I take the opportunity provided by the choice of "Processions and Festivals" as one of this Colloquium’s topics to examine the procession, largely in the context of Festival, under the auspices of a long-term project which has the aim of erasing artificial demarcations and identifying natural demarcations in the study of customary activities, and of devising a terminology appropriate to the picture that thus emerges.¹ The artificial demarcations are those which have been imposed, in the course of the modern development of academic disciplines, between Theatre, Pageantry and Folklore (i.e. folk customs). For me, the York Mystery Plays, the London Lord Mayor’s Show, a bridal procession, a village skimmington ride, a hock cart or a plough-trailing are all customary parades, or include parades in the course of something more elaborate: Only the cost differs. The natural demarcations to be identified are those between parades and other customary forms, and among parades in terms of simple, practical criteria such as the patterns of movement traced by the parade in relation to the local topographical and cultural landscape.

Recapitulating briefly, I have found it useful to distinguish between customs performed in the context of an assembly² of a single group such as the members of a household, an institution (e.g. a monastery or college), an association (e.g. a guild; a youth-group), a community or a sub-community, and those involving a conscious and deliberate encounter betwen two or more such groups.³ Among encounter customs it is useful to distinguish between various forms on the basis of the patterns of movement of the groups party to the encounter in relation to each other and in relation to the terrain. The obvious example, but a form on which I shall have little more to say, is the collision between two groups moving directly towards each other, for example as in Shrovetide inter-village football, in which men of adjacent villages go out to confront each other on their common boundary.⁴ The welcoming of a monarch to a city might also start with a collision if, as his train approaches, it meets that of the civic dignitaries riding out to greet him: but if they await him at a traditional location the encounter qualifies rather as an interception (see below).⁵

In encounter-patterns other than the collision (in which the intiative is shared by both groups, both of which are mobile) it is necessary to distinguish between an active group which initiates the customary encounter and a reactive group which somehow responds, as well as between a mobile group and a stationary group. These two distinctions do not necessarily coincide, however, giving us the following two permutations:

Two more significant encounter-categories are generated when the patterns of movement in parades and interceptions comprise movement towards and into a building, giving us:

This last is largely restricted to those moments on Queen Elizabeth's summer progresses when the royal train, as it approached the stately home of its next host, was accorded a ceremonial, spectacular and theatrical welcome by figures and pageants placed athwart its path. The topography and architecture of the noble estate and residence meant that the approach of visitors involved penetrating a series of concentric circles comprising the boundaries of the park, the inner and outer courtyards, and finally the threshold, one or more of which crossings could provide the setting for a formal reception, varying in complexity from a simple scenic display or a speech by a single character to a spectacular pageant deploying artificial structures, mechanical devices, and numerous performers. It is effectively therefore a series of interceptions in significant relation to a building, the last of which may occur within the building itself. (And I would distinguish this reception or ‘Welcome’ from - or within - the 'Entertainment' comprising the many shows put on during the monarch’s period of residence.)

The reverse form, the visit, is probably the most common encounter mode in recent folk traditions, in the form of house-visit customs like wassailing, souling, pace-egging, Thomassing, Catterning⁶ and (in some local traditions) the mummers’ plays.⁷ Its classic late-medieval form is the mumming, in which groups of masked men penetrate houses in order to gamble with dice with the householders.⁸ The customary house-visit encompasses a parade to the degree that the visitors consciously display themselves to the community at large on their way to a venue, or between venues. This was presumably the intention on those occasions when particularly splendid companies of mummers representing the London establishment rode through the city and its environs in an impressive cavalcade on their way to one of the royal palaces. In the most celebrated of these mummings, for the young Richard II at Kennington in 1377, a cavalcade of 130 men "disguizedly aparailed" (they included an emperor and a pope and their trains, and devils) rode "from Newgate through Cheape whear many people saw them with great noyse of minstralsye, trumpets, cornets and shawmes and great plenty of waxe torches lighted".⁹ Reversing the perspective, a custom involving parades between multiple visits might be considered a variant of the parade interrupted by performances at stations (touched on below), only with stations which are indoors and private rather than outdoors and public.

As an encounter-custom a parade therefore involves a mobile (active) group deliberately seeking an encounter with another (reactive) group, typically members of the community through whose territory the former proceed. As understood here a parade is a procession which seeks to be noticed or to have an effect, which says something (be it benevolent or malevolent), or does something (be it beneficent or maleficent), to the people it encounters on its route, and is undertaken to this end. A benchmark instance must be the custom, encountered in living Slavic tradition quite recently, in which a blood-stained shift or cloth is paraded around a village on a pole the morning after a wedding (substituted with a black cloth if the bride proved not to be a virgin).¹⁰ Or consider, at the opposite end of Europe and at the opposite chronological extreme, the 1295 Extent of the Manor of Dunnington, Yorkshire, which specifies that certain tenants "shall form a procession on Thursday in the week of Pentecost, and shall sing the following song: Gif i na thing for mi land, etc.": this may be, as has been suggested, a rogation ceremony, but if so it is one which makes an explicit statement - and in so doing probably achieves a renewal - of the terms under which the land within the community is held.¹¹

