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Abstract

Chapter 5 sees the parish as a platform for belonging, and sport and custom as celebrations of that belonging. It opens with Edwin Butterworth, a well-connected journalist working for Edward Baines, the radical newspaper owner, who was writing a history of Lancashire. Charged in 1835 with surveying a county deep in the throes of industrialization, and keen to establish the state of ‘Customs, Habits, &c’, Butterworth’s findings do not show the sudden death of parochial custom any more than they show the rising up of a great new factory system. Instead, they show parochial culture dying in some places but flourishing (and changing) in others. The chapter goes on to look more widely at how this old parochial culture had bound people to their sense of place—what the old Poor Law called ‘settlement’. At the same time the chapter notes how from the 1830s to the 1880s, the welfare functions that had underpinned settlement were being removed and given to quasi-national bodies. Apart from Church of England clergy who were not quite insiders or outsiders, the parish had insiders who were enemies as well. Primitive Methodists were anti-sport and counter-parochial for all of the nineteenth century. They brought disruption with a new kind of belonging.