Colonial days in old New York

by Alice Morse Earle

And Harmony her lyre now strings.

While plenty spreads her copious hoard,

And piles and crowns the festive board,”

etc., etc., for hundreds of lines.

The “copious hoard” of substantial food, with decanters of wine, bowls of milk punch, and pitchers of egg-nog, no longer “crown the festive board” on New Year’s Day; but we still have New Year’s Cakes, though not delivered by singing bakers’ ’prentices as of yore.

May Day was observed in similar fashion,—by firing of guns, gay visiting, and also by the rearing of maypoles.

A very early mention of a maypole is in June, 1645, when one William Garritse had “sung a libellous song” against Rev. Francis Doughty, the preacher at Flushing, Long Island, and was sentenced in punishment therefor to be tied to the maypole, which in June was still standing. Stuyvesant again forbade “drunken drinking,” and firing of guns and planting of maypoles, as productive of bad practices. I don’t know whether the delight of my childhood, and of generations of children in Old and New England up to this present May Day on which I am now writing,—the hanging of May baskets,—ever made happy children in New York.

There was some observance in New York of Shrovetide as a holiday-time. As early as 1657 we find the sober Beverwyck burghers deliberating on “some improprieties committed at the house of Albert de Timmerman on Shrovetide last.” As was the inevitable custom followed by the extremely uninventive brain of the seventeenth and eighteenth century rioter, were he Dutch or English, these “improprieties” took the form of the men’s parading in women’s clothes; Pieter Semiensen was one of the masqueraders. Two years later the magistrates were again investigating the “unseemly and scandalous” celebration of Shrovetide; and as ever before, the youth of early Albany donned women’s clothes and “marched as mountebanks,” as the record says, just as they did in Philadelphia and Baltimore and even in sober Boston. We find also for sale in Beverwyck at this time, noisy Shrovetide toys—rommelerytiens, little “rumbling-pots,” which the youth and children doubtless keenly enjoyed.

At an early date Shrovetide observances, such as “pulling the goose,” were prohibited by Governor Stuyvesant in New York. A mild protest on the part of some of the burgomasters against this order of the Governor brought forth one of Stuyvesant’s characteristically choleric edicts in answer, in which he speaks of having “interdicted and forbidden certain farmers’ servants to ride the goose at the feast of Backus and Shrovetide ... because it is altogether unprofitable, unnecessary, and criminal for subjects and neighbors to celebrate such pagan and popish feasts and to practise such customs, notwithstanding the same may in some places of Fatherland be tolerated and looked at through the fingers.” Domine Blom, of Kingston or Wyltwyck, joined in the governor’s dislike of the game. But there were some of the magistrates who liked very well to “pull the goose” themselves, so it is said. It was a cruel amusement. The thoroughly greased goose was hung between two poles, and the effort of the sport was to catch, snatch away, and hold fast the poor creature while passing at great speed. In Albany in 1677 all “Shrovetide misdemeanors were prohibited, viz.: riding at a goose, cat, hare, and ale.” The fine was twenty-five guilders in sea-want. What the cat, hare, and ale part of the sport was, I do not know.

In New York by the middle of the eighteenth century Shrove Tuesday was firmly assigned to cocking-mains. The De Lanceys were patrons of this choice old English sport. Cock-gaffs of silver and steel were freely offered for sale in New York and Maryland newspapers, and on Shrove Tuesday in 1770 Jacob Hiltzeheimer attended a famous cock-fight on the Germantown road. We cannot blame honest New Yorkers if they did not rise above such rude sports, when cock-fighting and cock-throwing and cock-squoiling and cock-steling obtained everywhere in Old England at Shrovetide; when school-boys had cock-fights in their school-rooms; and in earlier days good and learned old Roger Ascham ruined himself by betting on cock-fights, and Sir Thomas More boasted proudly of his skill in “casting a cock-stele.”