ROGATION PROCESSION AND MASS; TUESDAY 11th MAY

 ROGATION PROCESSION AND MASS

TUESDAY 11th MAY

Tuesday is the Rogation Day of the eve of the Ascension – a day when traditional parishes embark upon the Rogation Mass and procession, giving thanks to God for our many blessings, (in days past giving thanks for the harvest) and seeking God’s blessing and protection from illness and misfortune, (historically, for protection against plague and famine).

The history set out below of the Rogation processions is taken from Eamon Duffy, “The Stripping of the Altars, Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c. 1580.” (1), where he quotes George Herbert, writing in the 1630’s, as capturing the dimensions of the traditional Rogantide in the context of the “archetypal parish gatherings, the processions and especially the Rogantide processions”:

‘Particularly [the country Parson] loves procession, and maintains it, because there are contained therein four manifest advantages;

first, a blessing of God for the fruits of the field; secondly, justice in the preservation of bounds; thirdly, charity in loving walking and neighbourly accompanying one another, with reconciling of differences at that time, if there be any; fourthly, mercy in relieving the poor by a liberal distribution and largesse, which at that time is, or ought to be used. Wherefore he exacts of all to be present at the perambulation and those who withdraw and sever themselves he mislikes, and reproves as uncharitable and unneighbourly.’

In the processions, when the Parish boundary was reached, the priest, after singing the Gospel at the boundary, would say the ‘De Profundis’ with a Collect ‘for me and all Christian soules.” Professor Duffy observed that:

“The provision of a landmark in the form of a wooden or stone Cross at the ‘stational’ points on the boundaries where the Gospel was proclaimed was an even surer way of ensuring perpetual parochial recollection, for such landmarks, as in the case of ‘Perryes Crosse’ at Clare, were usually known by the name of the founder. John Cole, a Suffolk yeoman, left money to make a new Cross ‘according to Trapettes crosse at the Hamelanesende and set up at Short Groves end, where the Gospel is said upon Ascension Even’, and he assigned funds to [provide] ‘a drinkage upon Ascension Even everlasting for the Parish of Thelnetham to drinke at the Crosse aforenamed.” (2)

Professor Duffy illustrated the function of these procession as a “celebration of communal identity…[as] underlined in accounts of early Tudor perambulations by the prominence within them of the motif of eating and drinking. So in the 1520’s and 1530’s the men of Chilton and the inhabitants of Clare in Suffolk went in perambulation together each year to Chilton Street, ‘and there at a tree called Perryes Cross, at the end of that street, the vicar read a Gospel at the uttermost part of their bounds. And then they had there some ale or drinkings.’ A few miles away at Long Melford the processional year was more elaborate:

‘On Corpus Christi day they went….with the Blessed Sacrament about the Church green in copes, and I think also they went in procession on St Mark’s day about the said green with hand-bells ringing before them, as they did about the bounds of the town in Rogation Weeks, on the Monday one way; on the Tuesday another way, on the Wednesday another way, praying for rain or fair weather as the time required; having a drinking and a dinner there upon the Monday, being a fast day; and Tuesday being a fish day they had a breakfast with butter and cheese etc., at the Parsonage, and a drinking at Mr Clopton’s by Kentwell, at his manor of Lutons, near the ponds in the Park, where there was a little Chapel, I think of St Anne, for that was their longest perambulation.” (3)

It seems, however, that the collegiality, (as in, tribalism), sometimes overwhelmed the charity, as illustrated by Professor Duffy:

“Late medieval Rogantide processions, with handbells, banners and the parish cross, were designed to drive out of the community the evil spirits who created divisions between neighbours and sickness in man and beast. They were also designed to bring good weather and blessing and fertility to the fields. Structured round the singing of the Litany of the Saints, the processions set the earthly community of the parish within the eschatological community of Heaven in much the same way as did the ranks of the saints painted on the screens before which the parish assembled for Mass on Sundays.

But the Rogation processions were also rituals of demarcation, ‘beating the bounds’ of the community, defining its identity over and against that of neighbouring parishes, and symbolising its own unity in faith and charity. The sense of unity on such occasions was very strong. Processions from neighbouring parishes which happened to converge might come to blows, in part because they believed that the rival procession was driving its demons over the boundary into their parish. Those who absented themselves from such processions, and even from their lesser reflections before Mass each Sunday, were seen as bad neighbours.” (4)

(1) Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1992, at p. 136-137.

(2) Ibid., at p. 139.

(3) Ibid., at p. 137.

(4) Ibid., at p. 136.

Images: Liturgical Arts Journal: https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2019/05/what-are-rogation-days.htm

Below: A Rogation Day procession in Hungary 2017.