Lincolnshire’s curious customs: Rantanning

As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project, Dr Anna Milon looks at the history of the ‘Ran Tan’, a practice of public shaming – and considers some parallels with our online lives today.

There’s a blue plaque on 59 Main Road in Washingborough, a few miles east of Lincoln, which reads:

Danny Fitton lived here
and in April 1918,
accused of wife beating,
he was ‘Ran Tanned’
round the village to
Thackbush Lane
where his effigy was
burnt – the last of the
Lincolnshire Ran Tans.

The organist Danny Fitton (named James by W. E. R. Hallgarth, writing for Lincolnshire Life in 1968) was accused of domestic violence, attracting censure from his neighbours, which was expressed in a centuries-old tradition: the ‘Ran Tan’, or rantanning. This was a form of public humiliation, usually directed against people who were accused of transgressing in community or domestic matters.

Neighbours would gather outside the house of the accused with pots, pans and an assortment of improvised noise-making instruments and make ‘rough music’ (effectively, as much noise as possible) to express their displeasure. This would go on for three nights in a row, after which a straw effigy of the accused was paraded through the streets and solemnly burnt in a nearby field. The implicit message was simple: mend your ways or the next thing burning might not be a straw dummy.

ORIGINS
The Lincolnshire Ran Tan is a variant of a custom widespread across Britain, and further afield.

Elsewhere it is known as the Skimmington, Riding the Stang, Rough Music, or, collectively, by its French title, Charivari. The practice is directed against perceived social transgressors, but the exact nature of the transgressions varies: from violent spouses, both male and female, to the submissive husbands of authoritative wives, to adulterers, to widows and widowers seeking to remarry much younger partners, or parents and teachers who exceeded their authority over children in their care. The humiliation can equally target the perpetrator and the victim of the transgression, its main role often being to expose rather than to punish.

The rantanned individual may appear in person, or be represented by a proxy (such as a neighbour) or an effigy or puppet; he or she may be paraded through the streets while sitting backwards on a donkey, or astride a stang (a long narrow pole), or on a chair tied to a ladder. The finale of the procession may be the ritual burning of a straw effigy or the throwing of the accused into a nearby ditch or duck pond.

ROUGH RHYMES
Another common element of the practice is the nominy: a short, rhymed chant. It has a common generic structure, but particulars can be customised to fit the circumstances. One example is recorded by the Lincolnshire folklorist Ethel Rudkin (1893-1985):

‘Ran-a-dan, ran-a-dan, ran-a-dan-dan,
I ride the stang for this base-hearted man.
He neither took stick, stake, nor stower,
But ’e upp’d wi’ ’is fist an’ ’e knocked ’er ower.’

This particular verse, published by Rudkin in 1933, was spoken by a proxy of the accused, who was being rantanned on account of knocking his wife over with his fist. Another example was submitted to the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project this year by an inhabitant of Friskney, in the Lincolnshire Fens. It goes:

There was a man in our town and [Mr B.] was his name.
He’s been beating his poor wife and don’t you think it’s a shame.
And if he does the likes again, as I suppose he will,
We’ll sit him on Dicky Billy, and ride him through Foldhill.

The correspondent heard it from his father-in-law, and the name in the first line is censored here because it belongs to a specific person. ‘Dicky Billy’ is likely to be a chair tied to a ladder on which the accused would have been paraded through the village, and Fold Hill is a real place just outside Friskney. The preservation of this rhyme, and its connection with the local landscape, corroborates E. P. Thompson’s point, in his article ‘Rough Music Reconsidered’ (1992), that the ‘essentials of the “nominy” seem to have been as indelibly memorised as children’s rhymes, and collectors found elderly informants to be word-perfect in them’.

RANTANNING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
It also raises questions regarding when rantanning really did die out. Despite Danny Fitton of Washingborough being named as the last victim of the Lincolnshire Ran Tan in 1918, the Lincolnshire Free Press in 1919 records a group of men (between eight and thirteen according to various records) from Rippingale, near Bourne, being summoned to the bar for unlawfully joining a brawl with a great beating of drums, tins, buckets, and the burning of effigies. The group’s motivation was the exposure of a woman who was cheating on her husband while he was away in the Army. A decade after Danny Fitton’s ordeal, in 1928, a woman was rantanned in Quadring Fen for making scandalous remarks against her neighbours. Twenty-three people were arrested and fined for disorderly conduct. Other, later still, instances of the ran tan are certainly possible as well.

While rantanning might no longer involve the beating of pans outside a person’s house in the middle of the night, the practice could be seen to have evolved to suit our digital age, in the form of ‘cancelling’ and online pile-ons, involving the exposure of traits or views deemed ‘problematic’, even if they are not criminal. Have we become too civilised to rantan, or has the practice simply moved into the global village? What do you think – is this an evolved form of rantanning? I invite you to send your comments to Lincolnshire Life, or to rantan us on social media via @lincsfolk or lincolnshirefolktales.

The Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project, led by Dr Rory Waterman and Dr Anna Milon of Nottingham Trent University, is running storytelling events around the county, publishing blogs, books and articles, and collecting folk tales. The folk tale map on the website, www.lincolnshirefolktalesproject.com, is a treasure trove. Do get in touch with the organisers – they would love to hear from you!

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