Harvest Festival

I feel we did enough Harvest and lickle animaws last week, particularly the ickle bunnie wabbits.
But Church Mouse has been bringing the issue up and he's reminded me of the towering, oh-so-Victorian figure that was Robert Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow.
In those days before the Diocese of Truro and resurgent pseudo-Celtic nationalism, Hawker was also able to hold the living of Welcombe, the other side of a little brook that does the job that the Tamar does for the other 99% of the border between Devon and Cornwall.
To hold both livings, in the days before they invented cars, shows the hardiness (pun intended) of the average Victorian. The drive from Welcombe to Morwenstow church is about 10 miles by car. The walk is a couple of miles, but this is serious walker's country. It's also the sort of terrain to make a good Beaker Person spit, with a holy well dedicated to the so-called "Celtic" saint "Nectan" at Welcombe.

Hawker could have defined the term "eccentric" - although I doubt that modern-day bishops would tolerate a vicar who smoked opium while sitting on the cliffs looking out for shipwrecks in case there were any sailors he could bury or - in extreme cases - help to save. He is said to have excommunicated his cat for mousing on Sundays. He wrote the Cornish national anthem, a song of rebellion against the English (indeed, British) Crown. On his deathbed he converted to Roman Catholicism.

And how do we remember Hawker?

As the inventor of the Harvest Festival.

The English people (and the Cornish, our noble cousin-race) had been celebrating Harvest Home since time immemorial. But the Victorian clergy couldn't be having that, could they? People celebrating the blessings of the harvest with John Barleycorn's finest and a few rowdy ballads. They had to be tamed, calmed - made safer.
And so the Harvest Festival came about. A sanitised, sanctified equivalent to the Harvest Home. Where the Harvest Loaf could be raised on high in place of the ale of the Harvest Home. Where the Good Health of the Barleymow would be replaced by some polite words from the vicar.  Who was the only person in the parish allowed to be off his face of a Wednesday lunchtime - all the peasants were supposed to be sober and hard at work.

If you're interested, the Harvest image here is a bunch of alpacas (I've no idea what the collective term is) grazing oblivious to the cloud of chaff being kicked up by the combine at the top of the page. When a South American mammal is grazing quietly in the dust of a mechanized harvesting machine the size of Dunstable, you know you can only be in England.