Invented tradition

Why are so many customs described as immemorial in fact younger than the railways?

Ask when a tradition began and people will usually answer with a shrug: always, or as good as. Then look it up. The differentiated system of clan tartans, in which each Highland family has its own sett, is largely a nineteenth-century construction, propped up by the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842 — a book its authors presented as a medieval source and which was a forgery. The Welsh Gorsedd of Bards, with its stone circle and robes, was devised by Iolo Morganwg and first held on Primrose Hill in 1792. The Nine Lessons and Carols dates from Truro in 1880 and reached King's College, Cambridge, in 1918. Bastille Day became France's national holiday in 1880.

Britain's railway mania was in the 1840s. A great many things everyone assumes are ancient are, in fact, younger than the trains. What is going on — are people simply careless about dates?

Start with the strange part, which is not that traditions get made. Everything gets made at some point. The strange part is the confidence — the sense that a rite has always been done this way, held sincerely by people who have never checked. Where does a feeling of age come from, if not from evidence of age?

Try a thought experiment. You attend a ceremony. What could you observe that would tell you when it started? The vestments look old, but old-looking is a style, not a date. The words are archaic, but archaism is a choice a writer can make in any century. The order of events is fixed and everyone knows it — but that tells you it has been done before, not how many times. Now notice the trap: a ritual performed identically every year produces no internal record of its own history. That is not a side effect. Invariance is what a ritual is for, and invariance erases evidence of origin.

So the perception of antiquity is not an inference from age. It is an inference from formality — and those two come apart completely. A rite invented last decade, if performed with fixed words, costume and sequence, will feel older than a genuinely medieval practice that has drifted and been argued over.

Add the second factor: what is the reach of ordinary human evidence about the past? Most people's direct knowledge extends to what a grandparent told them, and grandparents tell of what their own grandparents did. That is a horizon of roughly a century. Anything older than that arrives as story, not testimony — so a custom that began in 1880 has, by 1960, passed beyond anyone's power to remember it starting. It does not need to be believed ancient; there is simply nothing left to contradict it.

Now the third question, and the sharpest one. Why did so many of them cluster in the same decades? Hobsbawm's observation was that the density is highest roughly between 1870 and 1914 — and that is precisely when the railway, the factory and the franchise were dissolving the local, inherited world in which continuity had needed no ceremony at all. When custom carries itself, nobody stages it. It is when the old links break that societies invent visible rites to stand in for them — and mass electorates, conscript armies and new nations all needed something to be loyal to. Cannadine showed the same pattern in British royal ceremonial: the "immemorial" pageantry was substantially developed from the 1870s onward, and earlier coronations were by contemporary account shambolic affairs.

So the paradox resolves in a way worth stating plainly: the appearance of unbroken continuity is strongest exactly where continuity actually broke. The ceremony is not the residue of the old world. It is the patch over its absence.

Two corrections, because this idea is easy to weaponise. First, "invented" does not mean fake, and it does not mean worthless. A tradition begun in 1880 and practised sincerely for five generations is a real tradition by any working definition — it does the things traditions do. Discovering the date changes the history, not the meaning it now carries for the people inside it.

Second, the sharp line Hobsbawm drew between genuine custom and invented tradition has been criticised, and fairly. Every custom was novel once; many old practices were substantially reworked rather than either inherited intact or fabricated; and the tidy binary flatters the historian by putting him outside the process. The durable insight is not a category of fake traditions but a method — always ask for the date, and expect the answer to be later than the rhetoric claims. Some details in the classic accounts are themselves contested; Trevor-Roper's attribution of the small kilt to an English ironmaster in the 1720s, for instance, is still argued over.

• How national anthems, flags and founding myths were standardised in the same decades, and by which institutions.
• What happens to an invented tradition when its date becomes widely known — does it weaken, or absorb the knowledge?
• The parallel case in heritage restoration, where a building is returned to a state it never actually occupied.

Every term the collection defines is gathered in the glossary.