ABSTRACT
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
Foxleye was describing a Rogationtide procession, a ceremony popularly known by the later sixteenth century as the “beating of the bounds,” in which the territorial boundaries of the parish were sanctified by a 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;
gospels silenced and spoken-and for its implication that the participants recognized the spatial limits of their collectivity. Although Rogationtide 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, was defined in early modern England. As a symbolic affirmation of the community of the parish, they had a “truly Durkheimian significance,” representing one of those fleeting moments when society might be observed in the act of describing itself.3
