Folklife Quarterly FQ 40: Jan 2014 Folklife Quarterly, web version | Page 43

‘Folklife Traditions’

FQ 40, Jan 2014, p41 v

Ì Beating the Bounds Ì
Ï by Roy & Lesley Adkins Ð

‘Beating the Bounds’ by Roy & Lesley Adkins

Traditional ceremonies of beating the bounds occur here and
there across the country, but 200 years ago this was a necessary
element in the annual cycle of country life. For many centuries
farming was conducted on the open-field system, where land around
a village was communally owned and each farmer worked a collection
of scattered strips. Farm animals were penned by temporary fencing,
often formed by woven hurdles.

Even though individual farmers had been acquiring and enclosing
land from medieval times, the countryside was still very open at
the start of the 18th century. There were few accurate large-scale
maps, and boundaries between parishes that passed through such
open landscapes were not documente d. Instead, they were agreed
lines connecting landmarks such as distinctive trees and stones. It
was therefore crucial each year to retrace the boundaries and check
the boundary markers. The ceremonies took place in Rogation Week,
even in towns and cities, with various names such as processioning
or beating the bounds. Children were involved so as to acquaint them
with the boundaries from an early age.

One report (in the Book of Days for the month of May) mentioned
beating the bounds in central London in about 1800:
‘As the procession of churchwardens, parish officers, &c., followed by
a concourse of cads, were perambulating the parish of St George’s,
Hanover-square, they came to the part of a street where a nobleman’s coach was standing just across the boundary line. The carriage was empty, waiting
for the owner, who was in the opposite house. The principal churchwarden, therefore, himself a nobleman, desired the coachman to drive out of their
way. “I won’t!” said the sturdy coachman; “my lord told me to wait here, and here I’ll wait, till his lordship tells me to move!” The churchwarden coolly
opened the carriage door, entered it, passed out through the opposite door, and was followed by the whole procession, cads, sweeps, and scavengers.’

The diary of the Reverend James Woodforde has a detailed account of the ceremony in his own parish of Weston Longville near Norfolk in May 1780.
After describing the process, Woodforde commented: ‘Our bounds are supposed to be about 12 miles round. We were going of them full 5 hours. We
set off at 10 in the morning and got back a little after 3 in the afternoon ... Where there was no tree to mark, holes were made and stones cast in.’ (see
R.L. Winstanley [ed.] The Diary of James Woodforde (The first six Norfolk years 1776–1781), Volume 2 1778–1779, pp.38–9, published in 1984 by the
Parson Woodforde Society).
For practical reasons, the local clergyman kept a close watch on parish boundaries, because his livelihood depended on the parish tithes, either
collected by him in person or paid to him by a third party. Tithes were a ten percent tax on just about everything that was produced annually, from
a tenth of crops like wheat and barley down to a tenth of the eggs laid by each hen. This church tax was understandably resented, and the problems
of collecting tithes are a recurring theme in clergymen’s diaries. In December 1799 William Holland, vicar of Over Stowey in Somerset, tried to coax
a tribute out of one parishioner: ‘In strolling about the fields I fell in with old Ben Hunt, who was holding the plow with a boy to drive. Jubb along, cried
Ben, but when he saw me he with a stern voice ordered the boy to stop the oxen.’ After some polite enquiries about Ben’s health, Holland approached
the subject obliquely, and he recorded the conversation, complete with Somerset dialect, in his diary (held by the Somerset Archives and Local
Studies, ref. A\BTL2/1):
‘H. Do you know anything of the bounds of my parish this way?
B. No, never was processioning in all my life.
H. Well Ben, you never brought me the Tithe of the Apples.
n.b. Ben look’d sad at this & said nothing. At last:
B. Sartainly I will pay you.
H. Well, but is not it right? Should not this be, I would give you three times as much in distress.
B. Oh sure, very true, said Ben shaking his head.
H. Tithe is but an acknowledgement of the Providence of God over you & your affairs, a tribute offered in support of his worship to whom you owe
everything.
B. I will sartainly bring you the money some day this week.
H. Very well, and so we parted.’
The following Sunday, Ben Hunt paid Holland eighteen pence for the tithe of his apples!
A few years later, in October 1804, Holland noted a boundary problem in his diary (Somerset Archives and Local Studies, ref. A\BTL2/19):
‘I mounted my horse to ride up Quantock to see whether Mr Balch’s heroes were viewing the bounds of the manor, a kind of contest having risen
between Mr. Balch’s steward & Lord Egmont’s, & poor Ben Hunt’s cottage built on the waste was in jeopardy. However, Ben produced an old lease
from Madana Hay before it became Lord Egmont’s property, which set the matter clear on that head.’
Ben was lucky in having such a lease, since any buildings or fences constructed without permission on waste land, or across the parish boundary,
were demolished, something that also happened when open land was enclosed.

The enclosure by large landowners of the open fields gathered pace throughout the 18th century. Apart from the hardship to poor people and
small farmers that enclosure often caused, it also drastically changed the appearance of the countryside. The once open landscape was divided
up into small fields that were enclosed by hedges, walls and fences. Boundaries between the property of individual landowners and between
different parishes were now readily visible on the ground and were legally defined in the surveys and other documents relating to the
enclosures. By the mid-19th century, little open farmland was left and the ceremonies of beating the bounds, no longer essential for
the local economy, passed into the realms of tradition.

Roy and Lesley Adkins © 2014

Roy and Lesley Adkins are authors of several books on history and archaeology, including Jack Tar. Their latest book is Eavesdropping
on Jane Austen’s England. See www.adkinshistory.com