A skimmington ride — the English regional name for the wider European custom of charivari — was a noisy, mocking public parade staged by a community to express open moral disapproval of specific individuals, most often for adultery, domestic violence, or a marriage locals considered socially improper (an older widower marrying a much younger woman, or a widow or widower remarrying too soon). Crowds banged pots, pans, cow-horns, and any improvised instrument they could gather — the resulting cacophony giving the custom its alternative name, "rough music." The targeted individuals, or effigies representing them, were sometimes paraded through the streets facing backward on a horse or donkey, a deliberately staged inversion symbolising a household or social order that had itself been turned upside down by the offending behaviour.
The English name derives from "skimmington," a large wooden ladle traditionally associated with a scene of role-reversal in the custom's visual shorthand: an unruly wife beating her husband with a ladle or similar kitchen implement, a comic-grotesque image found even in medieval manuscript illustrations and church misericord carvings well before the early modern period when the ride itself is most extensively documented.