Outside, in the garden, grew homely flowers and useful vegetables, and perhaps by the gnarled apple-tree there stood in the sun a row of bee-hives. Sussex superstition declared that they might, indeed, be purchased, but not for silver:
If you wish your bees to thrive,
Gold must be paid for ev’ry hive;
For when they’re bought with other money,
There will be neither swarm nor honey.
The year was one long round of superstitious customs and observances, and it is not without them, even now. But superstition is shy and not visible on the surface.
In January began the round, for from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Day was the proper time for “worsling,” that is “wassailing” the orchards, but more particularly the apple-trees. The country-folk would gather round the trees and chant in chorus, rapping the trunks the while with sticks:
Stand fast root, bear well top;
Pray, good God, send us a howling crop
Ev’ry twig, apples big;
Ev’ry bough, apples enow’;
Hats full, caps full,
Full quarters, sacks full.
These wassailing folk were generally known as “howlers”; “doubtless rightly,” says a Sussex archæologist, “for real old Sussex music is in a minor key, and can hardly be distinguished from howling.” This knowledge enlightens our reading of the pages of the Rev. Giles Moore, of Horsted Keynes, when he records: “1670, 26th Dec., I gave the howling boys 6d.;” a statement which, if not illumined by acquaintance with these old customs, would be altogether incomprehensible.
Then, if mud were brought into the house in the month of January, the cleanly housewife, at other times jealous of her spotless floors, would have nothing of reproof to say, for was this not “January butter.” and the harbinger of luck to all beneath the roof-tree?
Saints’ days, too, had their observances; the habits of bird and beast were the almanacs and weather warnings of the villagers, all innocent of any other meteorological department, and they have been handed down in doggerel rhyme, like this of the Cuckoo, to the present day:
In April he shows his bill,
In May he sings o’ night and day,
In June he’ll change his tune,
By July prepare to fly,
By August away he must.
If he stay till September,
’Tis as much as the oldest man
Can ever remember.
If he stayed till September, he might possibly see a sight which no mere human eye ever beheld: he might observe a practice to which old Sussex folk know the Evil One to be addicted. For on Old Michaelmas Day, October 10th, the Devil goes round the country, and—dirty devil—spits on the blackberries. Should any persons eat one on October 11th, they, or some one of their kin, will surely die or fall into great trouble before the close of the year.