Charivari

Charivari, also known in English as rough music and by regional names including skimmington in England and belling or shivaree in North America, is a European folk custom of noisy, public mock-ceremonial mockery organized by a community against an individual or couple perceived to have violated local marital or social norms, historically directed most often at cases such as a marriage between an older man and a much younger woman, a remarried widow or widower, a notably mismatched couple, or a husband beaten by his wife. Participants, typically neighbors and young men of the community, would gather outside the offending party's home at night banging pots, pans, and other improvised instruments, shouting, and sometimes performing a mock parade or effigy display, a ritualized public shaming intended to enforce community standards without resorting to formal legal sanction. Documented across France, Britain, and other parts of Europe from the medieval period into the nineteenth and, in some rural areas, twentieth centuries, and carried to North America by European settlers as the shivaree tradition, charivari has been extensively studied by social historians and anthropologists as a case of community-enforced social control operating through ritualized public humiliation rather than through formal legal or state institutions.