But allowance may have to be made, at least in theory, for ‘mere’ processions which have purposes other than making a statement, for example liturgical processions which are undertaken for devotional purposes and which communicate, if at all, with God or the saints, rather than by-standers. It is also possible to envisage civic processions involving almost every significant group in the community -- corporation, guilds, clergy, parishes -- which if they communicate anywhere, do so not so much outwards, to the insignificant residue of the community who may see them as they go by, as inwards, to and among the participants concerned, demonstrating say their unity and interdependence in undertaking this ceremonial act together, and/or their differences within this unity, since the order of procession was a clear and therefore sometimes contentious demonstration of the relative positions of groups within a community’s hierarchy.¹²

Probably most processions were parades (as understood here) to greater or lesser degree: these categories are designed to reveal the complexity of the reality rather than simplify it. To the extent that a Corpus Christi procession is an act of upward devotion and/or a demonstration of inward unity and hierarchy, it is merely a procession; to the extent it is designed to confer spiritual benefits on the populace encountered on its route, or to demonstrate the devotion, magnificance and unity of the participants to the rest of the community, or to teach the community about the host, or to inculcate a sense of devotion to the host in the spectators, then it is a parade. There will be variation between customs, between communities, and over time, and the distinction will therefore not be a central issue in what follows.

A good deal must be made, in contrast, of the distinction between a parade and an interception. It is a simple, empirical matter, but in reality there are many traditions combining the two aspects in various ways. Both involve a mobile group moving towards, past (perhaps with a brief halt) and away from a stationary group; the character of the hybrid depends on which group is active at which moment in the encounter, and this can sometimes, inevitably, be a matter of discussion. A straightforward illustration of the interception pure and simple is provided by those begging customs, of late largely confined to children, in which a group of friends or schoolfellows have constructed some kind of exhibition - say a guy or a garland - and sit with it by the roadside or on the pavement, demanding largesse ("a penny for the guy!") of the members of the adult community who pass by on other, workaday, business.¹³

Many interceptions, however, have a symbiotic, even parasitic, relationship with parades. For example a late-medieval or early-modern wedding invariably inolved a bridal procession to the church, accompanied by musicians, morris dancers, and customary symbols like gilded Rosemary and a bridal cup.¹⁴ But if the bride were rumoured among the local youth to be unchaste, they might intercept her with an insulting counter-demonstration, (for example a buck’s horn decorated with a wisp of hay and ‘a picture of a woman’s privities’), lying in wait on her route.¹⁵

Under more exalted auspices, procession and interception also coexist and interact in the late-medieval and Renaissance "Triumph" when a monarch enters a city for the first time in his reign (invariably on the occasion of his coronation in the case of capital cities; later, sometimes much later, in the case of provincial cities). To the extent the term has connotations of a monarch displaying himself by parading "in triumph" through a city (like the largely synonymous "Royal Entry") it is only partly appropriate.¹⁶ In the customary Renaissance pageantry to which the term now applies the element of interception is as significant as, or more significant than, parading. Perhaps there had always been an interceptive element, with civic dignitaries awaiting and greeting the monarch -- with speeches, gifts and ceremonies -- at significant boundaries (say at the limits of the city’s jurisdiction, or at its gate),¹⁷ but in the late-medieval and Renaissance periods these interceptions took on an increasingly spectacular, literary, even theatrical nature, with the monarch’s "Triumph" effectively a sustained series of shortish moves between lengthy stays at stations where elaborate shows were offered.¹⁸ And these would be supplemented by the cleaned and decorated streets and houses, and the populace drawn up in its best clothes (with guildsmen in livery) along the route offering shouts of joy and exclamations of loyalty.¹⁹

And of course the populace as a whole would also function as a third group in the encounter, witnessing the interception of the monarch by the official pageantry. It is legitimate to discuss who is performing for whom in such multiple encounters where one group intercepts another and a third looks on, ²⁰ but ultimately the primary 'audience' must be whoever it was who saw the whole performance, and in this configuration that can only be the monarch (and his train): unless they followed him, the citizens would have seen only what was performed at their station (the exact opposite of the mystery cycles which are not interceptions but station-to-station parades: the citizens get to see the whole show precisely by remaining at one station).²¹

These coronation "Triumphs" may be a special case, as there were also royal parades-proper in which the initiative remained with the monarch deliberately setting out (and riding in) to impress a community, as when after Agincourt Henry V led his prisoners through London, or when Henry VII paraded captured booty and battle standards through the capital after beating Richard III at Bosworth, or when Elizabeth rode through London in a chariot and wearing "robes of triumph" to commemorate her victory over the Armada in 1588.²² There were also royal entries when (for one reason or another) the element of welcome was so modest or muted that the aspect of parade might reassert itself in relation to the interception, as must have happened for example when in 1487 Queen Elizabeth (the wife of Henry VII) moved through a London whose buildings were decorated with tapestries and whose streets were lined with singing children dressed as virgins and angels, but which was otherwise devoid of pageantry.²³ In distant Livonia, when the Master of the Livonian branch of the Teutonic order visited major cities in his dominions, he paraded into and through the town, greeted on his way by guild representatives in armour and an excited populace, but there seems to have been no intercepting pageantry to compete with his parade (a calvacade numbering several hundred officials and armed men).²⁴ The parade will also momentarily dominate the interception on those rather refreshing occasions when a stationary pageant was indeed set up, but the royal personnage did not stop to see and hear it (like Edward VI in London in 1547).²⁵

In 1578, in what may not have been a unique occurrence, Norwich also intercepted Queen Elizabeth with pageants (expressing regret) as she left the city, as well as when she entered it.²⁶ For all the magnificence and erudition, however, the dramaturgy of the royal Triumph is a relatively simple hybrid of a parade interrupted by a series of interceptions.

There is a much more complex relationship between parade and interception in the annual shows accompanying the inauguration of a Lord Mayor of London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.²⁷ The two are combined in the sense that the mayor, who is processing in state between the venues for the day's ceremonies and celebrations, encounters, across his path, elaborate pageants produced and financed by his guild. Many of these however are mobile, and after the mayor has seen them move into line ahead of him (a single item carried by as many as 88 porters),²⁸ his train steadily lengthening into an ever more spectacular procession. But even without these Elizabethan and Jacobean additions it was already an elaborate, demonstrative parade, in 1553, as observed by diarist Henry Machyn, comprising (independently of a pageant of St John the Baptist "with speeches"): giants carrying the banners of the Mayor’s livery company, musicians, woodmen (functioning as whifflers, with clubs and fireworks), 16 trumpeters, 70 armed men, a devil, members of the Mayor’s company in livery, the King’s trumpeters, the city waits, and diverse officers, as well as aldermen and sheriffs.²⁹

The changing balance between the aspects of parade and interception over time may be reflected in the addressees of the speeches of the pageants: when guild documents first record the speeches of a pageant (in 1561) they are addressed from the parade to the Londoners,³⁰ but by at least the time of George Peele’s mayoral pageant of 1585, the speeches are addressed from the evidently stationary pageant to the mayor (even though the title of the published account retains the emphasis on the parade: The Device of the Pageant borne before Woolstone Dixi.³¹)

Emphasis on the interpretation of the intercepting pageants (a tradition inaugurated by the poets who devised them) has obscured the impact of the parade itself, including the circumstance (which the poets clearly preferred to ignore) that after the pageants had joined the parade the persons on them, as an observer noted in 1617, threw "sundry confections, sugar, nutmegs, dates and ginger ... among the populace". This may also explain why the parade had to make such an effort to force its way through the crowds, the exertions of the city Marshall seconded by "men masked as wild giants who by means of fireballs and wheels hurled sparks in the faces of the mob and over their persons".³²

And while it is right to appreciate the sophistication of the poets devising the speeches and symbolism of the pageantry, we should also be alert to their more vernacular, theatrical skills in devising different permutations of parade and interception as they (or whoever it was) planned the encounters between the mayor, the pageants, and the populace. For example Dekker's Troia-Noua Triumphans of 1612 (for the Merchant Taylors) has the new mayor (Sir John Swinnerton) intercepted at separate stations on his way from the river to the Guildhall by pageants representing a ship, the Throne of Virtue, the Castle of Envy, and the House of Fame, all with supernumerary figures too numerous to mention. Each pageant joins the head of the parade after its encounter with the mayor, with the exception of the Castle of Envy, through which a passage is forced only with allegorical difficulty. It is therefore still in place when he makes his way (accompanied by all the other pageants) to St Paul's. A second encounter ensues, the allegory is concluded, and the Castle of Envy can now join the parade. Finally in the evening all four pageants accompany the mayor to his house, where he has to face a final encounter, this time with the figure of Justice, who addresses a speech to him from a nearby (apparently stationary) scaffold.³³ In a variant procedure deployed by Anthony Munday in 1616 three pageants intercept the mayor in turn at different stations on one of his passages through the city, then congregate in Cheapside to waylay him collectively on the next.³⁴

For the potential significance of the distinction between interception and parade in the study of medieval theatre as conventionally conceived we may turn first to the town of Senlis in northern France. Here, late at night on Corpus Christi Day, 1530, a 20 year old barber, Guillaume Caranda, was mockingly asked if he had had an erection while impersonating Christ in an enactment of the Passion in the course of the day’s ceremonies. Both parties were probably unaware of the theological and iconographic respectability of the notion,³⁵ so the ensuing fracas was violent and ultimately mortal, leaving the young actor to explain himself and the circumstances in an account which reappears in one of those royal pardon-letters which are such a mine of detailed information on late-medieval and early-modern French life and mores. This is what Caranda says about the performance and its auspices:

There are clearly two activities involved here: a presumably official Corpus Christi procession through the town which is intercepted by this stationary pageant or play (and perhaps others of the same kind along the route), evidently performed by local laypeople, and manifestly to honour the procession and the host as they went past. This is not "processional" theatre: the "playing and representing" occur in the context of an interception, performed by the interceptors, effectively the opposite of the English station-to-station mystery cycles, in which the mobile play is brought to a stationary audience.³⁷

These interception-auspices at Senlis provide a useful confirmation of the otherwise rather eccentric-looking staging of the better-known tradition at nearby Lille. Here too (only more explicitly) we have an official procession, if now on the Sunday following Corpus Christi, and instead of the Host its central feature is a reliquary containing the hair and milk of the Blessed Virgin Mary, accompanied by representatives of most of the civic and religious institutions of the town. Concurrently the town arranged a dramatic competition under the control of a Bishop of Fools, whose surviving Proclamation of 1463 announces that prizes will be awarded for the best plays presented by those who:

The "Carts, wagons, wains or portable scaffolds" were not however to ennable the plays to form part of the procession, for in passage elided above the Proclamation is quite specific with regard to performance arrangements, each play to be performed:

which I would render as:

Alan Knight’s persistent use of the term "Processional Theatre" in connection with the Lille Plays³⁹ should therefore be taken in this rather special sense: it was the audience, rather than the play, that was processing. He does mention one group being rewarded "for miming the Passion on a wagon that preceded the shrine of the Virgin in the procession", but this evidently refers to the quite distinct guild pageants which, as Alan Knight’s paper here indicates, were indeed part of the procession. Alexandra F. Johnston’s assertion that "The records confirm that the plays were written to embellish the procession and that the plays were normally done in procession", presumably therefore confuses the two features.⁴⁰

With regard to the Lille plays themselves, at least in their morning, mimed performance, as at Senlis, the performance auspices are not a parade but an interception of a parade, involving "pageant wagons set up along the route of march, on which biblical and other historical scenes were mimed as the procession passed".⁴¹ In this encounter the procession essentially constitutes the reactive group, and its participants constitute the primary audience of the performance: while others undoubtedly looked on at any one station, as in the case of the royal entry pageants only those in the parade itself will see all the show. This would again be the exact reverse of a station-to-station English mystery cycle performance. While the wagons in both cases are stationary during the performance of a given play, the distinction between a stationary acting space and one that the audience can see approaching (and departing) and as one of a sequence will have implications for the nature of the performance:

This cannot be said, in this way, of Senlis and Lille, nor could their interception auspices produce the effect claimed for York, where the approach to a given station of the Skinner’s pageant of Jesus’ Entry into Jerusalem would effectively be part of the enactment that entry.⁴³

ooo

Having glanced at relations between parades and other customary forms I turn to variant forms - the morphology - of the parade itself. Many criteria for a typology are feasible, most obviously function and content (i.e. the person or object "paraded"), but since parades are distinguished from other customary activities essentially by the deliberate, collective movement of the participants, the essential morphological factor in the analysis of parades must be precisely the quality of that movement.⁴⁴ And movement has of course two essential qualities: speed and direction. The first of these permits us to distinguish between continuous parades which maintain a more or less constant movement throughout, and those whose progress is interrupted by halts for some additional activity (i.e. an autonomous halt to the parade rather than one prompted by an interception). While these halts can be at fairly arbitrary intervals,⁴⁵ they usually occur at designated stations especially qualified for this focus, and thus contribute to determining the direction of the movement, the pattern traced on the ground by the parade, which therefore emerges as the primary (and etymologically appropriate) criterion for a morphology. And of such patterns there are in turn basically only two kinds, the linear and the circular: A linear parade starts at point A and ends at point B; a circular parade starts at point A and, in due course, returns there.

In having a destination distinct from its point of departure, the linear parade has a built-in reservation as to its customary status and therefore its identity as a parade, since getting from point A to B may to a degree be an end in itself, as well as a means of ennabling encounters along the way. Inevitably, in historical reality, there will have been a spectrum of movements depending on the relative significance of the utilitarian and the customary elements in the movement: i.e. to what degree would it matter if the movement occurred through empty streets observed by no-one?

At one extreme we may imagine a group of people, say a nobleman and his train, moving through a city on horseback on their way from his residence to some other location in the city, or out of town. Diarist Henry Machyn, the inveterate Tudor observer of the sights of London streets, regularly noted the purposeful but demonstrative cavalcades of nobility and members of the royal family, for example in 1551 Lady (i.e. Princess) Mary left Westminster (with knights, gentlemen and ladies) on 15 March, and returned on 17 March; the Earl of Derby and his retinue rode through town on 31 March, the Earl of Shrewsbury on 5 June. On 6 July he saw Edward VI and his retinue, with trumpets playing.⁴⁶ The purpose of the cavalcade is to achieve this move from one place to another, but it would be entirely in keeping with the public and demonstrative nature of late-medieval life⁴⁷ that it should make something of a show and a clatter in so doing, displaying the magnificance of the grandee concerned.

The demonstrative element is greater in ceremonial movements like a christening or bridal procession or a funeral cortege which are a necessary means of getting from house to church but which are also a customary occasion for advertizing a household event (and displaying a household’s wealth and status) to the community at large.⁴⁸ Indeed in early-modern Germany a wedding was popularly referred to as "going to church and street", and proof of a marriage’s legitimacy could be furnished by eye-witness accounts of the procession, as well as appeal to the documentary, ecclesiastical record.⁴⁹

The relative significance of the utilitarian (getting from A to B) and parade (achieving encounter) elements may also be registered in the route, in the sense that the more utilitarian the move the more likely it will be to adopt the easiest (shortest; quickest) route from A to B, and the more the move is designed to achieve encounters the more likely it is to follow a roundabout route, taking it, say, to venues where people congregate. Thus carnival processions of German guilds in the Livonian towns in the later Middle Ages chose a demonstrably circuitous route to take them past important buildings and through prestigious quarters of the town.⁵⁰ We might correspondingly ask of the Hock Cart parade celebrating the completion of the harvest and conveying the last load from the field to the farmhouse, whether it takes a direct route (as all the other cartloads will doubtless have done), or whether it goes through the village to demonstrate the achievement of the harvesters. A 1598 account by a German visitor to England certainly indicates a determination on the part of the parade to get itself noticed:

