A ‘rude cacophony’ accompanying parades of effigies and tokens of dishonour in mockery of or hostility towards individuals who offended against community norms – shaming rituals or rough music as discussed in E P Thompson’s ‘Customs in Common’ (1991).
  In the mid-1700s as ecclesiastic, military and civil punishments declined in severity and effect they were often replaced with secular, ritualised, public humiliation employing profane procession conducted according to local precedent. The cavalcade comprised ear-shattering noise, unpitying laughter, mimicked obscenities, clashed pots and pans, clattering cleavers, wailing whistles, tongs, tambourines, kits, crouds, humstrums, serpents, sharp blasting ram’s horns with beaten draw-tins, shovels, lowbells or improvised stones in a rattled tin can. These bedraggled parades usually comprised a trussed-up culprit sat facing backwards on a dowdy donkey or strapped to a pole or under a ladder adorned with examples of the sins so charged. Enthusiastically accompanied by elaborate doggerel, mimes, pastiche, panto dramatics on carted platforms, as elders recited stang-nominy or rigmarole, their improvised doggerel or rhymes from childhood chanted as they burned the dog damned effigy for your grand finale. Sometimes they were played as a caricatured hunt with a masked-up master bearing an obscene decorated cross crowned with a grinning horse’s skull, surrounded by deer horns, bones, offal, sundry entrails, a straw-stuffed idol through lanterns and banners as shotguns fire and the audience huzza and gleefully fling ‘all manner of filth’ at the guilty party often ending in a mock execution with a bladder of bullock’s blood slit and spilled outside the miscreant’s house. Sometimes, depending on region, the victim was tried in ironic replica with black-faced boys dressed in counterfeit drag as proxy performers pretending to suffer the so sorry sentence – usually applied when the case concerned a craven cuckold or shrewish wife. And yet, as outrageous as these riots now sound there were few severe casualties, as avoiding direct violence was most of the point; shaming the delinquent before his public peers was deemed sufficient punishment; anyone’s death was always accidental.
  The origins of these punitive rites are necessarily arcane with records unlisted, let alone published. They certainly evolved from pre-Roman Celtic, via northern gothic, to your Anglo-Norman British – carried thither by the ‘great migration’ of European tribes as the Holy Roman Empire disintegrated. Folklore researchers of vigilante justice mention historical likely sources as the ‘sale of wives’, the carting of lewd women, Rebecca riots, tar and feathers, dubious Freemasonry, scold’s bridles, cucking stools, Guy Fawkes Day, Ku Klux Klan… is a stretch too far?
  Some of the elected misdemeanours are rightly obsolete, others could do with reintroduction? A marriage with improper disparity in age or wealth; greedy landlords; wife-beating; husband-beating; an ostentatious patriot; blacklegs; informers; crimpers; press-gangers; marriage to a foreigner; over-enthusiastic bailiffs; multi-racial marriage; paedophilia; a ‘lively’ pre-marital reputation; lick-trenching; sodomy; body snatchers; Mormons; zealous gamekeepers; pregnant brides who marry in white?
  These actions held historical and international connections with obscure yet familiar nomenclature: charivari in France – scampante, Italy – haberfld-triben, German – skimmington, the West Country – lowbelling, Kent – hussiting, Berkshire – riding the stang, mostly Scotland – shallals in Cornwall – polter-abends of Saxony – shivaree, a US mispronunciation – tin-kettling in New Zealand – wooset-hunting, Wiltshire – ceffyl pren, a torch-lit mugger mob; Welsh for wooden-horse – rantanning, up North.
  The degree of damage, paraphernalia paraded, charges levelled, happy denouement were parochially variable – the one common ingredient was extreme commotion – the noise, the music, was the thing.