©Ashgate 2008
CHAPTER 11
Beating the Bounds of the Parish:
Order, Memory, and Identity in the
English Local Community, c. 1500–1700
*
Steve Hindle
In 1581, the vicar of the Oxfordshire parish of Beckley gave evidence in a
church court case over the collection of tithes. John Foxleye remembered
that “abowte xxiiij yeares agoe” [i.e. c. 1557], the parishioners of Stanton
St John
in theire perambulacions … when they came to a certen meares ende … wich …
was sayed to be betwene the parishes of Stanton and Woodperie dyd then putt
downe theire crosse, folde uppe theire banners, [and] shutte up theire bookes
withowte singing or readinge in token that they weare then in Woodperie, [the]
parishioners [there] … commanding [them] so to doe for that they weare oute
of theire [own] parishe.
1
Foxleye was describing a Rogationtide procession, a ceremony popularly
known by the later sixteenth century as the “beating of the bounds,”
ritual perambulation combining the idioms of custom and religion to
make a powerful statement of communal identity and spiritual unity.
2
Foxleye’s account is especially interesting both for its vivid references
to the performance of the ritual—crosses lowered and lifted; banners
folded and unfurled; books closed and opened; voices hushed and raised;
*
Community in Early Modern Europe” at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in
Minneapolis, Minnesota (October 2007) at which a version of this paper was given; to thank
Spierling for their editorial efforts and comments.
1
Oxford Church Courts: Depositions, 1581–1586
1994), pp. 8–9.
2
Oxford English Dictionary [OED] s.v. “beat” (v.
1
41) cites Barnaby Googe (1570) as
the earliest reference to the idiom of “bounds” being “beaten” during “procession week.”
©Ashgate 2008
206
gospels silenced and spoken—and for its implication that the participants
processions were merely “one part of a complex mnemonic system”
that perpetuated local customs, perambulations like that at Stanton St
John were the principal means by which the local community, in both
the geographical and the sociological senses of that problematic term,
in the act of describing itself.
3
It was customary to perambulate the parish bounds at Rogationtide,
Day.
4
5
to be responsible for both contention and sickness; and to propitiate good
and gospels; stopped at wayside crosses to say prayers for the crops; and
sang the litany of the saints. Even in the late medieval period, however, this
was not merely a ritual of incorporation, uniting the living and the dead
through the authority of intercessory prayer. It also implied exclusion, for
the demons which infested earth and air were banished by the objective
power of holy words and gestures. Rogationtide perambulation was,
furthermore, a ritual of demarcation in which the identity of the parish
3
c.1550–1700,”
Social History, 32/2 (2007): 186; Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church
in English Society, 1559–1625
Phil Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric
(Manchester, 2000), pp. 1–15. For Durkheim, see John Bossy, “Some Elementary Forms of
Durkheim,” Past and Present, 95 (1982): 3–18; and Patrick Collinson, “Religion, Society
Journal of Religious History, 23/2 (1999): 149–67.
4
The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain
(Oxford, 1996), pp. 277–87. For the European context, see Edward Muir, Ritual in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 66–7.
5
The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700
(Oxford, 1994), pp. 34–6, 52; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion
in England, 1400–1580
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207
commensality, with food and drink being provided for all those who
perambulated. One of the principal symbolic themes of perambulation,
moreover, was the restoration of communal harmony and Rogationtide
was therefore a traditional time for the settlement of parish disputes.
Rogationtide perambulations, like many other forms of procession,
procession week, that it should the better grow;” and in 1540, Richard
processions and gangynges about” spent “in ryottynge and in bely chere,”
during which “the banners and badges of the crosse” were “unreverently
handled and abused;” and complained that parishioners took part “rather
to set out and shew themselves and to passe the tyme wyth vayne &
vnprofytable tales and mery fables than to make generall supplication
a boundary stone and rhetorically ask those who beat it whether there
was “an idol here to be worshipped that you have a drinking here?” In
that any sins committed between Easter and Whitsuntide could be “fullye
discharged by the pleasaunt walkes and processions in the rogyng, I should
say, Rogation Weeke.” By 1634, the separatist John Canne was arguing
that “the observation of Gang days” was “wholly popish, invented by
6
Rogationtide “cross days” were both archaic and superstitious.
