Rogation days

This was done by the inhabitants, who went round them every year, and stopped at certain spots where different ceremonies were performed, in order that the localities might be impressed on the memory of the young, as they were attested by the recollections of the old.

Rogation week, or one of the three days before Holy Thursday, the feast of our Lord's Ascension, was selected for the purpose; at which time the minister of the parish, accompanied by his churchwardens and chief parishioners, went round the boundaries, and stopped at remarkable spots and trees, where he recited passages in the Gospels, and implored the blessing of the Most High on the fruits of the earth, beseeching him to preserve the rights and properties of the inhabitants, and to keep them in safety.

Many a memorial tree, thus honoured, carried down the recollection of bygone days to the men of other generations; and among these the Gospel beech, which stood at a short distance from an ancient Saxon town, among the beautiful beech-woods of Gloucestershire, recalled to mind that ages must have passed since that failing tree shadowed with its ample foliage the earth beneath.

Now time-worn and riven, hollow too, yet throwing out green leaves in the spring, it marked one of the extremities of the parish, in its retired coppice on the rugged side of a wild common, while beside it a stream gushed forth, and went leaping and sparkling into the vale below.

Yeah, it's the start of the new court sessions.

Yeah, so you mentioned or someone mentioned Rogation Days.

Yeah, is it the same? We've got two different messages in.

This one had come in yesterday.

Rogation Days are the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday prior to Ascension Thursday.

Holy Water was put out on the land to help the crops to grow.

Then I got a similar call today from Nora.

She was just saying in her youth, Michaelmas was the last day for picking blackberries.

And suddenly we got ourselves a harvest festival.

So Rogation Sunday, which is round about Ascension, you pray for the crops, for the planting.

Harvest, you pray for the harvest.

So I guess it starts with the seasons and with our embeddedness in the church year, which is interesting in light of Jacob's comments that you stick to the gospel as it were, the gospel year, but this is the incarnate embeddedness in the Wendell Berry year, shall we say.

Yeah.

Well, there's a great ritual called Rogationtide, which is the annual marking of the boundaries of the village, the boundaries of the parish.

And before the Reformation, what happens in Rogationtide is that all the community comes together, and they march around the boundaries of the village, which might take two or three days.

And at certain key boundary markers, the village priest will read a psalm, and the choirboys of the parish will sing a song in praise of ideas of community and belonging and so on.

And the boys will then be given ale and cakes.

And there's one case from Amble in Northumberland in 1616, where an old man remembers when he was a lad in the mid-16th century being shown the boundary markers by his grandfather.

And his grandfather downed his, downed the boy's britches and made him sit with his bare ass upon the boundary marker as a way of remembering where the boundary lay.

And before the Reformation, the Rogationtide customs are a way of identifying an ideal of community in which the priest blesses the fields for their fertility in the year to come.