The culture of local xenophobia

‘Splendid Display; Pompous Spectacle’: historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain

“…74 Sometimes popular responses to appeals to local patriotism went further than necessary: the St Albans pageant provided an opportunity to display the 'local xenophobia' that K. D. M. Snell has identified as a significant element in English culture over a long period. 75 For example, one correspondent to the Herts Advertiser complained that the performance of Episode 3 -the martyrdom of St Alban -had been offered to a group from the nearby village of Radlett, and objected to this on the grounds that, as the martyrdom had taken place very close to the site of the pageant, it should be St Albans people who enacted it. 76 The educational function of the pageant was important to Charles Ashdown, who, as secretary of the Architectural and Archaeological Society, tried to use the build-up to the event to stimulate interest in the more scholarly aspects of local history.…”

Change and continuity in the techniques and technologies of identification over the second Christian millennium

“…From the 1830s onwards parish registration was replaced by civil registration but this was still based on kin or neighbours identifying a person before a local registrar (Higgs 2004a). The long continuance of the Poor Law system, parts of which survived until the Second World War, may help to explain the extraordinary parochialism of the English identity down into the twentieth century (Snell 2003).…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2003

“…Joan Kent clearly had much insight to offer on the social dynamics of welfare and her death is a sad loss to the scholarly community. Although Snell begins his brilliant analysis of the culture of local xenophobia with the insight that ‘the social conscience of a rural people is limited by the parish bounds’, he concentrates on the modern period, leaving early modernists to explore the possibility that the institutionalization of the poor laws significantly intensified parochial identities from the late sixteenth century. In a wide‐ranging and chronologically ambitious analysis of attitudes to migration, meanwhile, Feldman plausibly argues that modern debates over the entitlement to welfare of immigrants from overseas echoed those over the status of internal migrants seeking to assimilate themselves to the parish under the old poor law, an insight which might profitably be developed by early modernists interested in the social construction of belonging in the local community.…”

“…The intense territorialism of parish populations is discussed in two papers. Snell’s richly documented study brings out the ingrained strength of ‘parochial xenophobia’ in eighteenth‐century agricultural counties, arguing that it did much to frustrate other forms of collective consciousness among the rural poor. Indeed, from 1780, increasing rural poverty and unemployment intensified parochial hostility to outsiders seeking wives or work.…”