Craig Fees, 1996: "Tourism and the Politics of Authenticity in a North Cotswold Town", Chapter 7, "The Tourist Image: Myth and Myth Making in Tourism", ed. Tom Selwyn (John Wiley and Sons)
One of the forms that tourism takes is the resident tourist: the immigrant for whom the locale is a leisure backdrop to a 'real' life lived primarily elsewhere — in the past, in the case of retired persons; in the present, in terms of commuters and of holiday/second-home owners. These leisured immigrants, for whom leisure is the primary function of the locale, present a challenge to the rest of the population which can be characterized in the questions: who and what is the place for? Is it for people from outside, who wish to experience its beauty (for example)? Or is it for people who live and work there and whose children muddy grassy banks with their bikes?
The dilemmas thrown up when two populations attempt to live in the same place while holding radically different answers to these and similar questions — and the constructive role that an anthropologist might play in their resolution — are discussed in this chapter in the context of the recent history and development of an English town which discovered its own potential as a tourist venue at the end of the last century and has been 'discovered' continuously since. This is set against the backdrop of the question of 'authenticity', with particular attention to the role of narrative traditions and discourse in the definition of authenticity, 'belonging' and identity.
There are a number of British TV programmes concerned with the evaluation of the antiques people discover in their lofts and back rooms. Typically, a panel of experts which travels Britain, takes a local hall and provides expert analysis (and usually a valuation) of the objects in question. Someone might bring in a particularly attractive flower pot which their mother bought years before at a car boot sale for five shillings and be told that it is, in fact, a particularly fine and rare example of a sought-after potter's work and therefore worth five or six hundred pounds. Another will arrive with a prized painting which has hung proudly in the family dining room for generations, only to be told that it is a 19th-century reproduction and therefore, effectively, worthless. What was formerly a utensil on the kitchen window-sill suddenly becomes an object of art which must be insured and put on display, and what was a source of family pride is just as suddenly relegated to the spare room or perhaps taken to a car boot sale and sold. In neither case is the object itself changed — what changes is the meaning ascribed to it and the world it evokes.
This illustrates several points. First of all, it shows that 'authenticity' is not a quality of objects in themselves but is something which is ascribed to them; second, that objects are authentic because someone with the authority to do so says they are; and third, that the experience of an object as authentic or otherwise has practical consequences.
One of those consequences has to do with the nature of objects themselves, which are never 'alone', so to speak, but are always part of a world which they evoke and invoke. For example:
I am in Wyoming, in the United States, and, walking through a field with my brother. I kick up what appears to be an arrowhead and, yes, on examining it I find that the shape and flaking rule out natural causation: I determine that it is authentically an arrowhead and — based on what I know of Wyoming and American Indian culture — that it is an authentic American Indian arrowhead. It becomes a potent artefact of a bygone era to which I belong as an American, and I show it to my brother. He points to a tumbledown building in the neighbouring field and tells me that it is the remains of a Japanese-American internment camp, set up here during World War II. He then tells me that these Japanese-Americans made thousands of arrowheads to sell during the war. What I found was almost certainly one of these. The arrowhead itself is unchanged. But what is evoked by it now is an entirely different world: of native Californians packed off to the hostile and cold plains of Wyoming, their businesses sold at knock-down prices, lives and careers ruined because of their ancestry. The arrowhead's meaning and value change.2
Transpose this now to contemporary Britain, where a piece of wasteland scheduled to be bulldozed for a new motorway is redefined as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. That designation, that authentication, brings a whole machinery into play. The world evoked by the motorway — of cars, cities and transport-sector special interests — crashes up against the world evoked by the SSSI — of a vanishing Britain, fragile eco-cultures and green activism. A legal machinery is set in motion, as is a political machinery and a social and economic machinery. The object itself — the land — has not changed. But because it has to be authentically something, whether that something is authentic wasteland or an authentic reserve of rare and endangered species — it becomes the object of a social, cultural and economic contest. What is at issue is where the authority ultimately resides to determine the meaning, value and use of the land. It must be authentically something — even, to paraphrase Brown (Chapter 2), authentically fake.
The question is: where does the authority to ascribe that authenticity lie? The answer is: at the Centre. The 'Centre', of which Selwyn speaks (Chapter 1), is where the authority to ascribe authenticity resides. The 'Periphery' is that which accepts the authority, or, to look at it in less consensual terms, the Periphery is where the authority of the Centre holds sway, where its definition of what things are and mean holds.
Authentication is the province of authority. It is what authority does, and it is through authentication that authority (and all it represents in terms of power and capacity to move in and effect the world) is. But 'authority' is complex. There are different kinds of authority, which may or may not conflict, coincide or compete; and the same kinds of authority may have different domains. An expert, like those in the TV programmes about antiques, is an authority (and only in one particular field), but there are also people with authority (charismatic leaders, for example, who can authenticate through their presence the truth of a particular vision); people in authority (the minister or civil servant whose decision will eventually determine the fate of the motorway vs the SSSI); and there is the authority of tradition, for which certain people have the right to speak (the owner, for example, before the painting is shown to be a reproduction).
By the definition of 'authority' all of these can claim to be at the Centre or to be Centre. But what happens when two or more Centres attempt to occupy the same space? For example, what happens if the owner of the painting refuses to jettison family tradition and accept the authentication of his painting as a reproduction? The expert insists. The owner asserts his authority and the authenticity of family tradition against the authority of the expert, countering assertions of inauthenticity ('crank', 'troublemaker', 'ignorant amateur') by asserting the inauthenticity of his opponent ('quack', 'pompous self-serving know-nothing', 'snob'). The authority of 'family tradition' is attacked by the art historian; the authority of 'art historian' is attacked by the owner. There is the struggle for the authority to define and thereby to determine the nature and outcome of things (heirloom or fake/motorway or nature reserve). There is the drive to inauthenticate, to trivialize, to extend one's authority to authenticate, to peripheralize the Other. There is the politics of authenticity, in full cry.
Because it involves the assertion of authority to authenticate others — to define who and what they are and therefore what should happen to them — the politics of authenticity is also the politics of identity; and where distinct cultures are in competition for the Centre from which their mutual identities and relationships will be determined, it becomes the politics of ethnicity as well. Transpose all of this now to the rural English town of Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF TOURISM IN CAMPDEN
Chipping Campden (or Campden) is a small rural town and parish in northern Gloucestershire, England, 12 miles southwest of Stratford-on-Avon in the North Cotswolds. During the past century the principle industry of the area has shifted from agriculture to tourism.
