[807] Bede, D. T. R. c. 15 ‘ipsam noctem nobis sacrosanctam, tunc gentili vocabulo Modranicht [v.l. Modraneht], id est, matrum noctem appellabant; ob causam ut suspicamur ceremoniarum, quas in ea pervigiles agebant.’
[808] Mogk, iii. 391. Tille, Y. and C. 152, gives some earlier explanations, criticizes that of Mogk, and offers as his own a reference to a custom of baking a cake (placenta) to represent the physical motherhood of the Virgin. The practice doubtless existed and was condemned by Pope Hormisdas (514-23), by the Lateran Council of 649, the Council of Hatfield (680), and the Trullan Council (692). But Bede must have known this as a Christian abuse, and he is quite plainly speaking of a pre-Christian custom. J. M. Neale, Essays in Liturgiology (1867), 511, says, ‘In most Celtic languages Christmas eve is called the night of Mary,’ the Virgin, here as elsewhere, taking over the cult of the mother-goddesses.
[809] Tille, Y. and C. 65. In his earlier book D. W. 7, 29, Dr. Tille held the view that there had always been a second winter feast about three weeks after the first, when the males held over for breeding were slain.
[810] According to Bede, D. T. R. c. 15, the Anglo-Saxons had adopted the system of intercalary months which belongs to the pre-Julian and not the Julian Roman calendar. But Bede’s chapter is full of confusions: cf. Tille, Y. and C. 145.
[811] All Saints’ day or Hallowmas (November 1) and All Souls’ day (November 2) have largely, though not wholly, absorbed the November feast of the Dead.
[812] Pfannenschmidt, 203; Jahn, 229; Tille, Y. and C. 21, 28, 36, 42, 57; D. W. 23.
[813] Tille, D. W. 29; Müller, 239, 248. According to Tille, D. W. 63, Christmas only replaced the days of St. Martin and St. Nicholas as a German children’s festival in the sixteenth century.
[814] Tille, Y. and C. 34, 65; Pfannenschmidt, 206; Dyer, 418; N. Drake, Shakespeare and his Times (1838), 93. Martinmas was a favourite Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval legal term. It survived also as a traditional ‘tyme of slauchter’ for cattle. ‘Martlemas beef’ was a common term for salt beef. In Scotland a Mart is a fat cow or bullock, but the derivation of this appears to be from a Celtic word Mart = cow.
[815] Rhys, in F. L. ii. 308.
[816] Mommsen, C. I. L. i2. 287; Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. s. v. Bruma; Tomaschek, in Sitzb. Akad. Wiss. Wien, lx (1869), 358.