It is accordingly surprising that the Edwardian reforms of 1547 did
not explicitly outlaw perambulations, especially since they might easily
be associated with those other processions condemned because they
had ostensibly caused “contention and strife” among the people “by
reason of fond courtesy and challenging of places;” and prevented the
“edifying” of parishioners who could not hear what was said or sung.
7
by the inclusion of a Rogationtide sermon in the Elizabethan book of
homilies of 1563, though it had been conspicuous by its absence from
6
Answer to Thomas More’s Dialogue (Cambridge, 1850), pp. 61–2;
Epistles and Gospelles with a Brief Postil … from Easter tyll Advent
Elizabethan Essex,” in Frederick Emmison and Roy Stephens (eds), Tribute to an Antiquary:
Essays Presented to Marc Fitch By Some of His Friends (London, 1976), p. 186; William
A Sermon Made at Blanford Foru[m] (London, 1571), p. 19; John Canne, A Necessitie
of Separation from the Church of England (London, 1634), p. 111.
7
Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation
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208
the Edwardian volume of 1547.
8
suppression of superstition and the planting of true religion,” issued in
stipulated that Rogationtide perambulation was to be retained in order
that parishioners might give thanks to God and preserve knowledge
of their boundaries.
9
by the curate and by “the substantialest men of the parish” who,
without the use of banners or bells, were to stop at “certain convenient
places;” to “admonish the people” to thank God “for the increase
Grindal, Bishop of London, was declaring that his fellow reformers had
radically transformed the Rogationtide ritual so that it was no longer
“a procession, but a perambulation,” a distinction which implied a far
10
It was once thought that although it was the only procession to survive
the Reformation, Rogationtide perambulation experienced a long, slow
sacred associations, it was argued, the ritual was overwhelmed by processes
of agrarian change, and especially by the obstruction of the traditional
route around the boundaries which was often caused by the enclosure
11
More detailed research, especially
in the accounts of the churchwardens who often funded perambulations,
has, however, revealed a more complex pattern, in which continuity is
the dominant motif. In the short term, the destruction (under the terms
of episcopal instructions of February 1548) of those churchyard and
wayside crosses which had been the locus for the blessing of crops and
the exorcising of demons did severely curtail the number and nature of
perambulations.
12
revival, however, and payments for Rogationtide hospitality and for the
8
The Seconde Tome of Homelyes
(London, 1563), sigs. 233v–55r. Cf. Certayne Sermons, or Homelies Appoynted by the
Kynges Maiestie, to bee Declared and Redde, by all Persons, Vicares, or Curates, euery
Sondaye in their Churches, where they haue cure (London, 1547).
9
Visitation Articles
10
The Remaines of Edmund Grindal
p. 240.
11
Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in
Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England ([1971] London, 1997 edn), pp. 62–5; David
Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660
(Oxford, 1985), pp. 77–81, 90–91, 96–97.
12
England’s Iconoclasts, Volume I: Laws Against Images (Oxford,
1988), p. 263 fn. 25.
©Ashgate 2008
209
restoring of parish banners appear in the records of cities, market towns,
parishioners complained about the failure of their clergy or churchwardens
to organize the beating of the bounds, suggest that Rogationtide customs
were widely respected well into the seventeenth century.
dominated the republican regime of the 1650s, furthermore, seem to have
been ambivalent about perambulations, not least because even they could
see the utility of teaching youngsters the location of the parish boundaries.
show the continuation of Rogationtide payments in towns and villages
urban parishes paying for white sticks with which boundary stones,
and perhaps also the children who were expected to remember their
whereabouts, could be beaten, and rural parishes even providing pipes
and tobacco for those who walked.
13
Reports of the death of Rogationtide
the early modern parish demonstrate the gradual evolution of the early
were to prove so fundamental to the legitimation of parish identities into
the eighteenth century and beyond.
14
Rogationtide perambulations therefore continued throughout the early
modern period, and their place in the ritual year both before and after
the Reformation has been convincingly demonstrated.
15
It is remarkable,
the bounds has not been analyzed.
16
13
Merry England, pp. 85, 99, 142–3, 175–6, 217–18, 247.
14
Bob Bushaway, “Rite, Legitimation and Community in Southern England, 1700–
Conict and Community in
Southern England: Essays in the History of Rural and Urban Labour From Medieval to
Modern Times
Rural History
Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Belonging in England and Wales,
1700–1950 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 37–40.
15
David Cressy, Bonres and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in
Elizabethan and Stuart England
Stations of the Sun, pp. 277–87.
16
Manners,” English Literary History, 63/2 (1996): 260–67 discusses early Elizabethan
©Ashgate 2008
210
preliminary attempt to tease out the changing meaning of Rogationtide
perambulations for those who participated in them. It seeks to answer
second, why did they perambulate?; and third, what were the implications
Order
itself begs others about the nature and scale of participation; about the
allocation of resources; and about hierarchies of power and authority in
the local community.
17
that before the Reformation all the parishioners—both men and women—
were expected to process, and that those who absented themselves were
regarded as unneighborly.
18
Participation was sometimes subsidized at
parish expense, since nominal payments to those prestigious parishioners
who carried banners during the perambulation, as at St Michael’s Bath,
Mary’s Dover, or St Edmund’s Salisbury, were not unusual.
19
1559 circumscribed the ritual: the bounds were to be walked only by “the
substantialest men of the parish,” an exclusive formula which indicated
the chief male inhabitants.
20
Rogationtide in some detail.
17
The Experience of Authority in Early Modern
England
in R.W. Scribner (ed.), Germany: A New Social and Economic History, Vol. I: 1450–1630
(London, 1996), pp. 291–325.
18
John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), p. 73; The Kentish
Visitation of Archbishop William Warham and His Deputies, 1511–12
19
The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval
English DioceseThe Shaping of a Community:
The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish, c. 1400–1560The
Churchwardens’ Book of Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire 1496– c. 1540, ed. David Dymond
(Cambridgeshire Record Society 17, 2004), pp. 37, 47, 58, 87; Churchwardens’ Accounts
from the Fourteenth Century to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J.C. Cox (London,
1913), pp. 71–2, 263.
20
Tudor Royal Proclamations, Volume II, 1553–1587
©Ashgate 2008
211
parson, vicar or curate, churchwardens and certain of the substantial men
of the parish” were to perambulate.
21
Other visitation articles elaborated
sorts, aswel of the elder as younger sort, for the better knowledge of the
circuits and bounds of the parish.”
22
were to participate, the archdeacon emphasized the pedagogical function
of perambulation in perpetuating knowledge of boundaries from one
generation to the next. Other bishops were, moreover, concerned that
those very boundaries should be strengthened in the interest of controlling
stipulated in 1628 that the numbers walking be “restrained and limitted
of your parish,” in order that perambulations “be not overburthensome,”
23
Like wakes and
poor of adjacent parishes to take advantage of hospitality.
24
If parish elites
themselves into a frenzy,” they were even more hostile to the prospect
of strangers getting drunk at their expense.
25
perambulations were designed to promote spatial awareness of the
boundaries of the parish community, and were exclusive occasions.
Restrictions on participation were not, moreover, merely social–
structural; they were also geographical and (most of all) gendered. In
Elizabethan bishops explicitly excluded women from perambulations.
Bishop Bentham of Coventry insisted in 1561, for instance, that no “wemen
asking the clergy of the diocese of Winchester whether they still allowed
21
Visitation Articles
22
Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church
(2 vols, Church of England Record Society 1 and 5, 1994, 1998), 1:132.
23
Visitation Articles, Fincham, 1:197–8.
24
Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses: Contayninge a Discoverie of Vices in a
Verie Famous Island Called Ailgnia, Made Dialogue-wise (London, 1583), sigs. M6r– M7v;
Budworth Wakes, St Peter’s Day, 1596,” Rural History, 6/2 (1995): 155–78.
25
Religion, p. 65.
©Ashgate 2008
212
women to “go about with them” at Rogationtide.
26
In descriptions of
minister of Stisted (Essex) fell foul of the ecclesiastical authorities in 1561
though it is unclear whether greater offence was caused by their gender or
by their devotion.
27
Measuring the social status of those who perambulated is similarly
(Gloucestershire) for 1672, they have been correlated with taxation
records to suggest that the propertyless were excluded in practice as well
as in theory.
28
St Oswalds Chester in the 1610s, for example, included not only the mayor
the deputy steward of the Ellesmere estate, the late mayor and others.”
contrast, none of the gentry residents seem to have participated.
29
1630s that they could not get their parishioners to perambulate with them,
a tendency which might well imply the withdrawal of the middling sort.
More impressionistic evidence suggests that householders of middle rank
1714.