The origins of the modern tourist industry in Campden can be traced to events of the late 1870s. At that time Campden was the administrative, market and political centre of the North Cotswolds, and it had what, in contemporary terms, were various urban features, including slums, dense housing and overcrowding. While agriculture and its ancillary industries and businesses (basket-making, cartwrighting, blacksmithing, land and property management) were at the centre of the local economy, the local middle class indulged the urban rural idyll, taking picnics and holidays in the 'country' and kept up with and contributed to the latest fads and fashions of the city. The town as a public body was characterized by a self-conscious sense of progress and growing prosperity within the context of the Empire, as evidenced in new public buildings and civic amenities.
In the late 1870s, however, Campden was hit by the Agricultural Depression. Between the censuses of 1870 and 1901, in the crippling economic conditions of a depression which went on and on, the population of Campden fell by nearly a quarter. Houses fell empty, businesses closed and Chipping Campden faced the dilemma that British mining and shipbuilding communities are facing today: to diversify, to attract new investment and new industries, to provide opportunities for the young and to hold onto the skilled work-force, or to become an economic, social and political backwater. In Campden this meant, among other things, attracting inward investment in the form of new middle-class residents, each household of which employed numerous maids and help of various kinds, increased local trade, paid rates and perhaps rent. It also meant attracting shorter-term residents, who brought many of the same benefits, mainly during the summers; visitors, resident for a few days or weeks; and people visiting Campden for the day or as a brief stop during a tour. In short it meant developing the tourism industry, transforming Chipping Campden into a retirement and tourist venue and actively identifying, promoting and enhancing features which would attract people to the town.
Conceptualizing Chipping Campden as a tourist attraction required a fundamental cognitive shift in which the working political, social and economic centre for the local agricultural industry was recognized and authenticated as a desirable and marketable entity in its own right. Prior to the Agricultural Depression there was simply no need to regard Campden in this way; it was visited and admired, but there was no great motive to transform that admiration into an active tourism industry. In the 1880s and 1890s and concurrent with a shift in the local balance of social and political power from agriculture to trade, the necessary cognitive shift took place. 'Campden' was explicitly recognized as a marketable entity, with qualities such as 'beauty' and 'antiquity' which could be singled out, developed, advertised and sold. It was argued that in developing 'Campden' in this way all parts of the community would benefit, from farmers and traders, to working men and landlords, to members of the gentry who would benefit from the enhanced social life which would follow.
Initially it was not primarily the beauty and antiquity of the town but its possibilities as a health resort which were publicly recognized:
We have, I say, in that copious flow of excellent water, and in the natural gifts around us, undeveloped stores waiting to be worked for the good of this town, and of thousands of our neighbours, for whom a retirement (temporary or permanent) from city life is an absolute necessity.3
It soon became clear, however, that the major attractions for the contemporary tourist were the town's antiquity, its historical associations, (Civil War ruins; Robert Dover's Games; 'The Campden Wonder') and its beauty and the beauty of its setting. Efforts were made to develop these. In order to enhance the setting, for example, trees were planted along the High Street. New buildings, such as the Catholic Church, were intentionally designed and constructed using recycled stone and/or local and compatible materials in order to blend in with the extant architecture. The Town Trust made an order prohibiting the storage of farm carts in the Market Hall in the centre of the High Street, on the grounds that they disfigured the picturesque old building. The first history of the town was written. The self-conscious theme of ‘Ye Olde Campden' emerged in local entertainments for the first time, and in a series of elaborate Whitsun celebrations in the late 1880s designed to promote the town and its trade, 'Campden' was reframed for public consumption in images of Merrie Englande drawn from the antiquarian repertoire of the day: Robin Hood and his Merry Men walked the streets alongside May Queens, floral carts. Yeomen of the Guard, morris and maypole dancing. The campaign to promote visitors was a success: the only industry which definitely grew in the 1880s and 1890s was tourism.4
The real coup in the campaign to promote Campden as such, however, came in 1902, when 150 men, women and children came en masse to establish the London-based arts and crafts firm, the Guild of Handicraft, in Campden. The Guild was in the avant garde of the international Arts and Crafts Movement, and its well publicized move to Campden — attracted by the town's image and setting and by the availability of premises within convenient distance of the railway — was a radical and unique realization of back-to-the-land Guild Socialism. As such, as an ambitious socio-industrial experiment, the Guild itself became an object of considerable tourism; indeed, the volume of visitors to the new Guild workshops was such that visiting times and visiting charges had to be established to help keep the numbers from interfering too much with the craftsmen's work. Until the business failed in 1907-8 the Guild was a major Campden attraction, akin to a modern heritage centre, such as Ironbridge or the Black Country Museum in England (‘I have seen the past, and it works'). Indeed, even after its winding up, the Guild continued to play an important role in promoting tourism to Campden, and may be on the verge of playing a greater role still.5
Tourism slowed during World War I, but afterwards there was a dramatic boom. Cars and charabancs brought increasing numbers of day- trippers, while overnight visitors, certainly in the years immediately after the war, occasionally over-saturated the commercial capacity to house them and could be found knocking on the doors of private houses trying to find someone who would take them in. The town's fame as a tourist venue grew steadily, abetted by broadcasts and publications which pictured it as a reservoir of an agricultural way of life and an honesty and depth of an unspoiled rural character which was rapidly disappearing elsewhere. Along with 'beauty' and 'antiquity’ tourists therefore came to Campden in order to discover and engage with the authenticity of the rural 'character', the farmer or farm labourer who carried the wisdom of the soil in his bones and the untutored eloquence of a past era in his speech. It was a period in which labourers and other local people could and literally did play a part in the local tourist industry.
Following World War II (the massive military tourism of which has paid and repaid dividends in the form of returning ex-soldiers) this inter-war style of tourism temporarily re-emerged. Gradually, however, has come the demand that Campden be rural in a different way: that it cease to be a working, boisterous and earthy agricultural community and become instead a quiet gentle place of rest and respite from the cares and worries of the city. During this period the Cotswolds have been set aside by Parliament as an 'Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, and the centre of Campden itself designated a conservation area. It has thereby been authenticated by the state and declared as a site of outstanding aesthetic and historic merit and officially bracketed off from the urges and pressures of modern development. Within the current tourist industry Campden, in common with the Cotswolds generally, is primarily promoted as a beautiful and peaceful retreat.
