Beating the Bounds

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:

There was a grand uproar in the quadrangle, the men threw out to the boys old hats (which were immediately used as footballs), biscuits were also thrown out and hot coppers, and the quadrangle echoed with shouting and laughter and the whole place was filled with uproar, scramble, and general licence and confusion.

Beating the bounds – a custom still performed in Oxford and other places in Britain – is the descendant of the medieval tradition of Rogationtide, the three days leading up to Ascension Day. The roots of Rogationtide go back to the fifth century, and in the Middle Ages it was a season of penitential processions. Clergy and parishioners would walk together from their church around the local area, carrying holy relics and stopping at any notable landmark for prayers and blessings. They would bless the fields and orchards, praying for good weather and a successful harvest.

Rogationtide almost always falls in May, when the earth is bursting with life and new crops, so it is a good time to give thanks for the beauty of the natural world and hope for a bountiful harvest to come. It is also a lovely time of year to go for a walk in the country with friends, which perhaps helps to explain how Rogationtide evolved into a popular summer festival. From the Anglo-Saxon period until the 20th century it was known in English as the ‘Gang Days’, which simply means ‘the Walking Days’.

After the Reformation it became especially focused on the custom of beating the bounds: hitting parish boundary-markers with sticks or chalking them with crosses to fix them in the memory of onlookers. In the days when the parish was one of the main forms of local government and administration, knowing its precise boundaries was important. Beating the bounds was an opportunity to do a yearly circuit, inspecting conditions on the ground and making sure borders were preserved.

As Kilvert’s diary shows, this useful custom could also be a lot of fun. The processions became like parades, with music, banners, and plentiful supplies of food and drink. Participants enthusiastically embraced the challenge of following what could be awkward boundaries. If the boundary crossed a river, people would get in a boat to follow it; if it went through a house, they claimed the right to march straight through the building. In one Buckinghamshire parish, where the boundary went through the middle of a big kitchen oven, they would get a child to climb into the oven to mark the boundary (first checking the oven was not in use). Children were handy on these occasions: instead of beating the boundary-markers, it would sometimes be children who were playfully tapped with sticks, with the aim of passing the memory on to the next generation.

The pleasure of entering spaces usually off-limits was part of the fun, providing a transgressive sense of carnival licence. But this too had a serious purpose, asserting the primacy of ancient parish boundaries over later-built walls and enclosures. Parishes are some of the oldest and most enduring units of community in this country; in some parishes, the boundaries people walk today have remained unchanged for over a thousand years. These are not just lines on a map, but deeply cut furrows within which centuries of history have grown. Walking their paths is a powerful form of connection with the land and the people who have lived there – an act of collective remembering, helping to ensure that those communities, as much as the boundaries, are not forgotten by time.

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford.