People
Few old customs connect a village to its distant past as directly as beating the bounds. The practice has roots that reach back before Christianity, when communities in springtime asked for blessings on their growing crops and prayed for a good harvest. The Church took over the tradition and gave it a new meaning, and by the early eighth century it had become established across England. Here in Leigh, it seems likely that the ceremony was already in place by 1215, the year in which the first recorded vicar of the parish appears.
The idea was simple: the whole village would walk together along the parish boundary, usually on Rogation Sunday, which falls five weeks after Easter and a week before Ascension. Writing in 1652, George Herbert set out the purposes of the walk. The first was to bless the fields; the second was justice, so that everyone knew exactly where the boundary legally ran; the third was charity, in the shape of forgiving neighbours; and the fourth was mercie, meaning money given to the poor.
Boys taking part sometimes carried wands of white willow or elm, and with them they would literally beat the boundary markers, which were typically large stones or distinctive trees. Willow wands were also occasionally used on the choirboys themselves, who were expected to learn the more disputed stretches of the parish line. Hymns were often sung along the way, and there was a rougher side to the fun too: church officials could find themselves thrown into the river at the boundary, and new clergymen sometimes did eccentric things to earn their acceptance.
Memories of the custom survive in Leigh. Francis Hamlyn, whose farm straddles the Leigh–Weald boundary, recalled marching that line with hymn singing. Doreen Brooker remembered Fred Whibley, believed to have been the Parish Clerk, walking the bounds, probably in the middle of the last century. Harry Lucas recalled his grandfather describing how the men of the village walked the boundary around the beginning of the twentieth century; women did not take part in those walks.