Social Unity, Social Discord: Civic Ritual in Late Medieval England

Few events nowadays are important enough to warrant the kind of attendance, attention, effort, and cerebration seen in the late medieval civic rituals. Whether a holiday tradition involving social inversion, the inaugural entry of a king or queen into the city proper, or a Corpus Christi procession, citizens of the late medieval city knew the traditions involved and what the ceremony generally expected of them. Furthermore, such rituals were important to urban dwellers. Scholars have analyzed the meaning behind these ceremonies to a mind-numbing degree, and there is a fundamental disagreement as to what implications the civic ritual has for the state of urban social tension. The primary sources of civic rituals often describe, in the form of an effaced narrative, what went on. Modern scholars have little opportunity to study the true motivations behind such ritual, because very few sources are able to "get inside the head" of a medieval urban dweller. Psychological analysis, then, is key to drawing implications (and most of the arguments which follow are indeed implications) about the motives, process, and result of civic ritual.Adherents to one school of thought argue that the political nature of carnivals, pageants, and processions were a reflection on the discord between the social classes, and that they were essentially a form of social protest. Adherents to the opposing school of thought cede that civic ritual was, in the main, about social distinctions and inequality; however, to these scholars the function of the ritual was that of a "reconstitutive act" or a "safety valve." As always, most scholars seek their own middle ground between the two extremes, and hardly anyone is without a foot in both camps.