THE PERIPHERALIZATION OF CAMPDEN
The development of tourism in Campden has been paralleled by its economic and political peripheralization, a process familiar throughout Britain. In 1870 Campden, for most purposes, was its own unit of government. National legislation was implemented largely through the vicar, the farmers, the traders and the other prominent residents who lived in and around the town. It was they who, for the most part, took local decisions concerning roads, water, sanitation, education, the welfare of the poor and so on. Crown and County offices — Inland Revenue, police — were manned in the town by people who lived there. The centre of daily life, on the background of national imperial life, was therefore local. Local political life was vigorous; religious and social life were intense; the locus of the politics of authenticity was very much and for the most part focused on people one lived among and knew.
This has largely changed. Administratively, a succession of government acts has shifted authority over most areas of public life from Campden to increasingly distant District offices, to the County, to London, and now, more and more, to Brussels. The shift in Centre is reflected in most areas of life: against protests from local farmers and warnings from local workingmen, successive Education Acts have imposed urban-oriented structures and curricula which prepare local children for urban, not rural-centred lives and industries; and of course to pursue their personal development such children have tended to move from Campden. Individual wells gave way to a town water system, which was appropriated to a district system, which was taken into the national system, and is now, through sale by the national government, in dispersed private ownership. The local train service, postal sorting station, telephone exchange and, recently, the magistrate's court have gone. Alongside this have been the technological developments — the telephone, car, radio, television — which have dispersed the cultural and communication centres of everyday life and tended to place them elsewhere.
All of this reflects the receding of the Centre from Campden. This means, in lived terms, that for most practical and governmental purposes the authority to authenticate Campden has been withdrawn from the town and lodged with people who live in suburbs and cities, who work in offices and for whom the daily life of an agricultural district has little reality. Campden has become a satellite, firmly in the Periphery, of a Centre which has effectively moved, as it were, from Campden to London, whence significant elements of it have been dispersed in the national and international culture of bureaucracy and business. Campden, in that sense — and as experienced by local people — no longer belongs to Campden.
LOCAL VS INCOMER
My introduction to Chipping Campden came through the back door. When I arrived in England from the United States in the autumn of 1981, my intention was to focus my research and energies on a defunct mumming custom in Yorkshire, mumming being a perambulatory Christmas custom historically performed by working men. My tutor suggested going up to Campden, which still supported a living mumming, to ask its leader whether he would be bringing the custom out that year, and if so whether I might come back and see it; and with that in mind I was walking towards Campden with a backpack full of camping and recording equipment when the blizzard of December 1981 set in. I sought refuge in a smallholding just outside the town and explained myself to my accidental host. He took me in hand, and by the time the snow had thawed sufficiently for public transport to take me back to the University of Leeds his energetic introductions and facilitations had entrenched me in fieldwork and engaged my commitment to Campden.
The way in which I came into it meant that all of my fieldwork at that point and for some time after was among 'locals'. It was therefore from this perspective that I became aware of a rupture at the core of everyday life down or around which every local complaint and conflict seemed to run. What I was introduced to was the notion that there were two populations in the town. On the one hand were 'incomers', resident outsiders as it were, who were relatively wealthy, had moved into Campden from cities and suburbs, who bought up local properties at outrageously high prices, formed and joined various Societies from which Campden people were excluded, were on all important local committees, who pulled strings and had contacts in high places which made it possible to impose their ideas on the place, and who were for the most part retired people, second-home owners or commuters. Furthermore, they came and went. After a few years in Campden they died or sold their properties at a profit to new wealthy incomers and went elsewhere. It is for this population that I have used the term 'resident tourist'.
'Local people', on the other hand, among whom were native Campdonians, were the ordinary people of the town. (The term 'local' is unfortunately an ambiguous one, which I shall in this chapter be using as defined here. I was momentarily set on the wrong track recently when, speaking with an 'incomer', he said 'We really must keep local people informed of this.' He then went on to define 'local people' in terms of members of the local amenity society and the local historical society — in the membership of which local/native people form a distinct minority). I am using the term ‘local people' to apply to those largely working people, who could not afford the high property prices created by the Incomers and whose children therefore had little if any prospect of being able to stay in Campden once they left home. Those young people who could live at home faced unemployment or poor career prospects because restrictions on change and development insisted upon by Incomers and outside organizations (such as the Council for the Protection of Rural England) virtually precluded the development of any new industries apart from those which were tourist or service oriented.
These restrictions were intended to 'preserve' Campden. The effect, however (I was told), was that 'Campden' was dying. The town was being turned into a museum, from which real Campden people were being forced to emigrate, and in which they were not even wanted. During a spate of Welsh nationalist burnings of English holiday homes in the 1980s an elderly informant in Campden shocked me with the vehemence of her support; but hers was simply an extreme version of what other people were saying to me.
THE INCOMERS' MYTH
Because of the backward way in which I came into fieldwork it was some time before I began to read the standard historical literature on Campden, written almost exclusively by immigrants and outsiders. When I did so it was with eyes already conditioned by local informants and by the search I had begun through the primary sources — the local newspaper (first published in 1860) and so on. Against this background the narrative I encountered in the standard secondary literature appeared strange and distorted. It was written as history, but it did not reflect the world presented in oral and contemporary sources, and indeed the Campden of the secondary literature seemed sometimes altogether detached from the place described by the newspaper reports and letters to the editor, government reports, petty sessions records, diaries, school logbooks and the rest of the primary record. I began to realize that what was presented almost universally in books and magazines, television and radio programmes, tourist guides and journals as the history of modern Campden was in fact a Myth. It also became clear that this Myth was based on the traditions of a particular group of immigrants: the Guild of Handicraft and those most closely associated with it. What was treated as history was in fact tradition, with the sense given by Martin Heidegger (1978:43) that tradition 'takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence . . . and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand'. The narrative had been so self-evidently true for so long that virtually no writer — immigrant or outsider — had felt it necessary to go beyond the Guild-based story to the local historical record. It also became clear that one needn't previously have been aware of the detail of the Campden narrative to have shared essential elements of it. The Campden narrative is a local variant of a national urban-centred view of the countryside, which is itself an introspected form of the British myth of Empire, which in itself gives power to the self-evidence of the narrative.
