Part 2

Two bushels of corn, two dozen pots of beer, and cheese, to the value of 1.s. 1.d. for the play. The wardens also paid for this play 20.d. for skins, which would be used for disguisements, and 3.s. for staining diverse properties that were provided for the occasion.

Another entry relative to the same visit, has, we think, been misinterpreted by Rev. Prebendary Pearson, when he edited these accounts in 1878. The entry reads:--

_Et Johi Fowler pro cariando le tymbe a cimiterio dicto tempore ludi_ _v.d._

Mr. Pearson thought this meant a tomb (_tymba_), but it is far more likely that it was a bulky platform of timber, placed in the churchyard when not in use, and only brought into the church when it was required to serve as a stage.

With regard to feasting in churches, one of the canons put forth in 1571 specially enjoined the churchwardens to disallow the holding of feasts, drinking parties, banquets, and public entertainments within the walls of churches. The Church-ales, Clark-ales, and Bid-ales, about which so much has been written, were originally held within the fabric, and a variety of other drinking and eating customs in the same place were at one time prevalent, lingering on for some time after the Reformation in certain places, and even lasting almost to our own days in occasional retired parishes.

Funeral banquets, for the entertainment of mourners, were not infrequently held in the church when the ceremony was over, or even on the next Sunday.

In Strype's edition of _Stowe's London_ it is recorded that:--

"Margaret Atkinson, widow, by her will, October 18th, 1544, orders that the next Sunday after her burial there be provided two dozens of bread, a kilderkin of ale, two gammons of bacon, three shoulders of mutton, and two couples of rabbits, desiring all the parish, as well as rich as poor, to take part thereof, and a table be set in the midst of the church, with everything necessary therto."

We have seen wills pertaining to Porlock and Cutcombe, Somersetshire, to Scropton, Derbyshire, and to Easingwold, Yorkshire, all of the latter part of the sixteenth century, which expressly provide for the refreshment of the mourners within the church.

Occasionally, too, parochial charities provided that the bequest in kind should be consumed in the church. This was the case with regard to a small seventeenth century charity, by the terms of which a certain quantity of bread and beer were to be distributed in the parish church of Barton-le-Street, Yorkshire, on Holy Thursday to the children of the parish, to be by them consumed within the church, close to the tomb of the testator. This custom prevailed until about 1820, when it was abandoned in favour of the churchyard. The reformed custom prevailed for some twenty years, when it in turn gave way to a distribution of the fund in money to the aged poor.

Sad and quaint instances of the occasional evil uses of churches in recent times, even during the present century, could be gleaned, such as cock-fighting, card-playing, etc.; but the record would be of no profit, for they would not be examples of any once established custom, but mere freaks of wanton impiety.

Holy Day Customs.

BY THE REV. GEO. S. TYACK, B.A.

It is not surprising that a multitude of quaint customs has sprung up around the holy days of the church. For these were the holidays of the people in "Merrie England" of the bygone times; the seasons when gossips met to talk, and young folk to play, and all the country-side was gathered first in the church, and then on the village green, or round their neighbours' hospitable hearths. By sermon or by eloquent device of ritual, the parish priest endeavoured to imprint upon the simple minds of his flock the great truth which the holy day commemorated; and they, on their part, as free for the day from responsibility as from labour, showed their joy in a hundred different jests and homely sports. Within the church and without, therefore, was there ample scope for curious customs to grow up, some of which, even though the origin and meaning have been lost, live on among us to the present day.

The word _feast_, in the sense of a banquet, is now so familiar to us, that we are in danger of altogether forgetting that originally it contained no allusion to eating and drinking. But so universal is the idea that on all days of rejoicing a meal of special dainties should form part of the celebration, that long before we English had wrought the word into its present form, the Roman poets had begun to use its Latin original in the sense of a festal banquet. Certainly no high day is complete and national with us unless it include a dinner amongst its pleasures. We find, therefore, in surveying the holy day customs of yore, signs of much merry-making of this kind, and particularly of the dedication of special viands to certain occasions.

From time immemorial, for instance, Christmas cheer was incomplete without its mince-pies and plum-pudding; the former emblematic, so some say, by their shape, of the manger-bed of the Infant Redeemer, and the latter by its rich ingredients of the offerings of the three kings. The pancakes of Shrove Tuesday are equally universal, and form so conspicuous a part of the day's solemnities that the day is often known as "pancake-day," and the bell which formerly summoned the faithful to the shriving was similarly named the "pancake-bell." In many parts of the country, as for example at Crowle, in North Lincolnshire, the bell is still rung under that name.

