Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Pennick ·
The Standard of the Vigil
A recording officer files the wake custom of Pennick, where the gate vigil rota has filled itself in a single hand for forty years.
- filed: "at the close of the wake"
- reference: "PN/VG/01"
1. This reference covers the standing custom of Pennick, recorded under the parish's obligation to keep its observances on file. It was opened at the close of the wake for Rance Elder, farmer, of the Low Field houses, which ran the usual nights. The officer attended as for the last four wakes on file. There is continuity. That is not yet the finding.
2. The custom may be stated briefly. When a death is kept in Pennick, the household does not watch alone at the house. Instead, one adult from the parish stands, for the whole waking, at the gate of the household concerned. Not inside, not on the step: at the gate, upright, awake, for as long as the wake runs. One person at a time, relief at intervals agreed between themselves, and the gate may on no account be left to no one. The keeper stands where anyone arriving would first be seen. There is no written form for the custom older than the rota described in 3, and the officers who have inquired into its origins have been shown the churchyard wall and nothing else, which the parish considers a complete answer.
3. The rota is a single folded clerk's file sheet, headed in pencil VIGIL — with the household's name after the dash. It is kept on a nail inside the gatepost, under a slate flap, in weather and out of it. Names are entered in order, against times, and the sheet for the Elder wake, collected at the close by this officer as specimen for the file, had held, over the two nights, fourteen entries. All fourteen were in the same hand.
4. The hand is a formed, unhurried round hand, preferring soft pencil. This officer has shown specimens, from four wake rotas across four decades, to a document examiner engaged at district expense in 1983, in the matter referred to in the parish correspondence as the Fountainelse question and closed without finding. The examiner's conclusion, quoted here entire: the hand on the specimens is one hand, and the several hands of the parish, taken station by station, vary from it consistently — the parish writes one way and the sheet writes another.
5. It must be understood that the entries are nonetheless correct as a record. Every name on the sheet is a name of a person who stood; the times are right; neighbours confirm each other's hours without prompting. The persons named confirm the entries without difficulty, though put to them one after another at the close, several of the fourteen looked at their own signature — the entries are signed-on, each at relief — before agreeing, and their looking is not recorded as hesitancy but is recorded.
6. The parish's own account, given with perfect willingness, is that the rota fills itself. Asked who circulated it, carried it, held the pencil between stations, the household keeping the nail answered that the sheet is kept where it is kept, and that you put your name in when you have stood, and the name of the next in the order is there already by the time you reach the sheet. Nobody offers this as remarkable. It is spoken the way the parish speaks of tides and the late bus, and the notice taken of it here is that the explanation is procedural, not explanatory, and is yet accepted at every return without challenge, including by the officers who have preceded this one.
7. The continuity referred to in 1 may now be stated with its numbers. The parish's observances have been returnable since 1946, and the file holds returns for every wake since. Every rota collected, whatever the household or the year, whatever ink or pencil the parish's own writing favours, is in the round hand described in 4. Forty years. There is no first sheet in any other manner, and no entry, at any wake on file, begun in one manner and continued in another.
8. At the close of the Elder wake, the last station stood down at 03:12, and the sheet was taken from the nail with his leave. He read it through and asked the question filed here for want of any observation better suited: he asked who had been on the sheet before him. The officer, with the sheet in hand, could only say that the first entry of the wake was already a name, entered against the hour before any keeper had stood, in the round hand — and did not stay to hear whether the parish had an answer, because the parish, at every return on file, has only ever had the sheet.