No Harvest, please. We're British.
And one of the greatest changes in England's history
September is the month of Harvest Festival. But when is it? Which Sunday is the right Sunday?
There isn’t one. That’s partly because it’s not an official festival. This is odd, since there is a Plough Monday in early January (the first Monday in Epiphany, actually). The day before, the plough might be lugged into the church for a blessing. The plough might have also been paraded around the village or the parish inviting the raising of funds to pay for a ‘plough light’ to hang in the church. Essentially, this is a candle which burns, petitioning God for a good harvest. Naturally, this was extinguished at the Reformation.
Never Heard of It
You’ve probably never heard of Plough Sunday or Monday. This is partly because we’re done with festivals by early January. It is also because we think that food comes from packets, fridges and supermarkets. Ploughing is just something Jeremy Clarkson does when being filmed for money. We shall return to this after we’ve considered another forgotten food-related festival: Lammas.
A contraction of ‘loaf-mass’, Lammas falls on 1st August. It is traditionally a day on which loaves of bread are made from the first fruits of the corn, and then consecrated at a mass. The Anglo-Saxons celebrated ‘hlafmaesse’, suggesting this was a festival that was already ancient in the late medieval period. (It probably also gave Tolkien the name for ‘lambas’ bread.)
Lammas was the date of some significant fairs in places like York and Exeter. The Exeter Lammas Fair lasted three days, continuing into the 19th century. But it wasn’t a church-related festival. There was all kinds of civic pageantry, including an immense stuffed white glove which held some significance that we are unable to discern.
Lammas, however, seems to have gone the way of Plough Monday, lost amongst all the other festivals, fairs and revels. Not far from Exeter, the Devonian village of Combe Martin had its own celebration, home to a church dedicated to St Peter Ad Vincula (Peter in chains) whose feast day falls on the same day. Let the good times roll.
St Peter Ad Vincula was the first of many saints’ days that dotted across the harvest season like the Assumption of The Blessed Virgin Mary (15th August), St Bartholomew (24th August), The Exaltation of the Holy Cross (13th September) and St Matthew (21st September).
Moreover, when there was a harvest to be brought it, it did not take place on one particular day that the community could reliably celebrate. The growing season has waxed and waned through the centuries. Harvest during the end of the Anglo-Saxon period was probably later since it was the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250AD). It might have been earlier during the Little Ice Age when winter fairs were held on the frozen Thames a few centuries later.
It’s early September as I write this within sight of a field at the end of my garden that already been harvested, spread with muck and harrowed. A winter crop is probably going to be planted.
The harvest is a moveable season, let alone one day that can be pinpointed – as if a harvest could be done in a day. For most of English history, the harvest took many people many days to cut, thresh, transport and stack. It was a communal event. Not anymore. Now, a farmer checks the weather and if it’s dry, one man on a combine harvester can clear a gigantic field, sorting the wheat from the chaff, in a matter of hours.
The Budding of the Harvest Festival
So where and how do we celebrate the Harvest and say thank you to God for his provision? The stage was set for the eccentric Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875), parish priest of Morwenstow in North Cornwall for 41 years. In 1843, he announced to his congregation that there would be a harvest celebration in late September. Clearly there was pent up demand for this kind of celebration for within ten years, churches all over England were following suit, adorning their naves and chancels with fruit, flowers, vegetables and all kinds of local produce.
Why this sudden desire to reconnect to the produce of the field? It might have something to do with the sudden urbanisation of the population in the 19th century. In 1801, only 17% of the population of England and Wales lived in cities. By 1891, it was 72%. One might call that a mass exodus of the countryside. It has to be one of the biggest changes in English history.
We talk about the industrial revolution in terms of mechanics, commerce and economics. But what about the dramatic social, demographic and cultural changes? Within a few generations, the vast majority left the land and moved to towns to live in tiny house without gardens to work in factories. All connection with nature was lost in those dark satanic mills.
Currently, that percentage living in towns or cities is even greater: about 84.6% in 2023. Is it any wonder, therefore, that we have such disordered thinking and policies about agriculture and food production?
Earlier this year, I wrote this article on how we protect TB-riddled badgers by law, costing thousands of cattle to be slaughtered and how we pay farmers not to farm, but allow wild flowers to grow in their fields. That’s where government policy has taken us. No harvest, please. We’re British. Does that seem wrong? It seems wrong.
No harvest, please. We’re British.
In that article, I quoted Psalm 104 which seems even more relevant during the harvest season:
He makes grass grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to cultivate—
bringing forth food from the earth:
wine that gladdens human hearts,
oil to make their faces shine,
and bread that sustains their hearts.
I’m not anti-mechanisation. Canning food is a truly brilliant way of preserving it for hard times, making starvation almost entirely a thing of the past - or at least an opportunistic decision by a totalitarian government, rather than agricultural crisis. Jesus was in favour of storing grains in barns. He was less keen on man being enamoured by his own genius and becoming complacent and self-reliant. We are to pray every day ‘give us this day our daily bread’. It seems right that we celebrate the harvest and thank God for his bounteous and delicious provision.
Or you could just sing along to this:
Why not share this with someone you think would enjoy a weekly instalment of our shared religious and spiritual life in England?
Oh, and I read lots of other blogs on the Substack platform using their app. It’s a hard recommend:
“The Exeter Lammas Fair lasted three days, continuing into the 19th century.” (I don’t know if this it’s possible to quote from the post so I have just put what I want to comment on inside quotation marks.)
So, did the Fair start on Tuesday, 30 December 1800, or Wednesday, 31 December 1800?
Or maybe you are one of those people who considers that the century ends on the year ending in 99. And that would mean that the dates are 100 years earlier than what I have quoted. But I haven’t found out what the days of the week were in those years.