30
Rogationtide was, nonetheless, clearly an occasion on which
hierarchies of status and (especially) of age were insisted upon. When
the minister of Christon (Somerset) noted the names of those (exclusively
male) inhabitants who had perambulated in 1718, for example, he
26
Elizabethan Episcopate,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 23/2 (1972): 145; Visitation
Articles
27
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52/3 (2001): 441.
28
Daniel C. Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conict in the Vale of
Gloucester, 1590–1690
29
Cathedral Cities,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History
The Social World of Early Modern
Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005), p. 211.
30
Underdown, Revel, p. 81.
©Ashgate 2008
213
arranged his list in age groups.
31
Children, especially older boys, seem to
have played a particularly prominent role almost everywhere. In 1619,
as many as 150 boys were expected to perambulate the boundaries of St
32
educational experience, inculcating knowledge of parish bounds in the
young, the presence of large numbers of lads might create an atmosphere
Grindal’s concern, expressed in 1560, about the unnecessary perambulation
of a “multitude of light young folks.”
33
Correlation of the stated age of
deponents in tithe disputes with their estimates of how far back in time
they could remember Rogationtide festivities suggests, in fact, that boys
tended to be youths (in their teens) rather than mere children when they
toward full adult membership of the community.
34
Walking the entire length of the parish boundary might take up to three
of Bassingbourn took two days, and ale was invariably provided on the
who completed it certainly deserved the cakes and ale they got along the
way.
35
sixteenth century, refreshment was provided either by the parish; or by the
farmers who owned properties on the boundary; or by some combination
“ale or drinkings” after the vicar read a gospel at a tree at the “utrtermoste
a “drinking and a dinner” at parish expense on the village green, but also
“a breakfast with butter & cheese” at the parsonage, “a drinking at Mr
places where the company of which he had been part as a boy had paused
31
32
Merritt, Early Modern Westminster, p. 211.
33
Remaines of Edmund Grindal
34
Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford,
2003), p. 224.
35
The Churchwardens’ Book of Bassingbourn
“Perambulation of Purton, 1733,” Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine,
40 (1918): 119–28.
©Ashgate 2008
214
to have “a drinking,” occasionally including cheese and cakes. On such
from dinner.
36
Even so, these locations were remembered precisely because
commensality was often provided at contentious points along boundaries.
Both before and after the Reformation, churchwardens’ contributions to
these refreshments seem to have been more likely in urban areas, whereas
in the countryside prosperous parishioners themselves shouldered the
burden, perhaps because they were conscious that it was their crops for
which prayers were being offered.
37
Indeed, parish elites long used the occasion of perambulation to
exercise their social responsibilities of charity, hospitality and patronage.
38
seventeenth century, for instance, seem customarily to have stopped for
refreshment at the farm of a wealthy tailor. Down to the early 1620s, a
company”—42 all told, including both men and boys—was “entertained
at Westoe with bread and cheese and ale” and “in Skillet’s Fields with
bread and cake and cheese and ale by the Minister.” In 1683, the minister
of Ringmer (Sussex) similarly recorded the details of the entertainments
which took place at the end of each of the three days it took to perambulate.
respectively to the costs of hospitality “as by custom they are obliged to
when a perambulation is there.”
39
So entrenched was the practice of Rogationtide commensality that
parishioners came to expect hospitality during and after the perambulation,
36
The Transcript of the Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Parish of Tilney all All Sants,
Norfolk, 1443–1589Altars, p. 137;
The Spoil of Melford Church: The Reformation in a Suffolk Parish, eds David Dymond and
A Community Transformed: the
Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620
Past and Present, 47 (1970): 61.
37
Merry England, p. 34; French, People of the Parish, p. 190.
38
Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 369–70.
39
Merritt, Early Modern Westminster, p. 210; Before the Bawdy Court: Selections
from Church Court and Other Records Relating to the Correction of Moral offences
in England, Scotland and New England, 1300–1800
©Ashgate 2008
215
and complained bitterly when the tradition was abrogated.
40
perambulated regarded themselves as entitled to the provision of food and
drink by the churchwardens and especially by the minister, and the parish
one parishioner in 1621 for abdicating his charitable responsibilities so
Jacobean churchwardens of Cropredy (Oxfordshire) similarly criticized
three substantial parishioners for failing to “allow in rogation weeke such
(Wiltshire) in 1623 the minister castigated the substantial residents for
refusing to “provide drinkings for them at certain places where the gospels
are usually read.”
