adventurous'.³ In contrast, by 'travers[ing] prose, verse and ritual practice', especially by focusing on 'popular' and 'accessible' roman-letter 'Rump ballad' broadsides, and some of the verses in the 1662 anthology Rump: or, An Exact Collection of the Choycest Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times, he proposes a linguistic intersection between texts and street festivity, the 'disturbing subtextual implications [of] which could undermine the legitimacy of the newly triumphant regime'.⁴ There are problems, however, with ananalysis of 'popular' broadside ballad literature based on these sources. My own research into political balladry of the seventeenth century suggests that Jenner's reading of these texts may overestimate the political impact and social depth of the historical moment he describes, and ignores perceptions of the body politic as they consistently appeared in more traditional broadside ballads of the period.⁵ A broader methodological point also emerges. If, as Jenner suggests, we are to 'analyse the language, literary genealogy and symbolism of such political propaganda, or . . . unpack its meanings', then we must also have a clearer understanding of genre, of literary rhetoric and of the place of cheap print in the market place.⁶

The Rump anthology was a very miscellaneous compilation and included many pieces that had never previously been published, either as broadside ballads, or in print at all. Indeed, this was a selling point. As it pointed out in its address 'To the Reader', 'You have many Songs here, which were never before in print'.⁷ The contents of this anthology cannot be distinguished in terms of genre (ballad, song, catch, poem); product (print, broadside, pamphlet, book, privately distributed manuscript); or accessibility (cost, typeface, language, familiarity), but issues such as these must be considered ifwe are to be confident about a broad appropriation of the political language and ideas it contains.

Contemporaries did make distinctions between genres and print products. Anthologies claimed to be 'compounded of witty ballads, jovial songs, and merry catches', or 'jovial poems and drolleries', 'intermix'd with pleasant catches'.⁸ Pamphlets and broadsides used the social rhetoric of typeface for satirical effect, while Ratts Rhimed to Death (1660), an anthology of twenty-three ballads, announced itself as a collection of 'excellent ballads . . . formerly printed in loose sheets'.⁹ The cost of anthologies, as Jenner himself points out, naturally restricted their accessibility, while previously unprinted material, at best circulating originally in manuscript, would always have had a restricted distribution.¹⁰

The materiality and typography of the broadside ballad play a key role in this discussion and require a brief explanation. By the mid seventeenth century, traditional broadside ballads were usually printed on one side of a single sheet of thin, cheap, French paper, in black-letter type, in landscape orientation and frequently with woodcut illustrations. More sophisticated verse satires, which, like pamphlets, grew in number from 1639 onwards, were printed in 'white-letter', or roman type, on a variety of sheet sizes and qualities, always in portrait orientation.¹¹ Jenner argues that 'single-sheet verses' were 'extremely popular even though most of them were printed in roman type, not the more accessible (and cheaper) black letter'.¹² However, in this...