Mid-Lent, or Mothering Sunday, has its peculiar fare in simnel cakes. Few days in the year have received so many titles as this one. It is Mothering Sunday from the ancient practice of priests and people going, on that day, in pilgrimage to the mother-church of the district, from which arose also a traditional habit of children visiting their parents on the same occasion. At this family re-union simnels were the proper fare. But the day is also Bragget Sunday, from the draughts of bragget, or mulled ale, with which, in some parts, notably in Lancashire, the cakes were washed down. Again it is Fag-pie Sunday, from another refection sacred to it in the same county, namely a pie of figs and spices. Refreshment Sunday, and the Sunday of the Five Loaves, have reference to the Eucharistic Gospel for the day.

The following Sunday, Passion Sunday, has its special dish in _carlings_, or peas fried in butter; and on Palm Sunday figs were again thought appropriate. A strange custom, existing till comparatively recent times at Sellack, in Hertfordshire, was the distribution to those present at church on Palm Sunday of buns and cider by the churchwardens, with the words, "Peace and good neighbourhood."

Even the great fast of the year has its peculiar food in the hot cross buns of Good Friday. These are probably a survival of the heathen practice of offering consecrated cakes to the gods. They were originally unleavened cakes, made, it is said, from the dough out of which the hosts for the altar were baked, a fact which suggests a connection with the Pascal regulations of the Jews. The stamp of the cross probably marks the effort of the church to give a Christian significance to a practice that was found to be practically ineradicable.

Easter, the "Queen of Festivals," has no fare so unmistakably assigned to it as some other holy days. Hare-pie is the correct thing in some places, and at Hallaton, in Leicestershire, there is an endowment for providing hare-pie, bread, and ale, for distribution at this season. At Twickenham two large cakes were formerly divided among the young folk of the parish at Easter; a harmless practice which the Puritans suppressed in 1645, with the result that often attends the efforts of busy-bodies, matters were altered for the worse; for, thenceforward, penny loaves were purchased with the money, and flung from the Church Tower to be scrambled for. At Biddenden, in Kent, a large number of cakes and loaves are given away on this day, on the former of which is impressed the image of two females, joined together at hip and shoulder. These are the "Biddenden Maids," Eliza and Mary Chulkhurst, who are said to have been born in the village, in the year 1100, thus strangely joined, and in whose memory the rent of a plot of land, called the "Bread and Cheese Land," is thus distributed.

Other viands traditionally connected with certain holy days are the great spiced-cakes on Twelfth Night, and Valentine Buns given to children in Leicestershire, on S. Valentine's Day. A special "brand" of toffee is made at Bozeat, in Northamptonshire, for S. Andrew's Day; and roast goose has long been considered essential to the due observance of Michaelmas.

Reference was made above to the survival of heathen customs among us, in a dress more or less Christian; and there can be no doubt that such is the fittest description of very many holy day practices. Some usage was found in vogue, in itself harmless enough, but allied by long association with the superstitions of paganism. In some cases the mere conservatism of popular feeling kept these alive, after all meaning had died out of them; but in many instances the church took them up, and gave to the dry bones of the heathen custom a soul of Christian meaning. Conspicious among such are the use of mistletoe, and the burning of the Yule-log, as adjuncts to the gaiety and brightness of the Feast of the Nativity. Mistletoe was the most sacred of plants in the days of the Druids; and it is certainly one of the most extraordinary examples of the tenacity of life displayed by popular customs, that a tradition of special privilege should still cling to the mistletoe in spite, not only of the passage of so many centuries, but even of the exterminating wars waged against the Druids by the Romans, and against the Britons generally by the English. It was these same English forefathers of ours who taught us to burn the Yule-log in sacrifice to Thor the Thunderer.

Again, there can be little question that the "well-dressing," or decoration of springs of water with moss and flowers, so common in Derbyshire, had its origin in the worship of the nymphs or goddesses of stream and river; yet now in almost every case it has become part of the celebration of some Christian festival. At Tissington, which claims to have the only real survival of the custom, it takes place on Ascension Day; at Derby, and Wirksworth, at Whitsuntide; at Barton on the Thursday nearest to S. John the Baptist's Day. A pagan rite still existing without Christian "baptism," is found in the bon-fires that yearly crown the Cornish hill-tops on the night of Midsummer Day.

Some sports and games were in the past traditionally associated with certain church festivals, for reasons which in most cases are not very clear. In Derbyshire, particularly in the county-town, and in Ashbourne, Shrove Tuesday was marked by the playing in the streets of a rough and unorganised game of football, in which a large part of the populace took part. School children were very generally supposed to have the privilege of demanding a holiday on that day, or even of enforcing one by locking the master out of the school-house. At Haxey, in North Lincolnshire, the "Haxey Hood," is always thrown on the Feast of the Epiphany. This curious sport consists in the struggle for a roll of coarse sacking, about three inches in diameter, and two feet long, known locally as the "hood," and is the occasion of much wild excitement. This is said to have no connection with the holy day, except that it is a commemoration of some local contest that chanced originally to happen on that day. A similar reason is given for the fact that the town of Stamford formerly celebrated S. Brice's Day with the brutal sport of bull-running.