The Myth goes basically as follows: in 1902 the Guild of Handicraft, led by C.R. Ashbee, moved to Campden from the East End of London. At that time Campden was a morally and physically decaying village, with a feudal social structure dedicated to resisting any improvement in the lot of the labourer.
Beneath the contemporary surface decay, however, was a 'little forgotten Cotswold town of the Age of Arts and Crafts which industrialism had never touched, where there was an old silk mill and empty cottages ready to hand, left almost as when the Arts and Crafts ended in the 18th century’ (Ashbee, 1908:42). The Guild set about sweeping the corrupt old order out and bringing new order in: creating productive commercial workshops in healthy arcadian surroundings, while simultaneously restoring genuine life and traditions to the countryside.
Passive and peaceful, grave with the weight of antiquity, Campden 'was like the Sleeping Beauty waiting to be awakened by Prince Charming in the person of Mr Ashbee' (letter from H.T. Osborn to Fiona MacCarthy, 1.5.81; cf. Fees, 1986), and under his touch sprang to life. A swimming bath was built so that the children of Campden could grow up healthy and strong. A School of Arts and Crafts was opened in the face of entrenched opposition from the Earl of Gainsborough (the lord of the manor and principal landowner), local farmers and the governors of the Grammar School: 'not because they wanted to hurt the Guild or its enterprise, but because they considered that anything in the nature of educating the labourer would endanger the local labour market'.6 Areas of local farm workers' culture were reborn, thanks to the Guild. For example, 'The Brass Band was reinvigorated by new blood and was provided with uniforms. The Morris Dancers and the Christmas Mummers' Play were revived and reinvigorated.'7
In 1907-8 the Guild broke up, but a dedicated core of Guildsmen remained and formed the nucleus for new generations of aesthetically aware and sensitive immigrants, similarly dedicated to Campden and the effort to preserve and save it from the 'follies and futilities', the ‘bad and ugly work of the great towns'.8 Pre-eminent among these was F.L. Griggs, RA, Campden's 'most distinguished inhabitant during the years from 1904 to 1938' (according to his friend Christopher Whitfield (1958:237) who himself immigrated to Campden in 1924). Among his many achievements for Campden, Griggs persuaded the Post Office to run its telephone lines into Campden underground, thus leaving the skyline unspoiled by wires. Whitfield observed:
It is remarkable that all those who have fought to preserve the town have been people drawn from elsewhere by its beauty to live in it. Often they have had to fight not only against the current of modern 'civilisation', but also against those Campden people who have wished their town to become prosperous and modern at the expense of its unique atmosphere.9 (emphasis added).
Whitfield also remarked that the history of Campden in the 20th century has been 'a record of the deterioration of the idyllic town ... a growing urbanisation, both outward and inward . . .'10
The Myth is one of discovery, rebirth and decay, in which local people and the modern world conspire against the principles of new life and beauty represented by the Guild and since taken up by others. The fountainhead of the Myth is C.R. Ashbee, leader of the Guild, whose articles, books, manuscript Journals and typescript Memoirs create a persuasive foundation. Ashbee had a private income and a Cambridge education, and he was a Morris and Ruskin-inspired Guild Socialist reformer who made no pretence of needing, liking or accepting the social order in Campden. He spent most of each working week in London — an archetypal commuter — and took his holidays elsewhere. He was resident in Campden, but his centre was not its centre. In Campden terms he was an urban eccentric, and had he been on his own he would perhaps have been isolated and made harmless, inauthenticated as a crank; but he was surrounded by a small group of similarly liberal and artistically minded people within the Guild and was one of a number of artistically oriented immigrants attracted to Campden both before the Guild's coming and after. Furthermore, as a member of the Art Workers Guild and of the broad Socialist liberal reform movement of the day, Ashbee drew support from many well-known and well-connected people, many of whom visited him and were introduced to Campden through him. Consequently, from the point of view of the outside world, or of a literate and influential part of it, Ashbee became and for the most part remains the authoritative spokesman for life and society in early 20th-century Campden.
Before the move to Campden Ashbee held the firm view that rural life in the industrialized West had become pale and lifeless in the wake and shadow of industrialism and that the health of society needed to be revitalized. He imported this personal myth to Campden, and publicly and privately inauthenticated the daily life of Campden and its customs as fake. For example, in the Christmas 1903 entry in his unpublished Journals, held in the Modern Archives of King's College, Cambridge, Ashbee characterizes the locally eminent chairman of the Parish Council and Campden public life generally in these terms:
Farmer Stanley is a splendid type of do-nothing . . . On the days when he is really at work, for one can hardly call public business of Campden work, he wears a white overall, or as they call it here the milking slop. That is a misnomer, for I'm sure he never milks, and he is much too friendly and gracious with everybody to devote much time to any real occupation . . . Farmer Stanley plays at reform; he likes to pretend that he means it; he knows that he does not mean it at all . .. (Quoted with kind permission of Felicity Ashbee.)
This string of negations, or inauthentications, echoes throughout Ashbee's Journals, as, for example, in his June 1906 entry, where he epitomizes modern rural celebration in his description of the Viscount Campden's coming of age party: ‘I think everybody except perhaps Hodge and I would have been convinced by today's pageantry. It seemed so very real and everybody was made so happy.' He simultaneously authenticated the architecture — the shops and cottages built in an earlier era — as forgotten jewels from the great pre-industrial tradition of craft building. 'Campden' as a living society he declared corrupt and fake; 'Campden' as architecture and setting he declared real. In so doing he laid out the fundamental terms in which the history of Campden has since been written.
The Myth arising from this eliminates the 'Campden' of Campden people — social and cultural 'Campden' — and authenticates the town in terms of its architecture and setting, as a beautiful wasteland open to immigration and development. The fact that it was a lively town at the turn of the century and that it was through local work and publicity that the Guild was ultimately attracted to Campden are lost. The fact that cottages were not 'ready to hand', but that labourers had to be evicted to make room for the higher-paid Guildsmen is lost. Local contemporary sources show that Campden people can not be characterized en bloc as passive or opposed to the education of the labourers — indeed, I have shown (among other things) that it was only after Ashbee was forced to accept local farmers on to the Board of the School of Arts and Crafts that its classes really became popular among labourers — a high proportion of students beforehand would appear to have been persons of leisure, dilettantes and hobbyists. I have also shown that those farmers most castigated by Ashbee for their resistance had a long history of promoting technical education, better conditions and higher wages for farmworkers (Fees, 1988a). The Guild never had anything to do with the Mummers, and it did not revive the morris, both quintessentially 'Campden' customs. The town band was a going concern, the creation of the swimming bath can be seen by reference to its history as the clever exploitation of a wealthy new resident to achieve a desired but expensive local amenity without cost to the parish. The record shows that local people were very involved in the beauty and preservation of Campden before the Guild came and that it was local people who met and negotiated with the Post Office to have telephone lines run underground. The record also shows that Campden people spoke up in the inter-war period when F.L. Griggs flourished but were denied a voice or were consistently ignored. Having been peripheralized, and having been inauthenticated, they became invisible.
