‘Tacit, Unsuspected, but still Implicit Faith’: Alternative Belief in Nineteenth-Century Rural England

Abstract

Part of the title of this essay is taken from the writings of a late nineteenth-century clergyman whose parish lay in the northern part of the Yorkshire dales. As an indication of the familiarity with which he knew his parish, the Reverend J. C. Atkinson calculated that he had walked more than 70,000 miles, in pursuance of his clerical business, across forty years of residence. Despite noting the modernisation of local farming practice, a decline in ‘rowdyism’, the decay of local dialect and the advance of education, he could still record the widespread acceptance of alternative belief in the late nineteenth century as ‘a living faith’.¹ His informants were often reluctant to converse with him on this subject, through fear of being thought ‘credulous or superstitious’,² but, despite this reluctance, he was able to describe a holistic structure of folk beliefs. These were not rooted in ignorance but were at odds with orthodox belief; yet they often sat comfortably alongside formal knowledge or religious belief. One of his informants was

the worthiest of my many worthy parishioners, a man sensible, clear-headed, intelligent, one of my best helpers in all good and useful things ... a man with the instinctive feelings of the truest gentility, but who always seemed averse to entering on any folklore talk or inquiry, and was, even admittedly, on his guard lest he should be led on to speak of them inadvertently.³