Have you clipped your church today?

Ash Wednesday is tomorrow: a forty-day fast is nearly upon us, and we gulp at the prospect.  In the Middle Ages, the gulp was so palpable that they really made something of it:  in a last outburst of frivolity and feasting before Lent’s wilderness, down went all the food that would otherwise waste.  Hence Carnival — carne vale — farewell to meat.

For centuries, several English towns saw no reason not to mark Shrove Tuesday by transforming the entire parish into a football-pitch and the whole population into two opposing teams.  Shrovetide Football lasts for at least an afternoon, is played between two goals several miles apart and is otherwise entirely devoid of rules.  Here it is being played in Chester-le-Street in 1927:

Sad to say, the various drawbacks to this tradition (as portrayed in the reel!) became obvious in the end even to the furthest-turned blind eye.  The game in Chester-le-Street was banned in 1932.  It survives, however, in Ashbourne in Derbyshire, whose townsfolk remain resolutely boisterous.

Depending on where you live, Shrove Tuesday is also the day on which to ‘clip’ or clasp the parish church — joining hands in a great ring around church and singing hymns.  This is still done in several parishes.  Still, there is the sad thought that in many places the shrunken congregation must struggle to compass the girth of their church.

I see in this tradition an instinctive and affectionate gravitation to the natural heart of a village or town?  Surely there is a hearty rightness about it.  A church may of course be a ‘serious house on serious earth’ as Philip Larkin put it, but it is also a place of vigour and life, somewhere we are glad to be.  Why shouldn’t we, in the right spirit and at the right time, turn the church into a kind of toy, as children play with their fathers?  This is why I rejoice in the ornamentation and decoration of churches, and the continual additions and alterations of paintings and engravings — even if apparently needless or useless — even if roughly done!  And why I rejoice in the sound of bell-ringing and in terrific and uplifting streams of notes pouring from belfries.  It proves that a church, far from the austere and artificial stereotype in many a modern mind’s eye, is  to be lived in, to be loved, and to be as much mankind’s house for God as it is God’s house for mankind. 

‘Clipping the church’ — St Lawrence, Rode, by W.W. Wheatley.  (from the Wikimedia Commons)