The Myth is a narrative of, by and for Outsiders, some of whom have settled in Campden, and it is believed because it is part of a tradition and mythology to which they belong. It is one version of a national myth, the roots of which lie in the mythology of the Empire, the central concern of which is the nature of the Periphery and its relation to the Centre. It is a myth of foundation — the foundation of 20th-century Campden and the coming of outsiders to save it. It is an authenticating myth, authenticating a particular tradition as history. It is teleological, providing that tradition and the people who take it up with a foundation of meaning and purpose within Campden. And it is a myth of appropriation, arrogating 'Campden' to those people.
As 'history' written by immigrants or outsiders, the Myth gives immigrants authority at the centre of local culture and history. Where natives appear they are placed firmly in the periphery: as innocents, 'characters', eccentrics, incompetents or in some way corrupted by that impure world outside of Campden which is intent on destroying it. As history, it establishes the right of immigrants, or incomers, to authority in and over Campden; it displaces those who were born there or who have merged with it to become 'local', and it makes the local invisible in the politics of authenticity. Incomers/resident tourists fill the place, and thereby its centre, and there is no room left for Campden people. Along with the peripheralization of Campden, there is an extended peripheralization within Campden.
PERIPHERALIZATION, LOSS AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
Though one can find elements of localism and the politics of identity in Campden prior to World War I, the first public expression of 'Campden' as an ethno-political position dates from 1921. At that time the Town Trust, which had been formed by the Charity Commissioners in 1886 to look after town property, decided to send Campden's two town maces to London for safekeeping. The maces dated from the time of James I, and had lain safely, if unseen, for some years under a local bed, but the Trust took the decision to make a long-term loan of them to the Victoria and Albert Museum and to replace them in Campden with exact replicas for display. The immigrant chairman of the Trust at the time was the internationally known stained-glass artist Paul Woodroffe, and although there were 'Campden' people on the Trust, and immigrants among the opposition, when the plan became unexpectedly known in the town, the unprecedented protest which blew up characterized it as a contest between 'Old Campdonians' and 'newcomers', between 'local' and 'London'. To these opposing centres were attached the authenticating/inauthenticating pairs: 'elected' vs 'appointed'; 'public' vs 'secret'; 'open' vs 'conspiring'; 'forthright' vs 'innuendo'; 'courage' vs 'fear'; 'fair/just/popular' vs 'autocratic/austere'; real objects of Campden history vs fake replacements.11
Prior to this the politics of authenticity had been waged in conventional political terms of class and political affiliation, of 'old order' against 'new order', Liberal against Tory. But over the course of World War I there had been a massive change in Campden, and in wrestling with this change, another significant cognitive shift took place. 'Campden', as the world in which local people lived and discovered self and belonging, was explicitly posited and formally recognized as such: as a particular 'place', a world, an intangible object which was filled with cherished meanings and value. The mechanism behind this was straightforward: one in five Campden men found themselves serving in the war, and being absent from Campden had the chance to experience it as an explicit world of people and things which they missed. One in five of those who served was killed, which heightened for their survivors the experience of the world which had been evoked and invoked in Campden by them. For the better conduct of the war central government imposed regulations, many of which were aimed at industrial cities and did not make sense in a rural setting, were arbitrary or incompetent, which offended local autonomy and which highlighted the familiar local world which such things attacked and changed. The 'Campden' of local people and their local life and heritage, which Ashbee and those around him had declared fake, became intensely real and precious in its absence and loss and in the face of changes imposed and supported by outsiders.
In short, during the course of World War I the people of Campden discovered that what they had taken for granted and used everyday as if it were a common and inexhaustible resource was actually an object of rare and priceless value. This was discovered, moreover, in the context not only of its loss through the war but through its theft and appropriation by people who were not part of it, had no legitimate birth-claim to it and indeed did not understand it. This fundamentally altered the politics of authenticity in Campden which emerged as the politics of localism, in which the authenticating pole of 'Campden' was opposed for the first time to the inauthenticating pole of 'Not-Campden' ('newcomer', 'London'). Within this process the ongoing peripheralization of Campden acquired a new dimension in which the two centres or positions of authority which were 'not-Campden' — Incomers and Outsiders/Government — appeared to be working together to the exclusion of the third, the Local or Campden position.
The working of this latter pattern can be seen as early as 1892 in the nearby town of Broadway, Worcestershire, where a group of influential Birmingham people (Birmingham being some 30 to 40 miles away as the crow flies and the principal commercial and industrial centre in the region) intervened with Worcestershire County Council and stopped it repaving the streets of Broadway with blue bricks because, as one of the group said:
Broadway is essentially an old English village, almost unique in having for the most part escaped the desecrating hand of the 'improver' and the avarice of the jerry-builder. It is in this that its attractiveness to the outsider and the visitor chiefly consists, and no surer means of driving him away can be devised than levelling the place up or down to a standard of suburban trimness.
He suggested that a 'Defence Association' be formed 'for which I am sure many outsiders would subscribe, to protect themselves from the encroachment of this sham and shoddy age of ''improvement"'12 (emphasis added). To which a local resident responded:
. . . because certain private individuals in Birmingham, occasional visitors to Broadway in fine summer weather, 'don't like the look of blue bricks', the work is stopped! Whom should the County Council consider in the matter? The inhabitants of Broadway and their convenience and comfort in all sorts of weather, or the fads and would-be antiquarians of Birmingham or elsewhere?13
In almost identical terms the local (but by no means 'local') secretary of the Gloucestershire Society of Antiquaries (and others) argued successfully in 1934 against plans for a practical replacement of the town hall in Campden, a scheme supported by local people because it would have meant a parish hall large enough for full-scale parish meetings, large-scale dances, even a cinema:
Here in Campden our duties are plain [said the Secretary]. We are custodians of a very beautiful town and it's up to everyone to see to it that first of all the town is not harmed ...