Similarly skimmington rides, while heading for the house of the scold or the cuckolded husband to make a direct demonstration of disapproval (in what qualifies as a customary visit) might also (as parades) take a route through the community to advertize these sentiments (and the upcoming fun) to the rest of the community (and potential participants). In a relatively recent incident, an elaborate and strikingly virulent "Hussitting" or "Tincanning" from Berkshire in 1930, provoked by the failure of the authorities to protect a battered wife from her violent husband, a parade of effigies on their way to a climactic bonfire turned off for a burst of rough music at the homes of the perpetrator and members of his family considered accessories in the offence.⁵²

By this logic the purest form of parade must be the least utilitarian, i.e. the circular parade which literally gets nowhere by returning to its point of departure: for example those Palm Sunday or Corpus Christi processsions which, starting from the church, circle the churchyard, or the church green, or the parish, and return.⁵³ The church can also be the focal point for more worldly parades, like the gatherings by which money is collected for good purposes within the parish, and which involve the parading through the community of groups of dancers, often with figures or objects such as a hobby horse, Robin Hood, or a ceremonial plough (this last often, symbolically, kept in the church between outings).⁵⁴ The celebrated Horn Dance of Abbots Bromley likewise describes a circle beginning and ending at the church, where the horns are kept (although historically the hobby horse may be the more definitive item in the company)⁵⁵

ooo

Of course these purely geometrical distinctions are inadequate in isolation, as the terrain across which parades moved was not a desert but a cultural landscape which already had its patterns, and with which the shapes traced by the parades will have had significant interactions.⁵⁶ Most obviously, circular parades both beginning and ending at a particular location are a function and demonstration of the latter’s role in relation to the area circumscribed by the former.⁵⁷ Correspondingly a parade from point A to point B can reflect or express (or create or perpetuate) an aspect of their relationship.⁵⁸ In a very recent and fascinating close analysis of the medieval cultural geography or "symbolic cartography" of a small French town Marcia Kupfer notes that the relationships between its collegiate church and subordinate charitable institutions were written on the landscape by "annual liturgical processions through which the chapter literally circumscribed its satellite possessions". (Except that the processions were more linear than "circumscribed" implies, separate parades at different dates bringing the canons from their church to the institutions concerned, where they banqueted at the latters’ expense).⁵⁹ Medieval Pentecostal processions, in some regions in the form of processional dances, moved in the opposite direction, from cultural periphery to centre, bringing laiety from country parishes to their mother church, typically a cathedral.⁶⁰ Parades could also signify a more material link, as when representatives of a community went in procession to a water source to reassert or perpetuate rights of access: the parading of the Shaftsbury Byzant or "Besom", a substantial decorated garland, once had this function, securing the town's access to wells at Enmore Green, in a parish outside its jurisdiction.⁶¹

Furthermore, in addition to the points of departure and arrival, the route a parade takes between them can also be determined by the local cultural geography.⁶² As Lawrence Manley observes, "In their processions and activities during [the] annual ceremonial cycle, the leaders of London literally followed in the 'steps of their forefathers', tracing out in a series of processions a highly ordered ritual space", instancing the Midsummer Marching Watch, whose traditional route was revealed by the Elizabethan antiquarian John Stow to encompasses locations which had a vital role in twelfth-century procedures for getting the city into a defence posture.⁶³ Some rogation processions were not a border-perambulation or "beating the bounds" but drew lines between all the churches within a given city,⁶⁴ and in 1450 the ecclesiastcal authorities in Verona determined that the Corpus Christ procession should start from the cathedral, link all seven parish churches, and return to the cathedral.⁶⁵

In some instances the significance of these locations is such that the parade actually halts for some particular business, and they take on the status of stations, whose identity may reveal much about the custom concerned. The tendency of sword dancers or plough trailers to halt outside the residences of local gentry for a performance may be a symptom of social deference or of financial calculation, and most likely a mixture of both. In what must be one of the most disillusioning studies of the mystery cycles Meg Twycross has demonstrated that the York stations were largely determined not by a kind of spiritual geography making some places (e.g. adjacent to churches) particularly appropriate for performance, but by a wheeling and dealing worthy of a Philip Henslowe that brought the prestige and profit associated with performance to the doorsteps of those who could pay for them.⁶⁶

Of particular interest are the relationships between the routes of parades and those lines already inscribed on the terrain by social and cultural boundaries: We may take as the simplest but most fundamental case, the boundary which separated one (sub-)community from another or a given settlement from the terrain, cultivated and wild, outside it.⁶⁷ The permutations of relationships between parade-routes and communal boundaries encompass, mathematically speaking:

1. perambulations

-- in which the parade "goes around" following the boundary

2. excursions

-- involving an outward crossing of the boundary (by denizens)

3. incursions

-- involving an inward crossing of the boundary (by aliens).

Two more permutations can be added by considering not merely the movement of the parade but the destination of the item (person or object) which is paraded:

4. fetchings

-- when something from outside is paraded into the community

5. expulsions

-- when something from within is paraded out of the community.

