charivari

This is an article about the folk custom. For the band Shivaree, see Shivaree (band). For the historical magazine, see Le Charivari

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Charivari or shivaree or chivaree was originally a French folk custom, a noisy mock serenade for newlyweds. It was also sometimes used as a form of social coercion, to force an as-yet-unmarried couple to wed. "Charivari" is the original French word, and is used in both English and French in Canada. Similar customs arose in England and were carried to the colonies. They also existed in Italy. The term "shivaree" is used in the United States and "chivaree" is used in Ontario Canada.

In charivari, people of the local community gathered around to "celebrate" a marriage, usually one they regard as questionable, gathering outside the window of the couple. They bang metal implements or use other items to create noise in order to keep the couple awake all night. Sometimes they wear disguises or masks.

The custom dates back to the Middle Ages and originated in France where it was a regular custom after weddings. Later it became a form of censure of against socially unacceptable marriages, for example, the marriage of widows before the end of the customary period of mourning. In the early 1600s, the Council of Tours forbade charivari and threatened its practitioners with excommunication. Nevertheless, the custom continued in rural areas.

Shivaree has been practiced in much of the United States, though it was mostly a product of the frontier. Some regional variants include "belling", "horning", and "serenading". Although there were many accounts in the early half of the 20th century, it is thought to have mostly died out. In Canada, charivari has been known to take place in Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces, but not always as an expression of disapproval. Susanna Moodie describes, in detail, several Ontario Charivaris from the 1830s, two ending in fatalities. The custom appears to persist in the farming communities of Southwestern Ontario. As recently as April 2008, a charivari took place in Haldiman County, in which modern noisemakers included shotguns and chainsaws.^{[citation needed]}

The origins of the word "charivari" are likely from the Roman caribaria, meaning headache or the Greek kerebaria: kera (head), barys (heavy), named for the effect of the cacophony on the hapless newlyweds. The tradition has been practiced for at least 700 years as it is depicted in an engraving in Roman de Fauvel, an early 14th-century French manuscript.

Other usages

Charivari is also a German word for "shiny". In Bavaria, it refers to the silver ornaments worn with lederhosen.

Charivari is also the name/call sign of a radio station in Nuremberg, Germany in the state of Bavaria. In legal parlance, charivari also means discordant voices.

Charivari (also known as "riding the stang") was a community ritual in which a person (typically a wife) who had been accused of scolding, or beating, or otherwise abusing the other sex, was made to "ride the stang". "Ride the stang" simply meant that a woman would be placed backwards on a horse and paraded through town to be mocked while people banged pots and pans.

The charivari was used to belittle those who married but could not consummate their marriage. An example of this took place in the mid-1500s to a man named Martin Guerre in the village of Artigat.^[1]

References

Further reading

Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1975. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 106–112.

Thompson, E.P. "Rough Music", in Customs in Common (New York:1993), pp.467–531.

Moodie, Susanna (1854). Roughing It In The Bush. Richard Bentley. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/rghnb10.txt.  Chapter XI The Charivari