Working out where the boundaries are

The first Sunday of my pilgrimage happens to be Rogation Sunday, 25 April. In former times, and in some rural settlements today, parishioners 'beat the bounds' by walking the fields, identifying the boundaries of their community and praying for God's blessing on the growing crops.

As a child of the town rather than a son of the soil, this was all lost on me until recently.

Unsurprisingly, the moment when newly-sown crops lay in the fields has been a time for earnest prayer long before the Christian era. At this time of year, the Romans celebrated Robigalia, when the fertility gods Robigus and Robiga ("green/life") were worshipped. I imagine that before the Romans, our ancestors were up to similar things in late April.

As the first Christian missionaries arrived, they faced a choice between attempting to abolish a festival that was already deeply established and crucially relevant to the life of the community or adapting it. They chose the latter and pointed to reliance on God's provision and to the simplicity in prayer of asking for practical needs to be met. So the feast of Robigus and Robiga became Rogation, meaning "asking".

The custom of "beating the bounds" refers to the thrashing of boundary markers, though this too, is apparently a later adaptation of earlier tradition. At one time, according to Revd Robert Barlow, Chaplain for Agriculture and Rural Life in the Diocese of Worcester, it wasn't the boundary markers that were beaten but the children of the parish!

Identifying the boundaries of one's territory would have been vitally important in less ordered times. Like the gang turf-wars associated with today's inner-city, the countryside rivalries of our forefathers were nasty affairs. Put a foot wrong and your inadvertent trespass could be seen as a violation of space, an attempt to usurp the property of others or an invasion. So by established custom, the youngsters of the community were taken out to walk the perimeter of "their place", to learn which trees, rocks, streams, paths or deliberately erected stones marked its limits. To make sure they had learned their place, having received their instruction the hapless youths were rolled in brambles or nettles or were beaten by the adults.

This communal violence, however softened by ritual, would certainly link the idea of transgression with painful penalty. "So far and no further, or else!"

In time, the children were spared the rod and only the boundary marks themselves were walloped.

I shall be in France on 25 April, walking through the Vexin, and it would be wonderful to discover fields being blessed on that day, as they will be in our neighbouring parish of Great Glen.

Whether I see Rogation being observed or not, I shall cross hundreds of territorial boundaries while on my travels. Some of these will be signposted with the limited imagination of county councils, "Welcome to x, please drive carefully". Others will be marked with the tags of gangs and groups, like the lampost outside my vicarage front door, whose significance will be known to few. Boundaries are "edgy" and are still places of threatening behaviour, where it feels legitimate for the mildest middle-Englanders to proclaim "NO ENTRY", "PRIVATE", "KEEP OUT", "LARGE DOG", or, "YOU ARE ON CCTV!"

I shall be careful.