Other curious customs, such as the cracking of a gad-whip in Caistor Church, on Palm Sunday, by which a local land tenure was maintained, and which survived until 1846, were evidently associated, each with its special day, by a merely arbitrary arrangement, having no allusion whatever to the festival. To the same class belongs, perhaps, the ceremony of washing the tomb of Molly Grime, at Glentham, in Lincolnshire, by seven old spinsters, every Good Friday. This was regularly done until 1832, a neighbouring property being charged with the payment of one shilling each to the washers, but since that date, the tomb has been abandoned to a condition more typical of its occupant's name. Another strange usage, the meaning of which it is hard to conjecture, was the pinning of bits of coloured rag to the back of the women on their way to church, on Palm Sunday, a sport once found full of amusement by the lads of Leigh, in Lancashire.

Another class of holy day usages consists of endeavours to reproduce, in some more or less realistic manner, the fact commemorated by the festival, with a result that to us seems grotesque at times, if not profane.

Amongst the more obvious of these, we must reckon the singing of carols at Christmas, a memorial of the angelic hymn heard by the shepherds at Bethlehem; and the doll laid in a decorated box, rudely representing the Holy Child in His manger-bed, which children frequently carry from door to door at that season. The miners of Llwynymaen, when asking for Christmas gifts, used at one time, it is said, to carry boards to which lighted candles were fixed, in allusion no doubt originally to the coming of the "Light of the World."

The cruel custom of stoning a wren to death on S. Stephen's Day, once generally prevalent, is well-known, and was an obvious endeavour after commemorative realism. At Padstow, in Cornwall, the same scene was enacted less objectionally on the Eve of the Conversion of S. Paul, by the stoning of a pitcher, whence that day was locally known as "Paul's Pitcher Day."

The royal offering of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, at the Chapel Royal, S. James's, on the Feast of the Epiphany, was once a ceremony of real dignity, but is now rather a paltry business, interesting chiefly as one of the most curious of survivals. The royal charities on Maunday Thursday, are really a portion of an otherwise lapsed custom, which recalled the action of our Lord on the day before His Crucifixion. Down to the reign of James II. the king attended by some of the great officers of his court, washed the feet of a number of poor people on this day, and then distributed money, food, and clothing among them. The lads of Kendal have a different way of keeping the day; in parties of a dozen or so, they drag, or used to drag, tin cans through the streets, beating them with sticks, until they were quite demolished. Can this, one wonders, be in any way related to that Good Friday custom of Spanish sailors, the beating and hanging in effigy of Judas the Traitor?

An old Dorset poet, Barnes, says, referring to a well-known Easter custom:

"Last Easter I put on my blue Frock coat, the vust time, vier new; Wi' yaller buttons aal o' brass, That glittered in the zun like glass, Bekaze 'twer Easter Zunday."

No good luck can attend you, so the belief was, unless you wear at least one new thing on Easter Day. The fancy probably arose from an idea of the "newness of life" of which the festival speaks to us. Easter eggs again were obviously used at first as supplying a fitting emblem of the Resurrection. As a rule they are simply treated as pretty ornaments, but at Liège, in Belgium, boys have a kind of game with them, similar to an English lad's use of chestnuts, knocking two together; the boy whose egg remains unbroken the longest being proclaimed the conqueror.

The subject of holy day practices is an immense one, especially when one wanders into all the bye-paths of local peculiarities. All of them, no doubt, had their meaning in times past, and therefore their use; if some, having now become unintelligible or even foolish forms, drop year by year into disuse, we can scarcely, from mere love of the olden days, regret them. But all the more tenaciously should we cling to those old customs, which have still a living soul in them, still a lesson to teach. Our forefathers, with their ready wit in finding means for impressing truth on the mind through the medium of the eye, showed a deeper knowledge of human nature than some of their sons, who boast so freely of the superior wisdom of the nineteenth century.

Church Bells: When and Why they were Rung.

BY FLORENCE PEACOCK.

Bells filled a much more important place in the lives of our ancestors than they do in ours. From the time that Britain became Christian until the Reformation, there was scarcely an event in public or private history into which they did not enter--they were rung to celebrate the birth of an heir to the rich and noble, they were heard at his daughter's marriage, and the marriages of his dependants; they sounded alike for high and low, rich and poor, when the soul was passing away; and again some hours after death had taken place; as well as at the funeral. On these occasions, and upon many others, it was the universal custom to ring them, but there were also what may be termed local events in honour of which they were chimed; these differed in various parts of the country; in many cases adjoining parishes followed totally different rules in this respect. Some of these customs are so quaint that they are worth recording, not only as memorials of a past that we can but dimly enter into, but as throwing considerable light upon the manners and doings of our forefathers.