The obvious instance of a perambulation is the variety of the rogation procession in which the parish clergyman, accompanied by parishioners, parades around the parochial boundary, pausing at traditional stations to read from the Gospel and perhaps undertake other ceremonies. Partly designed to bring spiritual benefits to the entire community, the custom is also a demonstration of where the boundary lies (a beating of the bounds), with a view to warding off encroachments by neighbouring communities.⁶⁸ In Catholic Germany and probably elsewhere, beating the bounds could also involve parading the host to hallow its defining landmarks: trees, mills, crosses, bridges.⁶⁹ Perhaps the radical Elizabethan Bishop Grindal had this in mind when he insisted that the rogation which persisted after the Reformation was "not a procession, but a perambulation".⁷⁰ It has been said of medieval France that parades, including penitential processions, occurred in significant relationship to (both reflecting and defining) the "religious geography" of towns which also encompassed boundaries:

And some parades, whatever their ostensible purposes, had a quasi-archaeological status, in the sense that through force of tradition their routes continued to trace once-significant but now defunct boundaries.⁷²

Rather than following the boundary, excursions are designed to bring the participants up to a boundary and across it and into a new segment of the cultural landscape, say for some activity for which the latter is felt more appropriate. For example one of earliest records of customary carnival activity in Europe describes how, in the twelfth century, on the Sunday before Lent, the Pope would go in procession, accompanied by the Prefect of Rome and mounted knights, from the Lateran to the Testaccio Hill, where there would be traditional combats involving the slaying of a bear, bullocks, and a cock.⁷³ The Testaccio Hill was physically within the walls of medieval Rome, but in terms of the city’s cultural landscape was outside the built up area along the Tiber, and was a place of symbolic significance, reputedly the place to which nations subject to the Roman Empire brought their tribute.⁷⁴

The St George ridings at Norwich similarly involved a processional excursion, with the parade of St George, the Dragon, Lady Margaret, numerous guild banners and members of the St George Guild making its way to St William’s Wood, where, it may be conjectured, a combat took place, a guild ordinance of 1471 specifying that "... the George shall go in procession and make conflict with the dragon".⁷⁵ This would appropriately re-enact in the topographical sphere as well the St George legend in which a Libyan city was being terrorized by a dragon living in a pond outside the gates: St George defeated him there then brought him back into the city to be killed. In what may be a muddled derivative, conglomerated with Maying features, the celebrated and rather dragonish "Hoss" still paraded through Padstow in Cornwall on May Day, was (as reported in the nineteenth century) first led out of the town and made to "drink" from a pond, before being led triumphantly back into town (accompanied by a song which explicitly asks, "Where is St George?".⁷⁶) Medieval France had night-time excursions on Ash Wednesday with candles and torches to rid the fields and orchards of evil influences, while mid-Lent Sunday saw festive processions to bless the wells and springs, the day sometimes known as dimanche des Fontaines.⁷⁷

The reverse pattern, the incursion of outsiders into the community (thus involving an incoming transgression of its boundary) has already been illustrated in passing in the form of the Royal Entry (or Triumph), if with the proviso that the more spectacular features of such occasions were more often interceptions of the royal parade by the community upon which it intruded. The basic pattern will have been clearer in the Palm Sunday processions not merely commemorating but re-enacting the entry of Christ into Jerusalem (upon which the Royal Entry is sometimes consciously modelled),⁷⁸ i.e. with relics or the sacrament unobrusively taken out of town by the clergy then ostentatiously paraded back to the church. Some informative late-medieval Polish instances have recently been examined by Jolanta Szpilewska in a study which displays exemplary alertness to the topographical (and architectual) context of the Easter offices.⁷⁹ Even in such processions however the situation could be complicated by an interception, for example at Hereford in the fourteenth century the incoming Palm Sunday procession was greeted from the top of the city gate by boys singing.⁸⁰ And of course this is only a "virtual" incursion since the participants were from the community and had first to go out before they could parade in. The true cultural reverse of a community excursion into the countryside is of course the incursion of that countryside into the community. Outside the fictional worlds of Ovid and Tolkien this is hardly feasible, but this may haven been somewhat how it felt when lepers, who had been redefined as other than human (i.e. dead) and literally expelled beyond the pale of the community, exercsied a customary right (in some places on the second Monday in January) to parade through it (to seek alms).⁸¹

That the notion of the incursion of the wild had a powerful hold on medieval and traditional communities is indicated by the wide distribution and long persistence of winter customs like the Perchtenlauf and its variants in which figures representing denizens of the wilderness -- witches or wild men of the wood in various sub-species -- penetrated the community and its homes indulging in both physical violence and sexual harrassment against the population, sometimes linked to beliefs about the Wild Hunt.⁸² These too of course are "virtual" incursions to the extent that the intruders are of the community, or "mimetic" incursions in that the performers merely represent alien figures, but there are very occasional hints of such customs involving a genuine incursion, for example on the part of shepherds who live most of the year outside the community and who in many cases, even when resident, are kept at a social and cultural distance.⁸³ And of course when the "gatherers" of one English parish in the course of their money-collecting excursions to other communities enter another parish, from its perspective they represent a genuine incursion, mimetically enhanced if, as often, the performers represent forest figures such as Robin Hood and his outlaws (and behave with corresponding aggressiveness).⁸⁴