41
associated with perambulation. Clergymen were particularly concerned
to little more than petty extortion by the poor, and especially by their
in 1701 that perambulation costs, which had customarily been shared
was bothered less by the expenditure (the Rogationtide treat typically
cost him less than 11 shillings) than by the principle that the custom
was “expected as a right” from the clergyman just as it began to wax
cold among his neighbors.
42
Desire to restrict costs probably explains the
growing circumscription of commensality, which was evident from the
ale, as at St Mary De Crypt (Gloucestershire) in 1667; or at West Malling
“the Parish shall go aprocessioning.” Elsewhere, tight limits were set on
entitlement to hospitality. Rogationtide supper was provided only for the
mayor and constables of Canterbury from 1618; only for the vestrymen
40
Hospitality, pp. 220, 290.
41
Before the Bawdy Court Churchwardens’ Presentments for the
Oxfordshire Peculiars of Dorchester, Thame and Banbury
Society, 60, 1928), p. 245; Underdown, Revel, p. 81.
42
The Rector’s Book: Clayworth, Nottinghamshire
©Ashgate 2008
216
the parish” at Deptford (Middlesex) from 1684.
43
evidence, therefore, that Rogationtide hospitality was becoming more
exclusive over the course of the seventeenth century.
however, be exaggerated. Feasting after a period of fasting symbolized
the omnipotence of a God whose provision of plenty could only be
encouraged by a ceremony of thanksgiving; and commensality was an act
emblematic of the growth of social solidarity among those local elites
who increasingly regarded themselves not merely as representatives of
the parish community, but actually as the whole body of that community.
By the late seventeenth century, the select groups who were permitted to
dine after perambulating had effectively appropriated to themselves the
identity of the community. But if abstinence and consumption was one
motif associated with Rogationtide, age and youth was another, and it is
to the transmission of social memory which we will now turn.
Memory
Rogationtide ceremonies conserved the boundaries of parochial space which
rite of communication between the young, the aged and the dead.”
44
Perambulation was the means by which local historical and geographical
knowledge was perpetuated, functioning as a secular catechism through
which the young were taught the spatial limits of their rights and duties as
inhabitants of a particular parish.
Parish boundaries had to be commemorated precisely because they
were neither marked in the landscape nor recorded on paper. Indeed, there
the sixteenth century. Only from the 1520s do village bylaws insist on
the provision of markers of wood or stone to indicate where boundaries
43
Merritt, Early Modern Westminster
Cressy, Bonres, p. 24; Churchwardens’ Accounts, Cox, p. 264.
44
Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–
1730 (Oxford, 2003), p. 305.
©Ashgate 2008
217
45
It is
maps of parish boundaries were drawn up by surveyors acting on behalf of
those landowners who were exploiting their assets more assiduously.
46
location was inscribed did not, however, happen overnight, and for many
of boundary markers. Only very occasionally did the desire for a more
permanent memorial justify parish expense, on “brasse plates” to indicate
the boundary of St Michael Cornhill (London) in 1610, for example; or
47
By and large,
a psalm” was “lately cut down” but that they used “another great tree
hard by the place where it stood.”
48
those parishioners who were custodians of local knowledge.
of the oldest inhabitants, and the longevity of their knowledge was
perambulation in 1726, for instance, he noted in particular the presence
“marked the same places as was done 80 years now in remembrance.”
49
50
It was
accordingly crucial to secure the testimony of the very aged before their
knowledge of bounds died with them. In a dispute between three Essex
45
Open-Field Farming in Medieval England: A Study of Village By-Laws
(London, 1972), p. 54.
46
Evidence,” in David Buisseret (ed.), Rural Images: Estate Maps in the Old and New Worlds
(Chicago, 1996), pp. 27–62.
47
Claire S. Schen, Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London
48
“This Little Commonwealth: Layston Parish Memorandum Book, 1607–c.1650 &
1704–c.1747,”
49
50
Layston Parish Memorandum Book
©Ashgate 2008
218
51
Cumulatively, those
old men who perambulated had collective ownership of centuries of local
knowledge and they were accorded ritual authority on these occasions
precisely because the great breadth of their potential memory span might
help inculcate duties of remembrance amongst the young.
52
Indeed, if the
aged refused to participate, the minister might cancel the perambulation
when he claimed that “the auncyente men of the parishe dyd not offer
them selfs” at Rogationtide.
53
so it was decided that adults need only walk the section closest to their own
54
Indeed, some perambulations, such as that at Purton, were so demanding
Wormingford (Essex), the rector defended his failure to perambulate the
bounds in 1590 on the grounds that although he and his wardens were
prepared to process, “the youth” were “not coming to go.”