I should like you to remember that it is not only the people who come into this building who have to be considered; it is perhaps more the people who stand outside and look at it (emphasis added).14
The appropriative 'we' of the outsider/incomer (a local farmer had asked in vain, 'Would it not be possible to have some real Campden people on the Committee — Campden-born and bred?' and was answered: 'This is not the time and place for these distinctions. I think with any proposal of this kind Campden is in need of the help of every one of her sons and daughters whether they were born here or adopted')15 reflects back to the Myth of the Incomer, to the fact that, within that Myth, 'Campden' consists of its architecture and setting, Campden exists for those who can appreciate it from outside; and in the end, where the other 'Campden' of local life and society is a consideration, it is at best secondary.
It also reflects the gradual exclusion of 'Campden' people from the determination of Campden. Although the 'local' position won in the town maces affair in 1921-22, and the maces stayed in Campden, the indications are that those who had 'adopted' Campden were progressively occupying its centre. By the 1930s, one sees local people appealing to be heard (as the farmer, above) but left out of organizations and committees. A local tradesman recounted in 1983 how he and other local tradesmen lost their traditional role in putting together local celebrations when immigrants appropriated the organization of the 1935 Jubilee and 1937 Coronation celebrations.16 Elsewhere (Fees, 1988a), I have discussed various areas and instances of appropriation.
This external authentication of 'Campden' as its architecture and setting has become increasingly statutory in post-war legislation: Campden has become part of the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the town centre as a whole has been designated a conservation area, effectively transforming the town and its setting into the heritage and beauty equivalent of an SSSI. Following the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, the Historic Buildings and Ancient Monument Act 1953 and the Town and Country Planning Act 1968, for example, fields, field-dividers and woodlands which before had been private property used in farming became statutory objects of beauty. Their 'beauty' became a legal entity, an officially recognized property, the ownership of which was appropriated to the Nation. Buildings which, before legislation, had been either a house in which people lived, or a shop or a town hall in which public meetings were held likewise became objects of outstanding beauty and historical interest. Their 'beauty' and their 'historical interest' became entities, and these were similarly nationalized. The woodlands, the fields, the buildings were not changed — indeed, that is the whole point. But what can be done to them, and who may determine that, has changed, and the power has gone out of local hands. They no longer belong simply to Campden or to the people who live and work in the town. They belong — through peripheralization, reconceptualization and appropriation — to the 'us' of the nation, or indeed, of the world, and their meaning is to be there on call for when 'we' should want to come and appreciate them.
DISCUSSION
The politics of authenticity arise when two or more competing claims are made to the authority to determine what a thing is and what (and who) it is for, and for the most part the politics are waged in terms of inauthentication and peripheralization. The latter is to do with power, with the assertion of and acquiescence to or acceptance of authority. The former is to do with negation, a denial of the other's right to a place in or to a positive relation to the Centre. To say that something is not real, for example, or is not really what it claims to be — to say that it is a 'fake'; to call a person's argument 'nonsense'; or to say that a person or thing is decayed or corrupt (or criminal) — is to state that it has no standing vis-a-vis authenticity and the claim and counter-claim in the politics of authenticity.
In Campden, the two main competing centres in the politics of authenticity can be referred to as locals' and 'incomers'. Being 'local', in this sense, means belonging to the world of symbols and narrative structures which are recognizably local, as founded in people whose centre is firmly there and not outside, whose sense of self exists in the people of the place, in their discourse and in the place itself. At the core is the 'native', the Campdonian 'Campden-born and bred'. Because it is a phenomenological 'place' the boundaries of the local constantly change, depending on speaker and context. There are variable dimensions (of class and so on), and the boundaries themselves are capable, for example, of variously including and excluding people who could technically be called 'immigrants':
While I am talking to the leader of the Mummers an old man goes by who lays a family-based counter-claim to the custom. On this occasion the leader of the Mummers seeks to inauthenticate the other by telling me that he's a 'moonman', ie crazy. On a later occasion he says that the 'moonman' is not actually from Campden, that he was born in the nearby village of Willersey. This means that he can have no real claim to Mumming, the essence of which is that it is thoroughly of, by and for 'Campden'.
On still another occasion, however, when we are discussing incomers I put my foot in it by assuming that the elderly man (despite having spent his entire life there) is still not 'Campden'. I am brought up short by the forceful assertion that he certainly is, and the leader of the Mummers shows no sense of recognition that he ever said otherwise. Though rivals when it comes to authority vis-a-vis the Mumming, in the context of discussing incomers with me, both are authentically 'Campden'.17
The local life of Campden is rich in the discourse of authenticity, with 'local' people contesting authority among themselves over certain customs or in respect of certain historical facts and events. It is in belonging to this and its many levels and subtleties that one is 'local'.
Incomers, on the other hand, however much they would like to appropriate it, do not belong to the local discourse. That is the sense of the term 'incomer', which is a locally devised, inauthenticating one, with a slightly derogatory tone. In practice it indicates people who are wealthy enough to move into the town, who come from a different, urban-centred culture, who do not take the 'local' as centre and do not allow themselves to be drawn into its orbit, who instead import a centre around which they expect the local to gather, who adopt and who belong to the narrative tradition based on the Guild which firmly places the incomer at the centre of modern Campden history. Immigrants who assimilate to the local, and who do not attempt to appropriate, override or dictate to it do not necessarily become 'local', but they also do not tend to fall into the category of 'incomer'.
While the term 'incomer' is that used in Campden, I have used the term 'resident tourist' at different points in this chapter in an attempt to underline the real and phenomenological relationship between the 'incomer' and the tourist. The migration of the one and the immigration of the other are manifestations of a single social and cultural process, the roots of which are in the peripheralization and appropriation of Campden. Both tourist and incomer have their origin outside Campden in a world for which Campden is peripheral, firmly and safely tucked out of the way, a centre of retreat, respite, retirement: the contrary pole to their authenticating Centre, which is, speaking abstractly, the City. To put it another way, incomers and tourists belong to the Modern, the cognitive Centre whose characteristics have been delineated by Heidegger (1977, 1978,1985), Berger et al. (1973), Baudrillard (1988) and others. On to Campden, as the archetypal old English village, is projected the opposite of the Modern — with its underlying alienation, its break-up of belonging, its ceaseless reorganization, its change, its destruction of the past and its flight from the present, its tilt towards the maximum yield at the minimum expense, its proliferation of containing and defining structures and therefore of bureaucracy and ramified uniformity, the avarice of the jerry-builder and the sham and shoddy age of 'improvement', to quote the Birmingham defenders of turn of the century Broadway. It brings to Campden its relentless framing and re-creation as a picture, as a place to be set aside and as an object on hold and on call for whenever its use by the City may be called for.18 It brings to Campden the concept that it belongs not to itself, but to Others; and that in becoming a commodity it belongs to whoever can afford it, or whoever has the power to appropriate it.
The politics of authenticity operate on many dimensions and on some of these — eg on the level of straight economic self-interest ('not in my backyard') or where ethnic or social division are explicit and entrenched — the anthropologist can't really expect to have a major impact. But where, as in Campden, there are dimensions which owe more to taken-for-granted cultural stereotype, tradition and myth, and impoverished knowledge of and communication among protagonists, the anthropologist can have an impact, can help to bridge or heal the rupture and can contribute in however small a way to happier solutions to local distress. To do that, however, one must have a clear idea of the source and nature of the rupture; and in Campden, at any rate, that brings us back to the question of 'authenticity'.
'Authenticity' is not only a characteristic ascribed to objects (as discussed earlier) but is also, to use Selwyn's phrase, an '"alienation-smashing" feeling'. 'Authenticity' in this sense is an experience — an authenticating experience — where what is authenticated is one's Self, in and through one's experience of an object as authentic. This experience does not relate to the actual authenticity of an object, but to an individual's perception of the object as authentic, and in itself has an alienation-smashing quality of wholeness and fullness and of 'timelessness' which makes it much sought after, particularly where the lived world is alienated, fragmented and situated in the hurly-burly of commercial/industrial time. 'Authenticity' in this sense becomes a commodity in its own right, and the possibility of obtaining it is projected into (ec)-Centric objects and places (bringing a whole world of myth and expectation with it), which are thereby filled up to the exclusion of whatever might have already been there in the way of local or competing claims or understandings.
What we experience in the 'discovery’ of 'authentic' objects is the discovery of our own authenticity. Having discovered it, we become reluctant to lose it or let it go and may well return for it again and again, ultimately taking up residence. The Modern seeking authenticity becomes a tourist; becomes a resident tourist; and driven by the sense of an impending loss of something which, having been lost once (wholeness, beauty, sense of purpose), must not be lost again, establishes societies and associations to preserve things as they are. But as their experience of their own authenticity is mediated through things, and is experienced as a quality or characteristic of places or objects outside themselves, it is those things which they feel must not, at all costs, be allowed to change; the culture in which those things were formerly embedded and which lodges a counter-claim to those things is inauthenticated, made invisible, peripheralized.
Change, in this sense, is seen as what is negative in what the City in its alienation has become — but which the 'village' has not yet become, though pointed towards it. This is one source of the rupture between Outside and Local: what is 'present' for the local is 'past' for the tourist; what is participation in the national economy for the local is a race towards a present from which the resident tourist has fled, viewing it with dread or at least with the dis-ease characteristic of the Modern, and as a threat to the sense of their authenticity.
Another source of rupture lies in the nature of the local. For those born and brought up in a place, it has the character of always having been, and of always having been the way it is. It, and any processes of change from within, is taken for granted as part of what it is. Being the world in which one has grown up, it acts as a holding-place of memory, it gives a continuous and taken-for-granted reflection of the Self, wherein one's Self is continuously unfolding. Whereas the incomer discovers a 'forgotten' self in the 'forgottenness' of the countryside, and is self-conscious in that discovery, the native dwells in an already-discovered world in which the Self is constantly developed and encountered and in which meaning and understanding of the Self are constantly given back by encounters with and in this world. Change which comes abruptly, unexpectedly and imposed from Outside is not simply 'change', therefore, but is experienced as a catastrophe, a deprivation and loss of Self, of identity.
Historically, the 'discovery' of Campden by the City (by the Guild of Handicraft and its successors) came as a wresting of Campden away from local people, who shared a broadly common culture and were already developing Campden's potential as a tourist and residential venue. Outsiders and immigrants who were determined to save Campden from the City allied with one another and, in the consequent proliferation of organization, regulation and securing which are characteristic of the Modern, and in the attempt to 'save' Campden, they overwhelmed it. Local ways of doing, of seeing and meeting situations, of organizing fetes and customs were either not perceived at all or were perceived as already corrupted by the City — in decay, defunct, degenerate. In the logic of Modernization, in the ironic flight of the Modern from itself, the authentically rural culture and society of Campden were overridden by Modern solutions and conceptualizations at an increasing rate and with the consequence that locals were increasingly denied access to themselves qua 'Campden': to the Campden not simply of architecture and setting but to the Campden of countless formative experiences and encounters, of Self, of the local grammar of discourse and change.
Heidegger speaks of the 'phenomenon in which surroundings, especially the most familiar ones, become a compelling presence when something is missing in them'.19 World War I created a great and continuous 'missing' which firmly propelled 'Campden' into the forefront of local consciousness as a compelling presence, as that which had been lost and was also continuously threatened. Tourism, resident tourists and the actions of the government and other outside organizations have ensured that this 'compelling presence' has remained in the forefront of local consciousness as that which is continuously on view and threatened. To be 'Campden', to be locally born and bred, became an ethnic position — and it consequently became and remains an explicit pole in the politics of authenticity.
This ethnicity, this discovery of Self and identity in belonging to the locality and its people, has found itself and its expression in fewer and fewer elements of local life as greater dimensions of this have either been seized and reserved for the use of incomers or have lost significance in the diffusion of general contemporary culture. These remaining elements have therefore taken on greater significance. However hidden or unvalued an item or a custom may have been in the everyday world before the centre of culture slipped away from the local, this deprivation has isolated it and brought it to the fore as a sign. However insignificant it might have been beforehand, the item now becomes an icon and celebration of 'Campden' — and therefore acquires an especial value as that which brings 'Campden' into being, which continually revives and renews it and which thereby asserts 'Campden' against the claims of Outsiders and Incomers who would try to inauthenticate or appropriate it. It becomes a badge of 'Campden' and a pole in the politics of authenticity.