But if such aggressive incursions reflect a fear of the countryside in its wild and threatening aspects, there are other customs which are symptomatic of a more constructive relationship between community and the natural environment, and in which a usually celebratory parade effects a transportation of something from outside to within the boundaries. In one of his watershed studies of the local, including the customary, culture of Coventry, Charles Phythian-Adams notes no less than five seasonal customs involving the fetching of greenery from the countryside outside the city to decorate its churches or houses: at Christmas (holly and ivy), on Palm Sunday, on May Day, Misummer Eve and St Peter’s Eve (leafy boughs).⁸⁵ At Aldbrough, Yorkshire, in 1596 nine men were presented before the Church Court because:

This "mawmet" may have been related to the garlands which were brought into church on May Day, or perhaps the "towers and garlands and other formes of thinges covered with flowers" complained of (when brought into a rural chapel) in connection with a rushbearing in Cawthorn, Yorkshire, in 1596.⁸⁷ Both Maying and rushbearing might include parading garlands to the church, but these will only qualify for inclusion here if they were constructed in the countryside and so paraded across the community boundary.

It may indeed be possible to establish a topographical gradation of customs involving the "wildness" of the zone from which material is fetched.⁸⁸ Thus a hock-cart will bring the last load of corn from the cultivated arable fields, or hay from the (uncultivated but managed) meadows. Aubrey describes the procession towards the end of the seventeenth century, with a fiddler atop the load of corn, and somewhat earlier Robert Herrick supplies a celebrated and enthusiastic account in "The Hock Cart".⁸⁹ In the familiar Maying, parties of mainly young people bring back foliage to decorate houses or to build summer bowers for subsequent summer games, as a puritan observer complained in 1577:

But before the puritans took over communities officially supported the practice:

It survives, almost uniquely, as a feature of the "Furry Day" festivities at Helston in Cornwall, a preliminary to the more celebrated processional dance, with groups of youths going out into the country early on the morning of May 8 to gather flowers and greenery, and returning waving the boughs in their hands and rousing residents with the Furry song:

"Maying" is described in detail if with a classicising tendency in Robert Herrick's seventeenth-century "Corinna’s Going a Maying", where the specific reference to bringing back White-thorn (l. 46) is a useful reminder that the custom is defined and named after the blossom rather than the month,⁹³ and since the "-ing" suffix in custom-designations almost always implies movement, the term almost defines the customs as a fetching of greenery from the countryside, where whitethorn is a feature of hedgerows and scrubland.

The maypole sometimes figuring in this tradition would come from deeper in the woods, and feature in a parade made familiar from the frenzied condemnation of Philip Stubbes:

From the marshes would come the rushes ceremonially paraded in rushcarts later in the summer to strew on the floor of the church,⁹⁵ and in the autumn, at least in Cornwall, townspeople would also go into the woods to gather nuts, and parade home in the evening, "with boughs of hazel in their hands, shouting and making a great noise",⁹⁶

While the Palm Sunday parades bringing a symbol of Christ into the city are in some ways (as we saw above) incursions, in other ways they are a kind of ecclesiastical Maying, an excursion to fetch foliage (i.e. representing palms) from the countryside. In northern French towns

The analogy with Maying is particularly clear where the traditions have survived beyond the Reformation, bereft of their liturgical associations, as "Palming"; processions from the countryside into the community bearing willow or hazel branches.⁹⁸

The link and contrast between community and wilderness through customary parades is reflected in a charming medieval legend of the chilhood of Jesus. On one such day (presumably) He had gone into the woods to play and fetch green branches with His playfellows, including the son of the Emperor, but the others were all slain by wild beasts. The Emperor has the bodies loaded onto a cart for transport back to the city, but on the way Jesus restores them to life, and what the waiting townspeople see approaching from the woods is:

Nor are these customary fetchings restricted to the flora of the world outside the community. In a tradition with an unusually well-documented medieval ancestry, villagers in rural England and Ireland within living memory have on St Stephen's Day (26 December) gone out "Hunting the Wren", and brought the body (suspended in a ribbon-trimmed bush, or a garland, or a cross of sticks) back into the village in a colourful and noisy parade.¹⁰⁰ The prey is more often represented by a masked and costumed figure, but what he represents can be a denizen of the deepest wilderness, the antithesis of the community and its culture. A good example is provided by the carnival bear-figures of the Pyrenees, which among much regional and local variation are "hunted" in the woods, paraded into the community, and then go about its streets both provoking mischief (girls are at particular risk) and collecting money.¹⁰¹

Elsewhere in Europe the figure hunted and brought back into the village is the legendary denizen of the forest, the wild man.¹⁰² Unexpectedly, recent English tradition does have an analogue in the form of the grotesquely masked and straw-stuffed figure who under the name of "the Earl of Rone" is hunted in a wood (Lady’s Wood) near Combmartin in Devon, and when captured paraded into town sitting on a Donkey with his face towards the tail, accompanied by a Fool and a hobby-horse.¹⁰³

The temptation to see much of this as somehow bringing in ‘nature’ to renew ‘culture’ in accordance with the exploded notion of folklore as the survival of primitive cult should probably be resisted, but there are instances where there is an explicit interaction between nature and culture, for example the parade of a naked young girl concluding a high medieval rain-making ceremony which clearly disturbed Burchard of Worms in 1010:

