Midsummer

Above:  one of the most significant days of the ritual year is Midsummer, which is celebrated on St John's Day 24th June (not to be confused with the Longest Day which is on 21st June).  Midsummer is traditionally the day on which "Midsummer Fairs" are held, but as the day fell on a Friday this year the fairs were rescheduled for the weekends either side.  Rather than go to the fair on the 19th I waited until yesterday (25th) and went to a fair in the south-west of the county.

Above:  one of the features of the pastoral landscape as I neared the village was the blood-red appearance of the fields, which were covered in wild poppies (the common corn poppy or Papaver rhoeas).

Above:  the crossroads at the centre of the village was marked by the Crossed Swords Inn, which seemed a martial name for a pub (public houses are often of great antiquity, and often preserve in their names clues as to the past social activity of the village - was this pub the venue for fencing / jousting or a quasi-military club of some kind?).

Above:  the fair was held in the sports ground behind the village hall.  I got there quite late so the sparse appearance of this photo is not a true indication of the attendance.  Dog show, stalls of various kinds, a display of motor cycles.
















Above:  I left the fair and walked up a gentle hill to look at the manor house - stone, like most buildings in the village.  Pevsner says this building is 17th century.  There was a fine dovecote nearby.

Above:  near the manor was the village green with this truncated cross, obviously of great antiquity (often these crosses pre-date the church, so this could be Saxon).

Above:  an embroidery inside the church said that the cross was a "Moot" place where village elders would meet - a sort of miniature witenagemot.

Above:  approaching the church, which was on the summit of the little hill, I noticed that it had a chapel of some kind on the south side - possibly a chantry or a guild chapel.

Above:  looking inside the chapel it was now used as a tea room.  There were no monuments, so presumably it had not been a chantry chapel.  Possibly it was the meeting place for a guild (or guilds).

Above:  in the north wall of the chancel were two crusader gravestones.  This one had been reused in 1730, hence the inscription.  The Listed Buildings website says that both gravestones are thirteenth-century.

Above:  the second gravestone, slightly more worn.  The church was dedicated to St James, so is it fanciful to imagine the village was a recruiting ground for crusaders wanting to go on the crusades to support the Spanish kingdom of Galicia rather than those to the Holy Land?  A guild, meeting in the south chapel, would raise money to recruit, equip and support knights (they would do this by promising indulgences), and the knights before leaving might put on jousts at the crossroads inn to raise additional funds and generate enthusiasm and support from the local community.

All conjecture I know.

Above:  before leaving I went back to the fair to watch the Tug-of-war.  Village sports such as this were originally intended as demonstrations of strength.  Tug of war was also a popular event at medieval tournaments (sorry to keep harping on about this subject, but I found the various connections, slender though they are, to be intriguing).