Folklore as an Historical Science

Gomme opens with a complaint: history and folklore are not treated as complementary studies. Historians deny folklore any standing as evidence, and folklorists ignore the history buried inside it. His 1908 book sets out to repair both halves of that quarrel. Customs, beliefs, rites, folk-tales and local legends are not quaint leftovers, he argues, but a definite section of historical material, survivals of older stages of belief and social organisation that can be read as evidence. Chapters on materials and methods lead into psychological, anthropological, sociological, European and ethnological conditions, and he insists throughout that folklore cannot be studied alone. He works from a single culture area, Britain and Ireland, and begins with the Pedlar of Swaffham. The survivals theory he championed is now largely rejected, but this remains a founding statement of British folklore studies.