It is a pretty picture, but of course a drought, and so a ceremony to end drought, was a serious business in a subsistence economy. Similarly one of the most picturesque of English seasonal observances, already an "antient custome" observed "tyme out of mind" when first recorded in 1603, in which inhabitants of Wishford Magna, Wiltshire, parade from nearby Grovely Forest carrying green boughs, and representatives carrying oak-sprigs dance into Salisbury Cathedral, ensured the continuance of rights, much and bitterly disputed, to woodland resources.¹⁰⁵

These "fetchings" of flora and fauna from outside the community are matched, predictably, by parades taking something across the boundary in the opposite direction, usually with the function of an expulsion, i.e. of something considered undesirable within the boundaries of the community. As as might be expected, the more aggressive varieties of the charivary involve not merely the public shaming, but the physical expulsion, of those who have offended against traditional community mores in the sexual or domestic field. For example in a variant of the most colourful of English charivaries, the "Stag Hunt" of the West Country, reserved for more serious offenders against traditional morality, appropriately-guised "huntsmen" and "hounds" danced and howled around the victim's house before dragging him out and pursuing him through the neighbourhood, perhaps throwing him into a pond when he was exhausted and caught.¹⁰⁶ At times of social stress and unrest such expulsions can be extended into the political sphere. For example during the Swing Riots of the agricultural labourers in Sussex in 1830 a beribboned crowd assembled with rough music at the home of an unpopular Workhouse Governor, dragged him out, and paraded him out of the village (Brede) in a handcart with a rope round his neck and a stone tied to the end, accompanied by a (dis)honour guard of men with staves.¹⁰⁷ Whatever the case with individual customs, the general form is much older, with the Romans, in Republican times, observing a custom on 14 March in which a man clad in furs was beaten with rods and driven beyond the bounds of the city.¹⁰⁸

A particularly widespread and vigorous set of customs in Europe, generally performed at Carnival time or (perhaps more often) at mid-Lent involve the mistreatment and parading out of the community of an effigy, a dummy made of straw, taken to respresent, depending on locality, Winter or Death. Sometimes the figure is destroyed (burnt) rather than expelled, but the two can be combined, or the expulsion underlined by casting the remains of the figure into a river.¹⁰⁹ That the custom was taken seriously, and that boundaries were significant in its observance, is manifested in incidents when inhabitants of one community forcibly resisted the expulsion of death from a neighbouring community into their territory.¹¹⁰

Otherwise the boundary was seen as that between settlement and countryside: an unusually clear account from as early as 1289 describes the parading of a straw figure out of the gate of a city in Thuringia (Germany) and to what in German is known as the Flurgrenze (the edge of the fields; where it was "drowned").¹¹¹ Thomas Kirchmeyer’s highly informative Reformation invective of 1553, Regnum Papisticum, against German traditional customs notes three other calendar customs involving the symbolic parading of people or effigies into a pond or river - of Carnival, of spinsters (harnessed to a plough), and of St Urban (if the weather was bad on his day) - as well as of Death.¹¹²

In some places where the figure was taken to represent Winter, there was a parallel parade in the opposite direction, "fetching" summer (inevitably represented by green boughs and/or blossoms) into the village. This might be performed by the participants in the expulsion, who return waving branches, or by another group.¹¹³ An early version of the song performed on such an occasion survives only as a Reformation parody, but shorn of its obvious adaptions (winter is "Antichrist"; the flowers of spring are "the word of God"), the song clearly indicates the two movements:

ooo

In distinguishing among parades, and between parades and other forms, in terms of patterns of movement, this "morphology" focusses attention on a practical, dramaturgical aspect of processions, often neglected in favour of the more respectable literary business of discerning function and interpreting symbolism.¹¹⁵ But identifying the patterns of movement in a procesion is as important a preliminary to all the rest as determining if a given Jacobean play was designed for performance in an indoor private theatre or an outdoor public one.

In examining the movement of parades in relation to the existing cultural landscape this study enhances their historical significance as documentation of relationships not merely between the parade and those it encounters, but between the parade and the terrain over which it passes: a parade inscribes lines on the landscape, along and across its existing boundaries and between its sections and institutions, and those lines form statements just as much as does the symbolism of whatever is paraded.

In juxtaposing processional theatre and "official" pageantry with folk custom this study invites contemplation of their relationships from a new perspective. It is quite possible that some "folk" forms preserve the origins, and others, conversely, are the "survivals", of civic or royal street theatre or pageantry. But more importantly, at any given moment in the late-medieval or Renaissance periods, most of the traditions surveyed above, and many more, existed alongside each other in the calendar of customary activities of a given community, and will have been subject, in production or in the reception of performance, to whatever is the equivalent in customary activities of intertextuality in literature. In addition to evoking connotations of Christ's Entry Into Jerusalem, councils choreographing a royal Triumph must sometimes have sought to incorporate the spirit of renewal of a Maying or rushgathering; humbler citizens might well have seen the incursion of the royal train more in terms of a riding of the Wild Hunt or a rout of woodwoses come to molest their womenfolk and raid their beer-cellars.

ooo