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Villages’ Wakes grew out of communities celebrating their church’s patron saint. For us that is St Peter whose feast day is the 29th of June, still used to to calculate the start of Parwich Wakes; our Wakes beginning on the nearest Saturday to the 29th of June.

The current St Peter’s Church was built in 1872/73, replacing the smaller Norman building also dedicated to St. Peter. We can see some features of the old Church today in the current building, including the tympanum over the west door, the archway of the west door, the archway between the tower and the nave and the carved faces high up in the side chapel. It is thought that the old church was built in the late eleventh or early twelfth century and would almost have certainly been dedicated to St. Peter as it is unusual for the dedication to be changed. It is possible that there was a previous Saxon church here, but the evidence is inconclusive.

The old St Peter’s in a nineteenth century water colour

So we have been celebrating as a community at the end of June for at least nine hundred years, though perhaps much longer. These celebrations from the start would have included a lot more than just a church service. Processions and theatricals would have been included, possibly by the fourteenth or fifteen century involving a play celebrating Robin Hood and Maid Marion. The prettiest or best dressed youngsters might even have be elected to be that year’s Marion and Robin, a precursor to out Carnival parade and fancy dress competition. It is likely that there were local sports, foot races and perhaps archery competitions, certainly when archery practice was compulsory from the fourteenth right up to the sixteen century. ‘Beers’ were a big part of the celebrations, where local guilds and groups brewed beer to sell during the revels. This tradition was revived not so long ago with the Oddfellows Ale, brewed by Leatherbritches. The ‘beers’ raised money either to fund candles and devotion in the church for each guild’s favourite saint or to help guild members when times were hard.

This year it is perhaps worth wondering how the celebrations were impacted by the Black Death at the height of the first wave in 1349 and then in subsequent waves. The virtual disappearance of the main part of Ballidon around the church and of Lea Hall on the hillside over looking Tissington Ford are either directly or indirectly down to deaths during the plague indicate its local impact. Parwich seems to have come through these years without abandoned house sites or reduction in the land farmed so may have been lucky in terms of numbers of deaths, but even so celebrations would have been subdued and people would have turned to the church and celebrating their patron saint even more.

The Oddfellows now serve the role of the medieval church guilds and the Carnival & Recreation Committee inherit the mantle of the other local groups, raising money during Wakes to fund other things during the rest of the year. These celebrations continued perhaps unchanged up to the Reformation.

Interestingly during Henry VIII th’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, the English Civil War and the Puritanism of the Commonwealth, though the churches did not celebrate their patron saint, villagers continued to keep their saint’s day alive through their Wakes celebrations. In Derbyshire by the Restoration the dedication of some churches had even been forgotten, and had to be worked out by asking the then equivalents of the Carnival & Recreation Committees what date they used for the timing of their Wakes.

So as far as we know our Wakes continued through the Puritan years, though I like to imagine it would have been celebrated with more gusto after the Restoration in 1660, and again in 1662 when our font was returned to the Church from its hiding place.

We know surprisingly little of Parwich Wakes in the seventeenth and eighteen century, thought it is likely that as well as the Church, the three pubs, the Sycamore, the Crown and the Wheatsheaf provided focuses for celebration. Also the Square, the land in front of the Hall, was used for a village feast in 1814, celebrating Napoleon’s first exile to Elba, so it may have also been used in other celebrations too.

However with the founding of the local Loyal Laurel & Crown Lodge in 1836, meeting then upstairs at the Crown Inn, participation in the Oddfellows’ feast and church service on Saint Peter’s Day were mandatory for members. After the purchase of the banner in (or by) 1847, the Oddfellows’ parade became a central feature of our Wakes. The banner was also hired out to other Lodges that had no banner to use in their parades. The white wands carried in the Parade are unique to Parwich. Their origin is unknown but in 1854 payment was recorded for repainting some old ones and for making new ones.

Parwich Oddfellows in about 1900