55
between boys and parish elders, although rather more physical pedagogical
almonds to the boys who perambulated. Similar treats were handed out
the parish boundary.
56
Encouraging participation was, however, one thing,
inculcating memory entirely another. Indeed, the means of memory might
combine the tangible and the symbolic. During Elizabethan Rogationtide
cairns of stones on either side of the path that marked the boundary
he had perambulated “the out bounds” of Pertenhall (Bedfordshire), and
51
52
Shepard, Manhood, p. 224.
53
Tudor Parish Documents of the Diocese of York, ed. J.S. Purvis (Cambridge, 1948),
p. 194.
54
Merry England, pp. 247–8.
55
56
Merry England, pp. 182, 247; Maskeleyne, “Purton,” p. 124.
©Ashgate 2008
219
remembered that the parishioners always “made four crosses” at decisive
points on the circuit.
57
between the two Shropshire parishes of Pattingham and Clarely, so that
when their ministers met there at Rogationtide they would “put each
of them his foot” on a stone in the middle of the stream and “read the
gospell.”
58
their laughter and its location.
59
Other memories were more painful. John
Clarke of Worth (Sussex) remembered the precise line of the boundary
had encouraged Robert Mocke to remember that certain stones were “the
mark for the dividing of the parishes” by “pinch[ing] him by the ear so
that he felt it sharply,” a strategy vindicated by Mocke’s recollection of this
detail some 60 years later.
60
with references to being bumped, ducked, or beaten at the appropriate
point. Local knowledge was, therefore, transmitted from the memories of
the aged through physical inscription on the bruised backsides and sore
heads of the young.
61
Over time, it became increasingly likely that perambulations were
recorded in writing rather than simply committed (however painfully) to
57
Historical Journal, 42/1 (1999): 4 fn. 12; Whyte, “Landscape, Memory
P65/28/2.
58
59
Izaak Walton, The Lives of Doctor John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr Richard
Hooker, Mr George Herbert and Doctor Robert Sanderson
1895), pp. 155–6.
60
Shepard, Manhood
61
For a contemporary Italian example of boxing the ears to make an event memorable,
see The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Revised Edition, trans. George Bull (London,
money, and instructed him never to forget.
©Ashgate 2008
220
62
Clergymen, especially vicars,
doubtless had in mind the rights, privileges, and incomes associated with
their tithes when they inscribed the parish boundary in their registers, but
they may also have had other motives for perpetuating local knowledge
be cited by clergymen to justify their failure to perambulate, though
this might be little more than special pleading for their unwillingness to
provide hospitality.
63
Churchwardens themselves also had a vested interest
in keeping a written record of their knowledge of local boundaries, not
least because it might be used to justify their calculations of church rates
payable per acre, and they did so as far south as Liskeard (Cornwall) in
64
in 1591, he noted that these were the bounds “as they were gone … by the
time out of Mind kept and gone by the parishioners.”
65
In this formulation,
and in custom practiced beyond memory.
66
writing did not mean that it could not thereafter change. Indeed, what
perspective, perambulations were constantly evolving. When he described
“for Quietness sake” a deviation insisted upon 30 years previously by one
rolls; and the contemporary opinions of the “ancients”—for the original
route.
67
Even the written record could not remain unamended in the face of
62
Essex Review, 42 (1933): 62;
63
64
65
Layston Parish Memorandum Book
66
(eds), Experience of Authority, pp. 89–116.
67
Layston Parish Memorandum Book
©Ashgate 2008
221
when he recorded the parish bounds in 1613, noting that “wrightings
many tymes lose theyr worth with themselves, being either concealed,
and orderly kept” written perambulation might “give a great strength to
right and concord,” his preference was for “prescription and direction,”
which he thought were always the “best evidences.”
68
Whether it was
burned into the memories of the ancients or engrossed in the accounts of
churchwardens, therefore, custom might all too easily be corrupted.
In most cases, the motives for recording the intricacies of perambulation
litigation. Only very occasionally are these motivations spelled out. When
Robert Poole of Belchamp Otten (Essex) recorded the perambulation in his
tithe book in 1701, he hoped it would be a “memorial to posterity,” and
explained that a written account was necessary because “the landmarcks
of our parish were cut down” during “the time of the long Rebellion.”
