Harvest Festivals have been so much part of the Church of England scene for a century or so that it is difficult to believe that it was only in 1862 that permission was granted in the Church of England for there to be a special service that served as a harvest festival. Thus virtually all the hymns sung at harvest festivals were written in the Victorian era.
The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 contains no provision for such a service for it was assumed that prayer for the crops and thanksgiving for the harvests were part of the general annual rhythm and cycle of prayer and praise.
In England the origin of modern Harvest Festivals is only in the 19th century and seems to be associated with giving a religious dimension to the long-standing and popular harvest home thanksgivings (the celebration in food and drink and dance) on the farms, in the villages and market towns when the various crops were safely gathered in. Of course the clergy had gone to these for centuries and offered prayer when asked.
From 1862 until the arrival of liturgical revision and the new liturgical freedoms in the 1970s a harvest festival could be held on any day of the week and had to make use of and adapt officially approved forms of service (e.g., Morning or Evening Prayer with appropriate Bible readings and extra collects). The proposed revision of the BCP that was rejected by Parliament in 1928 did contain a Collect, Epistle and Gospel for such a festival if it were to involve Holy Communion. In the new prayer books of the late 20th century and early 21st, provision is made for a Harvest Festival but it is not a required service.
In the USA, the American edition of the BCP provides for Harvest Festival on a specific date – Thanksgiving Day in November. This is a major holiday (moreso than is Christmas) and had its origins in the thanksgiving of the Pilgrims in New England after they had survived a year in America in 1621.
I do not think that the intention in 1862 was that these local Festivals in the C of E would be held on a Sunday. Rather they would be held on the day of the local celebrations of harvest-home, and the people would go from church to feast and jollity. The move to have the religious service on a Sunday as the major service of the day, with the decoration of the church as if it were a major Christian festival -- and then a meal/feast on a weekday -- is relatively new and, I suspect, against the historic Christian understanding of Sunday worship.
If we look back through history, the Jewish Church, being a nation, people and territory, did have major festivals to celebrate the ingathering of harvest (e.g., Pentecost). This was not so of the Church of Jesus Christ for she understood the New Covenant to be of the supernatural order and so all her major festivals are a celebration of one or another aspect of the Incarnation of the only-begotten Son of the Father and the Acts of Redemption from sin and into eternal life.
This is not to say that the Church paid no attention to this world and the necessary harvest each year for bodily sustenance.
In the West for example, November 11, the feast of St Martin of Tours, was celebrated as a harvest thanksgiving, the ingathering of the harvest. Apart from attendance at Mass, it was essentially secular in character being a public holiday in many areas. [It was this celebration continued in the Netherlands after the Protestant Reformation that the Pilgrim Fathers experienced there and took with them to New England, there to become the origin of Thanksgiving as a holiday in the USA.]
In England, August l, was a feast of thanksgiving for the firstfruit of the grain harvest and was called Lammas [Loaf Mass] Day. Bread made from the new corn was presented at the Mass and solemnly blessed. This custom ceased in the 16th century (a few tried to revive it in the 19th century but the new harvest festival made their attempts redundant).
There is, as already noted, within the classic BCP, used from 1549 through to the 1970s in all parishes of the C of E and abroad, rogation days and specific prayers of thanksgiving for harvest as well as prayers for the growth of the same. These prayers are for use on Sundays and weekdays as required. Then there were/are local customs of going out from the church to bless the fields, animals and crops.
Where the modern Sunday harvest festival of the C of E departs from Christian tradition is that it takes over the major Sunday service and thereby a celebration of the old creation is made central on the Lord’s Day, which is intended to be Always a day which is the festival of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Happily American thanksgiving day is never on a Sunday.
The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon
Minister of Christ Church, Biddulph Moor,
England & Vice-President and Emissary-at-Large
of The Prayer Book Society of America
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