A quaint old ceremony

About a year ago I posted an item on the old county custom of marking the death of a virgin by hanging a paper crown up in the village church (http://afroml.blogspot.com/2007/04/clothed-in-white-samite.html). I thought at the time that none of these crowns had survived (there are some in Dorset, where the custom is apparently still carried out). Now I can report (report? reveal? bore everybody?) that I have found a local example.



The village is in the north of the county, away from the main road (you go through quite a maze of lanes to get to it). I was an hour early for an appointment at a nearby town, and so I was drifting around filling in town. I came round a bend and saw this church and something about the building made me want to see inside (the tower is a very rare Anglo-Saxon survival).

As usual the church was locked and there was no notice about where the key might be. I walked around the village but no-one was about (it was a sunny day but very cold). Eventually I saw an elderly woman parking her car and asked if she knew who might have the key. She directed me to a farmhouse on the edge of the village. At the farmhouse I was redirected to another house (“But I don’t know if you’ll find them in, they were going out today”). At this second house a very cheerful woman, just about to go out, came to the door and obligingly let me have the key, which was about a foot long (“But there’s not much of interest in the church”).



Not much of interest! As well as the Saxon tower there was a Norman zigzag arch over the west door, and when I stepped down into the building (the cold sunlight following me into the dark interior) I immediately saw this glass case containing one of the mythical (for I had begun to doubt their existence) Virgin’s Crowns.

You will probably need to click on the image to see all the details. It was much larger than I anticipated - about thirty inches in diameter. The crown was decorated with paper flowers.



A notice, hand-written in 1893, recorded that the crown belonged to Mary Hill, a fourteen-year-old girl, who was helping to ring the church bells in 1814 when her arm became entangled in the bell rope and she was carried up to the roof (a distance of about sixty feet), fell down and was killed when she hit the stone floor. At her funeral three maidens dressed in white carried three paper crowns in her honour, and these were later hung up in the church (only this one remains). The notice also records a local song composed in honour of a young woman who died on the day she got married (and presumably before the marriage was consummated).



As well as the original crown in the glass case a replica had been made and hung up in the chancel. Gilbert White records a similar custom taking place at Selbourne. These customs were designed to help people in the village to come to terms with grief and loss (which must be especially acute in the loss of a young child).



The entrance to the tower was half-open and so I could see into the space where the poor girl died. I could see the stone floor and the bell-ropes hanging down (although I don’t suppose that these ones date back to 1814). This was the moment when anthropological enquiry turned, with an unexpected sharp pang of empathy, to a real sense of sadness. We know nothing about Mary Hill except that she died a tragic death and was mourned by her family and neighbours in a quaint old ceremony. And yet out of all the hundreds of thousands of village girls who have lived and died in the county, her name has come down to us through the survival of her paper crown. When Larkin wrote “all that remains of us is love” possibly he had this sort of thing in mind.



There was something about the shape and design of Mary Hill’s paper crown that seemed familiar. And later I thought of this stone crown that marks the entrance to Crown Farm in the south of the county. Just coincidence?



And also thinking laterally, my mind went back to an open day last autumn at a small village in the central hills of the county. The entrance to the little church was decorated with sunflowers (which symbolise loyalty as they follow the path of the sun across the sky). A handful of elderly ladies (old maids?) made me very welcome.



Inside the church was this enigmatic recreation of a maiden’s crown of flowers (worn on the day she would get married). Notice also the veil which is formed out of lace showing butterflies caught in a web (a symbol used by Paul Scott in Jewel In The Crown). Mary Hill's white paper virgin’s crown was meant to symbolise the floral crown she would have worn on her wedding day.



In the video that accompanied the 1980s version of Spirit In The Sky were these two weird figures wearing floral crowns. Dressed in white and with long hair down to their knees they flounce around in a psychodelic 1980s interpretation of the 1960s. Who created this image and where did they get the idea from?



In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (beautifully recreated in Roman Polanski’s Tess) Tess Derbyfield goes to see her “cousin” Alec Stokes who puts a crown of flowers round her head. This is one of the most effective scenes in Polanski’s film. Unfortunately it has been ruined for me by Tim Brooke-Taylor’s recreation of it on I’m Sorry I Havn’t A Clue.



Etonians wear floral garlands during their Fourth Of June celebrations. The boys are wearing 19th century naval uniform. This picture appeared on the front page of The Guardian.

Folk song that might be associated with all this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqInvZ9hY9Y

Spirit In The Sky (1980s version) on MySpace: http://vidsearch.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=6678905

PS this is the 1000th post on this site.