Beating the Bounds
May is a month for praying for a good harvest, enjoying the natural world – and reaffirming ancient boundaries.
In May 1876 the diarist Francis Kilvert was visiting Oxford. Enjoying a peaceful sunny day in a quiet college garden, he suddenly heard a disturbance: ‘the voices and laughter and trampling of a company of people’, made up of boys and academics. They carried a ladder, and ‘every member of the company bore in his hand a long white peeled willow wand with which they were noisily beating and thrashing the old city walls’.
The group were performing the ancient custom of ‘beating the bounds’, a yearly perambulation following the boundaries of their parish through the city. The ladder was to help them climb over the city wall at the place where it crossed the parish limits. Kilvert decided to join the procession on their trek through streets, sheds, passages, and gardens, and recounts how it culminated in a scene of cheerful chaos:
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