The Antiquities of Selborne, Shown to the World by the Rev. Gilbert White, of Selborne, in the Country of Southampton

Pageant type

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Performances

Place: Grounds of Gilbert White’s House (Selborne) (Selborne, Hampshire, England)

Year: 1926

Indoors/outdoors: Outdoors

Number of performances: 2

Notes

21 July 1926, 3pm and 7pm

Name of pageant master and other named staff

  • Pageant Master: Kelly, Mary

Names of executive committee or equivalent

n/a

Names of script-writer(s) and other credited author(s)

  • Kelly, Mary
  • White, Gilbert

Names of composers

n/a

Numbers of performers

Financial information

Object of any funds raised

To ‘raise funds for the enlargement and improvements of the village hall.’1

Linked occasion

n/a

Audience information

  • Grandstand: Not Known
  • Grandstand capacity: n/a
  • Total audience: 1500

Notes

The figure of 1500 is an estimate: 800 attendees ‘from all parts of Southern England’ were present at the afternoon performance. It was likely that the evening figure was similar.

Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest

3s. 6d.–1s.

Admission to the grounds was 1s. and seats could be secured for either 2s. 6d. or 2s. on top of this.

Associated events

Gilbert White’s house was opened to the public.

Pageant outline

Prologue

Musical introduction by orchestra. Gilbert White and John Mulso in the dress of 1790 ride through a gap in the hedge of the wood. They discuss the natural beauty of Selborne, and Mulso asks what he learnt of the village’s history from writing his study. White replies: ‘As soon as ever I step out of Natural History into the walk of Antiquities I find my feet as it were on strange ground, but I will do my best to satisfy you.’ They discuss its origins in Saxon times, in which times it was a Royal manor in possession of Edith, Queen of Edward the Confessor. White remarks: ‘Such a link with the past seems to bring it clearly before one’s eyes, the mists of antiquity clear away, and one can almost fancy that one hears the hunting horns of the Saxon monarch, as he pursues the fleeting deer in the forest of Wolmer.’

Episode I. The Founding of Selborne Church, 1049

Enter pages, woman and boy as the sound of a horn is heard distantly. King Edward the Confessor rides in followed by earls and huntsmen pursuing their quarry, a hart. The King is pensive, and decides to spare the hart, though the sons of Earl Godwin, Sweyn, Tostig and Harold mock him. The Queen enters and offers the King and others ale from a drinking horn. Edward confesses to being weary of ‘doing to death the creatures of the All-Father’ and that his soul is tormented. The Queen says he may make amends by going to Radfred the priest. Radfred is sad because no one prays, as there is no church. The King grants him land to build a church. King Edward declares: ‘Holy father, I will help thee in the building of this church, for I believe that it was for this that God spoke to me from heaven, leading me to this spot that I might hear thy prayer.’ After this, the scene returns to White and Mulso, who then relates the history of Sir Adam de Gurdun, a follower of Simon de Montfort, even after the latter’s death.

Episode II. The Capture of Adam de Gurdun, 1265

Swineheards enter. One sounds a horn. A rough unkempt man-at-arms wearing De Gurdun’s colours (red and white) leaps over the hedge, followed by others. They take the basket of the swineherds. Sir Adam enters, and a boy warns him that Prince Edward and his men are in the forest searching for him. The Lady Agnes, who sent the message, warns him to make peace. Sir Adam (adopting quasi-Robin Hood reasons) refuses. The King’s men appear, surrounding them. Prince Edward arrives and fights Sir Adam, who is eventually wounded. The Prince spares Adam’s life due his gallantry, and Adam swears not to wage war and to pledge fealty to the King. The Queen enters, and Adam pledges loyalty to her also. They depart to the church. Once again the scene then shifts to the time of Gilbert White, who introduces the visitation of William of Wykeham to the Priory of Canons Regular.

