Stations of the Sun by Hutton Ronald

Author:Hutton, Ronald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 1996-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

26

ROGATIONTIDE AND PENTECOST

As the secular rejoicing of early summer got under way, so the religious calendar proceeded. By the year 305 the Church in the western Roman empire had started to celebrate an annual commemoration of Pentecost, the inspiration of Christ’s apostles by the Holy Ghost. It had become a major event by the opening of the fifth century, being held upon the seventh Sunday after Easter, while the sixth Thursday was set aside to mark the ascension of Christ into heaven. Both were joyous occasions for a lovely season, and before the end of that century the clergy at Vienne in Gaul had begun to tie their activities still more tightly to the agricultural year by processing around the fields on the days before the feast of the Ascension to bless the growing crops. 1 The latter rite was regulated in England by canons passed at the ecclesiastical council of Cloveshoo in 747, one of the most important meetings of the young English Church. They gave the processions the name of Rogations, from the Latin rogare, ‘to ask’, and fixed them as belonging to the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension Day. They also ordered that the people who processed should fast until noon, and should not accompany the ceremony ‘with games, and horse races, and great banquets’, as hitherto, but to walk ‘with fear and trembling, with the sign of Christ’s passion and of our eternal redemption carried before them, together with the relics of saints’. 2 The walking and blessing of the fields had a clear pagan progenitor, in the festival of the Ambarvalia at Rome which had followed exactly this pattern. 3 It may be that there was an Anglo-Saxon equivalent, which is suggested by the tradition of sports and feasts, or it is possible that the Ambarvalia were Christianized and introduced to Britain, where they rapidly became popular.

During the next 700 years occasional glimpses are caught of the development of these feasts and ceremonies. By the eleventh century Pentecost had already acquired its enduring English nickname of Whit Sunday or Whitsun, which has baffled scholars ever since. The most likely explanation is that the festival was a notable time for baptisms, and white was the customary colour of baptismal robes. 4 Medieval writers made their own guesses; thus the fourteenth-century monk John Mirk suggested that the name came from the giving of wit to the disciples by the Holy Ghost. 5 Reference to parish processions at Whitsun or in the preceding week abound in the statutes and mandates of reforming prelates between 1200 and 1320. 6 In that period, too, the boundaries of parishes were fixed, all over England, making it possible for the Rogation processions to become a communal perambulation of them as well as a blessing of the crops. 7 In the 1230s Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, complained to his archdeacons of the manner in which they had become so much an expression of parochial pride, the people marching behind their local church’s cross and banners, that they were being attacked by members of rival communities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.