We see this heightened significance displayed particularly in customs: either in a greater or more intense awareness which brings a custom into unprecedented prominence; by a proliferation of occasions on which a particular ritual is publicly performed; or by the revival and creation of customs (see Fees, 1988b), all of which have ramifications not only locally but in terms of the tourist industry. Through what is invested in them, customs become an assertion of possession, of belonging, of the authority and of the authenticity of the 'local'. With access to most of the effective economic, social and political sources of authority in Campden denied to locals, the assertion of the 'local' is increasingly displayed in performance, in the symbolic discourse through which the local is defined.
The anthropologist is peculiarly situated to understand this symbolic discourse and to speak it in a way that the Modern can and perhaps will hear, understand and reflect on. By listening and recording, and by the seriousness of his or her research, the anthropologist can also affirm the local in its sense of its own authenticity and broaden its understanding of the processes in which it is involved. Through the privileged position of belonging to both and neither, and on the fulcrum of authority of the 'expert', the anthropologist can help bring about a change not in the things themselves but in the way they are viewed. And in the end, if that change of view is rooted in the authenticity of the situation, and in the way that things authentically are, then this is a considerable and practical power. It is the power of transforming a politics based in the self- and ethno-centric disregard of others immanent in inauthentication and peripheralization into a politics based on mutual recognition of one another's authentic-ness, out of which flows a new basis of communication, resolution and unexpected possibilities of change.20
NOTES
1. This study builds on field, archive and library research carried out from 1981-8. A detailed description of that work, with full citation and support, is available in Fees (1988a).
2. Personal experience, March/April 1989. My brother is Dr Paul Fees, Senior Curator at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming.
3. Evesham Journal (1887), 28 May: 3.
4. Based on commercial listings in Kelly's Directory. See Fees (1988a: appendix B).
5. With the creation in Chipping Campden of the Guild of Handicraft Trust, dedicated to the creation of an archive and study centre on art, craft and design as such, with particular reference to their history and practice in the North Cotswolds.
6. C.R. Ashbee, Memoirs, Vol. 2, 'Introduction 1938', Part II. Sept. 1903-Dec. 1906: p. 215. The unpublished Memoirs are held in the Modern Archives of King's College, Cambridge.
7. Christopher Whitfield (1958) A History of Chipping Campden, Eton: Windsor, Shakespeare Head Press, p. 237.
8. C.R. Ashbee (1903), quoted in 'Campden's Beautiful Houses', Evesham Journal, 4 April: 6.
9. Ibid.: 238.
10. Ibid.
11. The continuity of the tradition is apparent in the rhetoric of localism since World WarII, in which 'Native' is contrasted with 'Incomer'; 'real Campden people, working People' with 'snobs, toffs, hoteliers, tradesmen'; elected representatives with the self-appointed members of the local amenity society; 'socially oriented/native industry' with 'tourist-related industry'; 'living/ working environment' with 'museum/preserved quality'. See Fees (1988a:489).
12. Evesham Journal (1892), 3 December: 5.
13. Evesham Journal (1892), 'A Disgusted Ratepayer', 12 December: 7.
14. Evesham Journal (1934), 24 March: 11.
15. Ibid. For the appropriative 'we', see, for example, F.L. Griggs, 'The Foreword Read to the General Meeting March 20th 1925 written by F.L. Griggs', Campden Society Minutes, Gloucestershire Record Office D2857 1/1: 'we resent anything that is not of Campden ... In Campden we call it "Campden".' Broadcaster Georgie Henschel, who lived for a brief time in Campden in the early 1950s, adopted the appropriative 'we' for the benefit of interviews about the place: see, eg BBC Written Archives Centre; Scripts; Holt, William and Georgie Henschel: Festival in Britain, broadcast on General Overseas Service 18.9.1951, 1700-1715 hours. The original Campden Society was a short-lived 'Defence Association' as was called for in Broadway in 1892 (see below), created by immigrants and outsiders to 'save' Campden.
16. Lionel Ellis, Ellis family tape, Cassette 79. Mr Ellis concluded: ‘That was the start of Campden people not bothering. I'm sure of it.' Quoted with kind permission of Dorrie Ellis.
17. Fees, Field notebook 2:20.2.1982. Personal experience.
18. Heidegger, in Heidegger (1977), p. 130 remarks: ‘The world does not change from an earlier medieval one, but the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.' This reminds one of C.E.M. Joad's comments (as related in R.I. Wolfe (1966), 'Recreational Travel: The New Migration', Canadian Geographer 10:6, ‘That it would be said of his generation that they found England a land of beauty and left it a land of beauty spots.' Heidegger also (1977), pp. 16-17, in discussing the nature of modern technology remarks that, 'Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve.' Tom Selwyn, in a personal communication, draws attention to the similarity of Marx's conception of a 'standing reserve army' of the unemployed.
19. Heidegger (1985:189).
20. It would be unrealistic to expect wonderfully dramatic changes all the time, and it is part of the sorrow of anthropology to see destructive forces going forward in front of one's eyes. But I am aware through my own work, for example, of a greater respect for the integrity and authenticity of a custom previously considered by many in the town to be disreputable and right for appropriation, and a more critical approach to the absolute authority of C.R. Ashbee and the Guild-based tradition of the town's history, with a greater understanding among some, at least, of the dynamics surrounding appropriation and the fear of appropriation. These are small things, but not inconsequential, and can be seen as part of a national and globed shift in the understating of our impact as tourists and immigrants on a world which exists before we come into it, and hopefully endures after.
REFERENCES
Ashbee, C.R. (1908) Craftsmanship in Competitive Industry, Campden and London: Essex House Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1988) Selected Writings, Cambridge: Polity.
Berger, Peter, L., Briggite Berger and Hansfried Kellner (1973) The Homeless Mind: Modernisation and Consciousness, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fees, Craig (ed.) (1986) A Child in Arcadia: The Chipping Campden Boyhood of H.T. Osborn 1902-1907, Chipping Campden: Campden and District Historical and Archaeological Society.
Fees, Craig (1988a) Christmas Mumming in a North Cotswold Town: With Special Reference to Tourism, Urbanisation and Immigration-Related Social Change, PhD thesis, Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies, University of Leeds.
Fees, Craig (1988b) 'Maypole dance in the twentieth century: further studies of a north Cotswold town', Traditional Dance 5/6, 97-134.
Heidegger, Martin (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Heidegger, Martin (1978) Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell.
Heidegger, Martin (1985) History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Whitfield, Christopher (1958) A History of Chipping Campden, Eton, Windsor: Shakespeare Head Press.