69
In other cases, the traditional boundaries had doubtless been obscured
by enclosure. But underlying the desire to inscribe perambulations in the
narrative about the changing relationship between the oral, the literate,
and the social circulation of local knowledge.
70
Identity
processions had originally, by the dramatic use of movement in the
performance of liturgy, constituted a walking manifestation of spiritual
important territorial issues had been at stake. Communal identity was
invariably forged in opposition to the perceived interests of strangers and
68
The Parish Register and Tithing Book of Thomas Hassall of Amwell, ed. Stephen G.
69
70
Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 9 (1999):
Oral and Literature Culture in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000);
Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past.
©Ashgate 2008
222
not only by 12 men of that parish, but also by 12 men from each of four
neighboring parishes.
71
In a context where Rogationtide rituals might be
used to expel demons across the parish boundary, local communities could
in relation to other geographical jurisdictions and the communal interests
associated with them.
If territoriality was an issue, it is hardly surprising that symbols
should have evolved to express distinctive parish identities. In Beverley
“Cross Monday” processions paraded the town’s relic of St John; and the
the parishioners of four adjacent parishes processing behind the bones
of four local saints.
72
was, however, the banner, like the one purchased by the churchwardens
image of the patron saint, often adorned with streamers or pennants, and
1537, the parish of Morebath (Devon) paid 12s to London craftsmen for a
silken banner decorated with the image of the favored local St Sidwell on
the one side and that of St George on the other.
73
Indeed, St George was
the image of St George, a perfect example of the appropriation in the
nascent English national identity.
74
for instance, banners played a central part in an elaborate ritual between
71
72
Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge,
1991), p. 269; Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the
English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989), p. 241.
73
French, People of the Parish, p. 190; Whiting, Blind Devotion, p. 21; Eamon Duffy,
The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village
Guilds
and the Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia, c. 1470–1550
pp. 79, 107.
74
French, People of the Parish, p. 205; John Bengston, “St George and the Formation
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997): 317–40;
Change in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999): 1–27.
©Ashgate 2008
223
symbols, including their respective parish crosses, back and forth across
the boundary represented by Levins Brook.
75
In some cases the staves on
which banners were supported might serve as convenient weapons if and
when groups of rival parishioners came to blows about the precise location
of a boundary.
displayed at Rogationtide in Buckinghamshire and Cornish parishes
(Essex) could affectionately recall the church banners and pennants he had
or holy banner” of the parish was carried round the bounds when they were
perambulated for the last time in 1720.
76
Generally, however, banners were
Parishioners nonetheless found other ways of asserting their collective
ribbons to be worn by the boys who beat the bounds, as happened in St
may be seen as a form of parish livery, symbolizing the nexus of belonging
which perambulation inculcated in the young.
77
By the late seventeenth
Wenlock (Shropshire), for instance, chanted that “We go from Beckbury
so return we.”
78
Songs of this kind testify to the longevity of a proverbial
culture which was deeply embedded in the local landscape.
demarcation could be a matter of life and death, or at least of the expenses
75
Whyte, “Landscape, Memory and Custom,” p. 176.
76
Merry England, p. 106; McIntosh, Community Transformed, p. 202;
G.C. Peachey, “Beating the Bounds of Brightwalton,” Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and
Oxfordshire Archaeological Journal, 1/3 (1904): 75–81.
77
Merritt, Early Modern Westminster Merry England, p. 176;
Churchwardens’ Accounts, Cox, pp. 263–4.
78
English Folk-Rhymes: A Collection of Traditional Verses Relating to Places and
Persons, Customs, Superstitions etc
©Ashgate 2008
224
dispute over the boundary between two Shropshire parishes, it was
remembered that the “Further Portway” lay in Rattlinghope because a
parishioners there, “as Church Stretton said it was out of their bounds.”
79
responsible for the maintenance of any poor children born within their
bounds, overseers of the poor aggressively prevented the settlement of
families that would “breed up” a charge on the poor rate, and especially
of single mothers.
80
It was not, accordingly, unusual for servant girls in the
advanced stages of pregnancy to be harried across the boundary to give
then have to meet the substantial economic costs of the illegitimacy. When
Grace Fisher of Fillongley (Warwickshire) went into labor in 1653, for
instance, the inhabitants drove her “uncivilly and unmercifully” across
the very next day.
