The English Year: A Month-by-Month Guide to the Nation’s Customs and Festivals from May Day to Mischief Night (review)

The English Year by Steve Roud is a handsome volume, filled with excellent photographs and illustrations. A large (but not oversized) text with a beautifully designed dust jacket, it has the appearance and appeal of a coffee-table book and suggests itself as a gift for people interested in British custom and tradition. The subtitle of the book, “A Month-by-Month Guide to the Nation’s Customs and Festivals, from May Day to Mischief Night,” announces the text’s format and contents well. The English Year is essentially an encyclopedia of British customs arranged chronologically by calendrical date. Occasions that have no fixed date or that otherwise do not fit the calendrical schema are assigned places in the book according to the author’s discretion, which he explains in a foreword. Although encyclopedic in scope, The English Year is authored entirely by Steve Roud, in what is clearly both a Herculean task and a labor of love.

The goals of a book of this kind differ from those of a more focused ethnographic or theoretical study. Such a volume speaks to and is intended to reach a broader readership than the typical scholarly study, and this fact needs to be taken into consideration when evaluating its contents. Still, volumes that are presented as primarily factual and straightforwardly descriptive do in fact manifest theoretical assumptions, in both the criteria by which materials are chosen for inclusion and the way in which such materials are presented.

The front matter includes a six-page introduction, an essay on the calendar, and a pagelong section called “How To Use This Book.” The introduction, an engaging and chatty essay, articulates the author’s positions on a number of his editorial decisions. Several important points are discussed here, but given the nature of the book, they are dealt with in a cursory way. Roud embarks on a discussion of authenticity, assuming it to be an essential quality. He warns against local histories and etiologies for customs and festivals, as well as more learned attempts to identify almost every local event as having its origins in an imagined Celtic prehistory. He does not, to use his term, “deconstruct,” contextualize, or situate these local interpretations, so much as he simply rejects them; he points out that these interpretations form an interesting narrative genre in their own right, but he does not elaborate this idea.

Roud raises the question of whether the customs documented in The English Year can be said to reflect a national culture and concludes that they are better seen as particular manifestations of local, and possibly regional, ones. This is an important point but, again, one that begs for further exploration. In light of this, I find it problematic that when he explains his criteria for inclusion, he states that the

historical approach adopted in this book means that with two exceptions, the customs of newer immigrant communities have not been included. The customs of new communities are already “English” in the sense of taking place in this country, but if they have been simply imported from elsewhere they need time to become naturalized. Again, once they have been passed on to second and third generations, and once they break out of the host community to become more widely known, they will become “English” in every sense, whatever their origin. The Chinese New Year and the Notting Hill Carnival are included for precisely this reason.

(p. xii)

Personally, I was disappointed to find only these two examples from the immigrant or ethnic populations of contemporary multicultural Great Britain. While Roud’s reasoning is straightforward—and he is to be commended for explicitly stating his rules of thumb—the volume as a whole very much reifies the “Merrie Olde England” image that he himself criticizes in the essay. One approaches the book expecting to find entries on...