“A stick to beat the present”?: Brexit, the British Empire and beating the bounds in the modern English village

This thesis is about boundaries: boundaries in ancient folklore, in modern politics, and psychological ones which separate the reality of what England 'is' from England as many might prefer to imagine it. In 2016, Vote Leave claimed Britain had lost control of its borders, urging voters to regain it through voting to leave the EU. In 2021, the Open Spaces Society claimed much the same of the boundaries of Britain’s countryside, urging Britons to regain control through reviving beating the bounds: an ancient English walking custom devised to fortify borders against outsiders. Despite stereotypes of Brexit as a ‘working-class protest’ against EU bureaucrats flooding struggling Northern cities with migrants, Brexit was conceived by Britain’s own oligarchs and arguably primarily delivered by the rural southern English ‘middle classes’. And whilst historically beating the bounds indeed defended against the genuine threats that invaders posed, rural power dynamics today make for a very different landscape. I argue that Brexit and revivals of beating the bounds are linked not purely through ideas of insiders/outsiders, but in the opportunities they provide to ‘do the boundary’. This describes any phenomenon which gives privileged people the chance to ‘play’ at defending borders, regardless of whether they had ever truly ‘lost control’ of them in the first place. I explore doing the boundary—in folklore, politics and daily life—in one majority-white, relatively privileged village in south-east England, conducting interviews on the topics of community, history and identity, and even taking part in their custom myself. This thesis seeks to use beating the bounds not merely to investigate Brexit, but to treat the English rural at large as a lens through which multiple visions of England—its grand and mythic past, its tense sociopolitical present, and now its uncertain legislative future—come together, clash and unravel one another.