As far as we are aware no complete collection of these old usages relating to the ringing of Church Bells has ever been made, though there is much valuable information to be found upon the subject in the various books upon bells which have been published during the last twenty-five years. It is said that year by year fewer bells are heard to ring upon the twenty-ninth of May, but "Oak-apple Day," as it is still called in many parts of England, is yet celebrated by the bells of Swineshead, amongst other places; and also by sprays of oak leaves being worn, though in the northern and eastern counties, if the season be a late one, it is somewhat difficult to obtain them. Some six or seven years ago many of the engines of trains running upon the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire Railway were decked with branches of oak on that day; and it is no uncommon thing to see the plough boy adorn the heads of his horses with sprays of oak leaves in memory of King Charles's escape. There is an entry in the churchwardens' accounts belonging to the church of St. Mary at Stamford:--"1709 Pd. Richard Hambleton for ale for the Ringers on ye 29 May ... 00 06 00." We find three years later the ringers at the church of All Saints in the same town received five shillings for ringing the bells upon the twenty-ninth of May. At Waddington it has been the custom from sometime which is now forgotten to ring one or two strokes on the tenor bell to publish the fact that an apprentice belonging to the parish is "out of his time." The fifth of November was a day of general bell-ringing all over the country, and we believe they are still sounded in many parts of England to call to mind the escape of King, Lords, and Commons from the Gunpowder Plot; Guy Fawkes is to be seen burning through the length and breadth of the land, and crackers and bonfires are usual. There is a curious inscription upon the second bell at Owmby, commemorating the events of 1605; it is dated 1687, and bears upon it:--

"LET VS REMEMBER THE 5 OF NOVEMBER."

The churchwardens' accounts of S. John the Baptist at Stamford contain the following entry:--"1608 Item paid for Rynging the vth of November vi{d}."

In some places the bells are rung to summon people to attend the vestry meeting which is held on the Monday after Easter Sunday, to elect the churchwardens for the following term of office, to pass the church accounts for the year, and to transact various other business; this is done amongst other places at Bottesford and Epworth (the latter celebrated as being the birth-place of John Wesley, the former for possessing the most perfect specimen of an Early English church to be found in the northern part of Lincolnshire).

On Shrove Tuesday it was the general custom in pre-Reformation times to call the people to church, that they might confess their sins before Lent; this was done by one of the bells being rung, or more likely tolled, but in later times the real reason for which its sound was heard has been forgotten by the people, and where the custom has been kept up it has now got to be called "The Pancake Bell," because it is usual to have pancakes upon this day, the last of feasting, before the fast of Lent begins, and Shrove Tuesday is often known by the name of "Pancake Tuesday." This bell is rung in a great many places, though the present writer never happened to hear it: noon is the usual time for it to be heard, and at Navenby it used to be rung by the eldest apprentice in the place, but this part of the custom is now obsolete. Our forefathers believed that the ringing of church bells had the effect of allaying storms; this is illustrated by an entry in the Spalding churchwardens' accounts:--"1519 It'm pd. for ryngng when the Tempest was, iijd."

In some parts of the country the bells were rung on the fifth of August to celebrate the escape of James I. from the Gowrie Plot; there are charges for ringing on this day to be found in the churchwardens' accounts of Kirton-in-Lindsey at various times during the seventeenth century. In the same parish there was also the custom of ringing what is in some parts of the country known as the "Market Bell," but here it was, and we believe is still, called the "Winter Ringing," because it was only done during the months of November, December, and January, from seven until eight o'clock, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings--on the former night to guide people home who had attended the Gainsborough market, and upon the latter to aid those who had been to Brigg market to find their way back again. This was a useful precaution when the country was unenclosed, as the sound of the bells told people when they were going in the right direction; the same was done in the neighbouring parish of Scotton on the Tuesday night. The custom is still kept up at Kirton-in-Lindsey during November and December, but we believe the bells are not heard upon these two evenings after Christmas, the modern idea being that the ringers are practising for that great festival of the Church.

Bells very often had names bestowed upon them; there is one in St. Mark's Church, Lincoln, always spoken of as "Old Kate," and "Great Tom" of Oxford has a world-wide reputation. Many old bells have unfortunately been sold, in some cases to obtain money with which to repair the churches; in others we fear the money merely went into the pocket of the holder of the living, or those of the churchwardens; it was for the former reason that two bells at Cadney were parted with during the last century. A writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, in 1849 (p. 158), states that there is reason to believe that, since the death of Edward VI., not less than four hundred bells have, from one cause or another, been lost in Lincolnshire alone.