NEWS
On Saturday September 6th an audience of more than 50 people attended Dr Barry Darch’s fascinating talk on the Rede family of Beccles and Barsham and enjoyed a magnificent ‘Barsham tea’ afterwards. The PCC is most grateful to Barry for preparing and delivering this talk as part of the fundraising effort for making safe the dilapidated Rede tomb in the churchyard (photo). Special thanks as well to everyone who prepared the teatime delights and helped to serve and clear up afterwards. We also thank our visitors, whose kind donations raised £301.00.
Work has been undertaken to clear the entrance to the Rede tomb so that the church architect, Ruth Blackman, can assess the integrity of the structure during her Quinquennial Inspection visit on September 23rd. In the process some two tons of rubble has been removed.
Congratulations to Cheryl, Amy, Sarah Jane, David, Neville and Pat on their efforts visiting churches on the day of the Ride, Stride & Drive, Saturday September 13th. Between them they raised more than £1,200.00 for the Suffolk Historic Churches Trust. Half of this sponsorship money will be allocated to Barsham Church. Many thanks as well to the volunteers who manned the reception desk at Barsham on the day.
A team of six started off the Love Box wrapping season on September 3rd. The next session is on Thursday October 2nd at 2.30pm – all help welcomed.
The PCC met to conduct routine business on Thursday 11th September. This was John Randall’s last meeting before retiring from the PCC and he was warmly thanked for his contributions over six years of valuable service.
Sarah Jane’s next market stall is scheduled for September 26th. She would be grateful for any unwanted household goods in good condition to add to her stall. She continues to raise funds for the Rede tomb repair project.
The August sales table organised by Jenny produced a fantastic £180.00. The September sales table has been cancelled so as not to clash with the Harvest festivities.
Amy passes on thanks from the Revd Pam Bayliss at St Luke’s Beccles for the 156 items contributed to the Beccles Food Bank in August.
FORWARD PLANNING
Autumn Equinox, Monday September 22nd: Weather permitting, the illumination of the rood will be at about 5.50pm on September 21st, 22nd and 23rd.
Harvest Festival Choral Evensong, 5.30pm on Sunday September 28th. Harvest Supper follows at 7pm in the village hall. Tickets for Harvest Supper can be purchased from Bridget at £12.50 each.
SNIPPETS – Raise the Song of Harvest Home
The safe gathering in of crops at harvest has probably been a matter for celebration and thanksgiving in most cultures since prehistory, and with good reason, for a fruitful harvest ensured a community’s survival through winter. In ancient Israel it was the custom to celebrate the first fruits as well as the end of harvest: ‘Celebrate the Harvest Festival, to honour the Lord your God, by bringing him a freewill offering in proportion to the blessing he has given you’ (Deuteronomy, 16:10).
Fast forward to early medieval England, not long converted to Christianity, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions Lammas, the Feast of the First Fruits, which is thought to have been a Christian adaption of a native pagan tradition. On August 1stat Lammas – or ‘Loaf-Mass’ – a loaf of bread baked from the first of the new wheat crop was offered at Mass.
By the high medieval period in England, the Church’s role in the agricultural cycle was well established with several holy days marking the harvest season. Lammas continued as a celebration of first fruits, and the end of harvest – ‘harvest home’ – was celebrated on St Rusticus Day (September 24th), also known as the ‘Feast of Ingathering’, and at Michaelmas (September 29th). Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, marked the formal end of the harvest season and the end of the farming year. The high-spirited feasting and revelry that always accompanied ‘harvest home’ was known in East Anglia as a ‘Horkey’.
These harvest thanksgiving observances in church came to an end with the Protestant Reformation. In 1536 the holy days associated with harvest were abolished and the various iterations of the Book of Common Prayer excluded all mention of harvest, both in its Table of Feasts to be Observed and in its Prayers and Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions. Harvest celebrations became an entirely secular affair. The feasting, drinking, dancing and merriment that had always run alongside the sacred celebrations now continued alone.
The modern tradition of Harvest Festival is usually said to have begun in 1843, when the Revd Robert Hawker, the eccentric Vicar of Morwenstowe in Cornwall, introduced a special harvest thanksgiving service that became an annual event. The story goes that Hawker’s harvest thanksgiving service rapidly caught on and spread across the nation.
In fact, the idea of harvest thanksgiving in church had already been launched on a nationwide basis half a century earlier when the Church of England began to designate certain Thanksgiving Days in years of plentiful harvest to thank God for His bounty. There were Harvest Thanksgivings, for instance, in 1796, 1801, 1810, 1813, 1832 and 1842, and continuing into the 1850s. It seems likely that this was as much the impetus and model for the annual Harvest Festival that we know in the Anglican Church as was Hawker’s initiative. Whatever its origins, the tradition of Harvest Festival had become popular and widely established by the 1860s and was formally adopted in the Anglican Church calendar in 1862. By then, special harvest hymns had been written for the occasion: Come ye thankful people, come (1844), and We plough the fields and scatter (translated from the German in 1861). So too the custom of decking out the church with produce, at first the final sheaf of corn from the harvest and later, more elaborate decorations of flowers, fruit and vegetables.
Some churches began to organise harvest suppers, and these might perhaps be seen today as a distant echo of the ancient secular harvest home celebrations – the Horkeys – that died out with the dramatic shrinkage of the agrarian workforce brought on by the mechanization of farming.
Such are the roots of the Barsham Harvest Festival and Supper.
OCTOBER DIARY
Sunday 5th October – Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Jonathan Olanczuk.
Sunday 12th October – Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Canon John Fellows.
Sunday 19th October – Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11.15am Sung Eucharist (BCP), Barsham. Revd Desmond Banister.
Sunday 26th October – Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity. 11am Sung Eucharist (BCP). Revd Graham Naylor.
Church correspondent: Robert Bacon 07867 306016, [email protected]