Episode III. The Visitation of the Priory by William of Wykeham, 1387

A band of boys and girls enter and celebrate May-Day, dancing and singing ‘Summer Is I-Cumen In’. A canon enters and criticizes their dancing. When they ignore him, he calls the prior, who tells them of his love for Morris dancing and celebrations and blesses them. The Morris procession enters with fool, hobby horse, etc. They dance. They are welcomed to the Priory, and eventually bring the prior and canon into the dance to the music of ‘Robin Hood and Little John’. William of Wykeham enters suddenly and everyone freezes. The prior extricates himself, though he forgets to remove a May wreath. Wykeham is very angry, accusing them of being ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing, false stewards, untrue servants, fit for the wrath of God!’ The crowds disappear very rapidly. He criticizes their furred gowns and other signs of vanity. Woebegone, they go into the Priory. The action then returns to White and Mulso, who reflect on the monks, suggesting their repentance was short-lived. ‘Although William of Wykeham acted towards them as a liberal friend and benefactor, as well as a stern judge, we find that within ten years the whole of the Priory plate, vestments, relics, and title-deeds were in pawn.’ White talks about the slow decline of the Priory, finally being suppressed by the Pope in the reign of Henry V.

Episode IV. The Departure of the 77th Highlanders in 1790

The action merges into the time of the late eighteenth century, and and the departure after a billeting of six months of the 77th regiment of Highlanders. Villagers enter and greet White. They are coming here for a feast to celebrate the wedding of Sophia Stuart (daughter of the squire) and Captain Alexander Gordon, which White has forgotten. White: ‘I am indeed distressed that I had allowed myself to wander so far into the past as to forget the present.’ The wedding party enters and the squire greets White and Mulso. The squire isn’t particularly happy about the marriage. They greet Sophia Stuart. Musicians strike up ‘Haste to the Wedding’ and all dance. A Highlander performs a sword dance. A reel follows. White and Lady Stuart discuss the virtues of the cuckoo. All dance ‘Brighton Camp.’ The captain receives orders that the Highlanders are to depart to Southampton and then to India, Sophia faints. The Squire vows that he will use his influence to transfer the captain to another regiment. The captain and Sophia are parted, the soldiers form up and march out, and the villagers sing ‘The Rout is Out’. All disappear, leaving White and Mulso who mount their horses and ride through the crowd. They hope the parting will be temporary. They then discuss the instincts and virtues of ‘Timothy the Tortoise’ wandering around the Wakes. They keep talking about nothing in particular until the pageant is at an end.

Key historical figures mentioned

  • White, Gilbert (1720–1793) naturalist
  • Edward [St Edward; known as Edward the Confessor] (1003x5–1066) king of England
  • Edith [Eadgyth] (d. 1075) queen of England, consort of Edward the Confessor
  • Swein [Sweyn], earl (d. 1052) magnate
  • Harold II [Harold Godwineson] (1022/3?–1066) king of England
  • Tostig, earl of Northumbria (c.1029–1066) magnate
  • Gurdun [Gurdon], Sir Adam (c.1220–1305) soldier and rebel
  • Eleanor [Eleanor of Provence] (c.1223–1291) queen of England, consort of Henry II
  • Edward I (1239–1307) king of England and lord of Ireland, and duke of Aquitaine
  • Wykeham, William (c.1324–1404) bishop of Winchester, administrator, and founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford

Musical production

There was an orchestra.
  • Anon, ‘Robin Hood and Little John’
  • Anon, ‘Haste to the Wedding’
  • Anon, ‘Summer is i-cumen in’

Newspaper coverage of pageant

The Times
Manchester Guardian
Hartlepool Mail
John O’London’s
Portsmouth Evening News

Book of words

Kelly, Mary. The Antiquities of Selborne, Shown to the World by the Rev. Gilbert White, of Selborne, in the Country of Southampton. London, 1926.

Other primary published materials

n/a

References in secondary literature

  • Kosugi, Sei. ‘Representing Nation and Nature: Woolf, Kelly, White’. In Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place, edited by A. Snaith and M. Whitworth, 81–98. Basingstoke, 2007.
  • Barrett, Susan. Making a Difference: A Novel. Victoria, Canada, 2006.