81
the poor made it even more imperative that parishioners should remember
therefore retained several elements of an older festive tradition, but the
careful perambulation of borders helped parishioners control the limits not
only of the traditional obligations of tithe and church rate; but also of their
novel secular responsibilities for the poor, and especially for abandoned,
illegitimate, or even congenitally idle children.
82
and sometimes in outright opposition to, the claims of neighboring
with them. Where contention existed between parishes about the precise
location of a boundary, perambulations might easily degenerate into
bounds of Runwell (Essex) came to blows with their neighbors over rights
two dozen parishioners of Rettendon had violently “hindered them from
79
80
On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England,
c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), Ch. 5.
81
Warwick County Records
(9 vols., Warwick, 1935–64), 3:153–54.
82
Schen, CharityOn the Parish?, pp. 223–5.
©Ashgate 2008
225
their lawful, peaceful and ancient procession and perambulation.”
83
But
it was not only neighboring parishioners who prevented perambulations.
parishioners complained that their landlords had stopped them beating the
in 1623.
84
Since Rogationtide commenced with the ritual cursing (derived
from Deuteronomy 27:17) of those that dared to remove their neighbors’
landmark, perambulations might license, perhaps even encourage,
of Coleby (Lincolnshire) at Rogationtide 1616, for instance, promptly
demolished the enclosures with which their landlord had “blemished”
Rogationtide 1641, meanwhile, crowds numbering as many 400 burnt
down the posts and dug down the mounds with which parts of the town
lands of Colchester (Essex) had been enclosed.
85
of the bounds might involve the cracking of skulls and the leveling of
and its associated rights and obligations. It is no coincidence that these
the margins where communities are most regularly tested and new social
identities most intensively forged.
Dening community
of the Festial in 1483, the order of perambulation was described: “in
the people follow.” Mirk exhorted parishioners to “put away all danger
and mischief [for] holy church ordains that each man fast these days and
go in procession, in order to have help and succour of God and of his
83
ERO, Q/SR 70/4. For a late medieval example, see Dorothy M. Owen, Church and
Society in Medieval Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1971), pp. 108–9.
84
Underdown, Revel, pp. 80–81.
85
vset
al.et al. vs. Jolly et al.); John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence
in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 101–2.
©Ashgate 2008
226
saints.”
86
Over a century and a half later, in 1632, the churchwardens of
Bolney (Sussex) concluded their detailed description of the perambulation
to Sanctify and preserve you all for ever for the Merits of his beloved
and our alone Saviour.”
87
Even into the seventeenth century, therefore,
perambulation and “commended [them]selves to God in prayer.” Indeed,
the early Stuart bishops were interested not only in whether perambulations
took place regularly but also whether appropriate prayers were used during
the procession.
88
Perambulation therefore long remained “a religious ceremony in
which the language of custom was spoken with the authority of God.”
89
recognition, perhaps not even as far as Bishop Grindal’s deft distinction
between a procession and a perambulation
the demarcation of boundaries only increased. In this respect, the parish
resembled an institution rather than an organism. Even so, when George
parishioner chanting gospels or drinking ale during “cross day” procession:
preservation of bounds; thirdly, charity and loving walking and neighbourly
accompanying one another, with reconciling of differences at that time, if
there be any; fourthly, mercy in releeving the poor by a liberall distribution
and largesse.”
90
had vested interests associated with tithes and other property rights in the
perpetuation of Rogationtide processions.
91
But he surely echoed centuries
of tradition in concluding that “those that withdraw and sever themselves
86
John Mirk, FestialEarly English Text Society, early series, 96
(1905), p. 150.
87
88
Parish Register and Tithing Book of Thomas Hassall, Doree, p. 193; Visitation
Articles, Fincham, 1:xvi, 29.
89
Beaver, Parish Communities, p. 35.
90
The Works of George Herbert
91
Early Modern Literary Studies, 1/2 (1995): 8–10.
©Ashgate 2008
227
should be reproved “as uncharitable and unneighbourly.” Rogationtide
perambulations may in practice, of course, have been less indicative of
context of the perennial push and shove of local social relations, to say
nothing of the litigation and labeling that were especially characteristic of
92
petition or festivity” which helped rid an otherwise intolerable life of
communal tension.
93
So if we seek the local communities of early modern
parish bounds is a particularly promising place to start, perhaps even the
92
Jones and Daniel Woolf (eds), Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
(Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 19–49.
93
Beaver, Parish Communities
Community and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth
Centuries,” in Derek Baker (ed.), Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World (Studies
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