Horses with riders trailed by foot processionals, silver bands and pipe bands, furling medieval banners, lavish costumes, and singers and actors--the "Common Riding" is an elaborate, little-studied ritual phenomenon of the border towns of Scotland. In this vividly written and insightful analysis, Gwen Kennedy Neville uses this civic ceremony as a window for glimpsing the process of ritual, symbol, and experience in the development of the concept of "the town" in Western culture.
Based on extensive fieldwork in the town of Selkirk, The Mother Town looks at the Common Riding in detail, uncovering pre-Reformation symbolism and pageantry--often medieval and Catholic--in a region that has been Protestant for over four hundred years. Neville shows how the ceremony is a model of the way civic ritual serves to construct a system of towns which gives rise to the modern world. Further, she contends that these civic rituals create a ceremonial setting in which the contradictions between tradition and modernity can be temporarily resolved and where past and present live side by side.
Neville offers a provocative and illuminating study of how the ritual of Common Riding makes a dramatic statement about local strife, communal independence, and Protestantism in the towns of the Scottish Borders.

The twin concepts of kinship and pilgrimage have deep roots in Protestant culture. This cultural anthropological study, based in part on the author's own fieldwork, argues that in Reformed Protestantism, the Catholic custom of making pilgrimages to sacred spots has been replaced by the custom of "reunion," in which scattered members of a family or group return each year to their place of origin to take part in a quasi-sacred ritual meal and other ritual activities. Neville discusses open air services and kin-based gatherings in the Southern United States and Scotland as examples of symbolic forms that express certain themes in Northern European Protestant culture, contrasting these forms with the symbolic social statements in the Roman Catholic liturgical world of medieval Europe and traditional Mediterranean Catholicism. According to Neville, Protestant rituals of reunion such as family reunion, church homecoming, cemetery association day, camp meeting, and denomination conference center are part of an institutionalized pilgrimage complex that comments on Protestant culture and belief while presenting a symbolic inversion of the pilgrimage and the culture of Roman Catholic tradition.

Horses with riders trailed by foot processionals, silver bands and pipe bands, furling medieval banners, lavish costumes, and singers and actors--the "Common Riding" is an elaborate, little-studied ritual phenomenon of the border towns of Scotland. In this vividly written and insightful analysis, Gwen Kennedy Neville uses this civic ceremony as a window for glimpsing the process of ritual, symbol, and experience in the development of the concept of "the town" in Western culture.
Based on extensive fieldwork in the town of Selkirk, The Mother Town looks at the Common Riding in detail, uncovering pre-Reformation symbolism and pageantry--often medieval and Catholic--in a region that has been Protestant for over four hundred years. Neville shows how the ceremony is a model of the way civic ritual serves to construct a system of towns which gives rise to the modern world. Further, she contends that these civic rituals create a ceremonial setting in which the contradictions between tradition and modernity can be temporarily resolved and where past and present live side by side.
Neville offers a provocative and illuminating study of how the ritual of Common Riding makes a dramatic statement about local strife, communal independence, and Protestantism in the towns of the Scottish Borders.