Leighton Buzzard turns the world upside down
At Leighton Buzzard on Sunday, a choirgirl with plaits, in surplice and cassock, was carefully turned upside down by two bigger girls, her head resting on a comfortable cushion, and held there while a short speech was made, quoting the 17th-century will of Edward Wilkes.
Really, the ceremony should have been on Monday, one of the Rogation days. Those are the three days before Ascension day, which is 40 days after Easter, so always a Thursday. As people aren’t free during the week to take part in the traditional parish walks that marked Rogationtide, the curious customs are enacted on the Sunday instead.
The will of Edward Wilkes is read at Leighton Buzzard because he left money to fund almshouses. The administrators of the charity still run 16 in the parish. So the rector, Cate Irvine, in a cope, led a procession, with the curate, someone holding a ritual bucket of holy water for asperges with a frond, a thurifer making smoke, a man in a gown with a wand of office, men in albs, choristers and parishioners. Out they went from the curly-ironworked door of All Saints church and up the High Street, past Fabric World and the Conservative Club, the Three Counties Pawnbrokers and the Swan Hotel, to North Street where Wilkes’s almshouses stand.
Even some of the participants thought their procession eccentric, yet it was plain and sober. It belongs not so much to Wilkes’s legacy as to the tradition of Rogation walks, “beating bounds”. Rogation comes from rogare, “to ask”, since prayers to God ask for a fruitful harvest. In the Book of Common Prayer, the Rogation days are marked for fasting, but people have forgotten that practice.
The processions are thought to have begun in Gaul in late antiquity, and in England the Protestant Reformers easily rid them of unwelcome elements, such as the carrying of a cross and invocation of saints. Indeed the Book of Homilies, compiled in the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I to counter suspect preaching, managed to accommodate Rogationtide to its Calvinist outlook so happily that it supplied three homilies for it and an exhortation attached to the “perambulations”.
It took its cue from the Collect for the Sunday that begins Rogation week: “O Lord, from whom all good things do come: Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same.”
To the lesson that “all good things cometh from God”, the Book of Homilies adds colourful language on the sin of encroaching on neighbours’ land by those who “do turn up the ancient terries of the fields, that old men beforetime with great pains did tread out”. That word terries is found nowhere else, but one gets the idea. Other words for boundaries in the Homilies are meres and balks, doles and marks. The book suggests that paths between fields were made broader “for the better shacke in harvest tyme, to the more comfort of his poore neyghbours cattell”. This seems to refer to shack or grain fallen from the ear, for the feeding of pigs or poultry – a sort of animal gleaning. Gleaning was a righteous observance in the Old Testament.
Whatever the Reformers’ intentions, boisterousness broke into the Rogation walks. Boundaries are beaten now but originally it was the choirboys, so that they would remember the boundaries. Strangers and people from rival parishes would be “bumped”, as happened to a farmer who sued the mayor of Maidenhead for bumping him in 1874. Leighton Buzzard shows how it can be done more gently.