Archival holdings connected to pageant

n/a

Sources used in preparation of pageant

  • White, Gilbert. The Natural History of the Antiquities of Selborne. London, 1789.

Summary

Note: see also the entry for Pageant of Selborne (1938).

The rural nostalgia of the interwar period has been extensively documented by historians, and the 1926 Selborne Pageant is an excellent example of the desire to preserve England’s natural and historical beauty, as well as a celebration of the folk traditions of the countryside.2 Some two years after the performance of the pageant at Selborne, Clough Williams-Ellis, the famous architect-owner of Portmerion in Wales, published England and the Octopus (1928), an impassioned denunciation of the expansion of suburban England and the commuter railways, roads, and tourism that were destroying the last vestiges of organic folk culture. This was a cry that had some affinities with those raised by William Cobbett in the 1820s and George Sturt in the early twentieth century (figures familiar to the local area of Surrey, Berkshire and North Hampshire); it was also one that would be taken up by a host of writers and artists from F.R. Leavis to W.H. Massingham and John Nash. Pageantry, it is fair to say, has been an ideal bedfellow to expressions of rural nostalgia and the projections of a bucolic ‘deep’ England, unspoiled by the motorcar.

While there is a contemporary tendency to dismiss much of this lament as misplaced (the demise of rural England has been proclaimed since Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)), the Selborne pageant went beyond mere hand-wringing at the state of things. Mary Kelly (1888–1951), the author of the pageant, was the key force behind the Village Dramatic Society, which performed the Selborne Pageant. Kelly founded the Village Dramatic Society in 1919 in her native Devon, though in its early years the society performed mostly religious plays often in local dialect and preserving folk traditions. The Selborne Pageant was Kelly’s first foray into pageantry—and only one performed outside the South West—followed by others at Rillington (1927), Bradstone (1929), Launceston (1931), Bude, and Exeter Cathedral (1932).3 She also wrote the book How To Make a Pageant (1936), drawing on her own experiences, which presented the pageant as a disappearing tradition thanks to the lure of modern commercial mass entertainment.

The Selborne Pageant did not fall on any anniversary in White’s life, and White’s commitment to retired study, avoiding upheavals and excitements, were hardly conducive to traditional notions of pageantry. The publication of The Natural History and Antiquaries of Selborne coincided with the French Revolution of 1789 and the height of the enclosures of English lands which impoverished many of the poorer Hampshire farmers and irrevocably changed the face of the English landscape. The book, which is framed around a number of letters to various naturalists, records the topography, flora and fauna before going on to sketch key events from the history of the village. The book was an unlikely success, remaining in print ever since and enjoyed by millions.

White’s long discussions with his friend John Mulso (they were played by R.H. Lock and Mr. G. Naish, Devonshire performers)4 form an excellent backbone to the drama and creates the sense of a double perspective: the audience watches White and Mulso who themselves watch the unfolding scenes on horseback. The pageant also featured members of the Alton Dramatic Society and the Hampshire Hunt (in Episode IV).5 By creating a sense of historical distancing, their presence reduces the sense of melodrama found in other events. The episodes presented by the pageant, such as the eventual capture of Adam de Gudrun, Wykeham’s chastisement of the monks, and the lament over the newly wed Sophia, are thus put into perspective against the progression of time, stressing above all the natural continuities of the village. Thus, in the final scene, where the festivities of the nuptials are shattered by the Napoleonic War, the symbol of ‘Timothy the Tortoise’, whose slow-paced life exceeds the brevity of human experience, emphasises the timelessness of nature.

The pageant deviates from the ideal of a bucolic ‘merrie England’ both in this episode and in the third episode, in which a fairly innocuous May-Day celebration, ubiquitous throughout pageantry, is interrupted by William of Wykeham who claims this is far-removed from the ideals of monasticism. Thus the notion of medieval harmony, combining feasting and piety, is disrupted. It is unclear whether the audience ought to sympathise with the rather too worldly monks or the archly austere Wykeham—though the scene can be read in the context of White’s remarks that the order was suppressed some twenty years later (notably, one of the few references to dissolution not connected to Henry VIII). Mick Wallis suggests that the ‘coexistence [of] the ostensibly “non-political” Kelly of royalist sentiment on the one hand and enthusiastically progressive—to some extent democratic—impulses on the other was not unusual in the inter-war period’.6

The use of White and Selborne was a canny idea which ensured the pageant a reasonably large degree of publicity as far away as the Hartlepool Mail, which noted that ‘Selborne, as most people know, was the home of Gilbert White, the naturalist’, and which proclaimed to its readers that ‘visitors will be able to see the brick path that Selborne made, his old sundial, and the garden that he loved so well and wrote so charmingly of in his “Letters.”’7 According to the Manchester Guardian, the pageant coincided with the annual pilgrimage to Gilbert White’s house at Selborne’ made by the Selborne Society: ‘The Selborne Society invites any lovers of Gilbert White to join in the pilgrimage’.8

A number of commentators have linked the Selborne Pageant, which was repeated in 1938, to Virginia Woolf who wrote on White a number of times, notably in her essay ‘White’s Selborne’ in the New Statesman and Nation on 30 September 1939.9 It is uncanny that her last novel, Between the Acts (1941), which is about the performance of a pageant staged by a female Pageant Master, should have been written so shortly after the essay and within a few years of the second staging. Sei Kosugi asks: ‘Why did this symbolic encounter between Mary Kelly and Virginia Woolf occur at a specific moment of history (the late 1930s) and at the Hampshire village of Selborne?’10 One novelist, Susan Barrett, in her novel Making a Difference, has conjectured that Woolf herself visited the pageant in 1926, though no evidence for this exists.11 The important cultural phenomenon of pageantry and the obsession with the preservation of the folk culture and the historical traditions of rural England, so well-depicted in Gilbert White’s Natural History of the Antiquaries of Selborne, explain the bond between the imaginations of Woolf and Kelly, and for that matter writers such as E.M. Forster whose Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938) pursue many of the same themes.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Hartlepool Mail, 6 July 1926, 4.
  2. ^ Jeremy Burckhardt, Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change Since 1800 (London, 2002), esp. chapters 1, 8–9 and 11–12; Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London, 2010); Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993); Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The Past in Contemporary Britain (London, 1985) and The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham (London, 1995); Peter Mandler has criticized this rural nostalgia in ‘Against Englishness: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 7 (1997): 155–175.
  3. ^ Mick Wallis, ‘Kelly, Mary Elfreda (1888–1951)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 7 January 2016, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/69833?docPos=1; Mick Wallis, ‘Drama in the Villages: Three Pioneers’, in The English Countryside Between the Wars: Regeneration Or Decline? ed. Paul Brassley, Jeremy Burchardt and Lynne Thompson (Woodbridge, 2007), 102–115. See also the interesting blogpost by Julie Sampson, accessed 7 January 2016, http://scrapblogfromthesouth-west.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/mary-kelly-devons-c1920-village.html.
  4. ^ Western Morning News, 17 October 1940, 5. Lock was the honorary secretary of the Devonshire County Cricket Club.
  5. ^ Manchester Guardian, 8 July 1926, 12.
  6. ^ Mick Wallis, ‘Kelly, Mary Elfreda (1888–1951)’.
  7. ^ Hartlepool Mail, 6 July 1926, 4.
  8. ^ Manchester Guardian, 8 July 1926, 12.
  9. ^ Christina Alt, Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (Cambridge, 2006), 159–60.
  10. ^ Sei Kosugi ‘Representing Nation and Nature: Woolf, Kelly, White’, in Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place, ed. A. Snaith and M. Whitworth (Basingstoke, 2007), 89.
  11. ^ Susan Barrett, Making a Difference: A Novel (Victoria, Canada, 2006), 297.

How to cite this entry

Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alex Hutton, Paul Readman, ‘The Antiquities of Selborne, Shown to the World by the Rev. Gilbert White, of Selborne, in the Country of Southampton’, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1184/