CHAPTER VI
VILLAGE FESTIVALS
[Bibliographical Note.—A systematic calendar of English festival usages by a competent folk-lorist is much needed. J. Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777), based on H. Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares (1725), and edited, first by Sir Henry Ellis in 1813, 1841-2 and 1849, and then by W. C. Hazlitt in 1870, is full of valuable material, but belongs to the age of pre-scientific antiquarianism. R. T. Hampson, Medii Aevi Kalendarium (1841), is no less unsatisfactory. In default of anything better, T. F. T. Dyer, British Popular Customs (1891), is a useful compilation from printed sources, and P. H. Ditchfield, Old English Customs (1896), a gossipy account of contemporary survivals. These may be supplemented from collections of more limited range, such as H. J. Feasey, Ancient English Holy Week Ceremonial (1897), and J. E. Vaux, Church Folk-Lore (1894); by treatises on local folk-lore, of which W. Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (2nd ed. 1879), C. S. Burne and G. F. Jackson, Shropshire Folk-Lore (1883-5), and J. Rhys, Celtic Folk-Lore, Welsh and Manx (1901), are the best; and by the various publications of the Folk-Lore Society, especially the series of County Folk-Lore (1895-9) and the successive periodicals, The Folk-Lore Record (1878-82), Folk-Lore Journal (1883-9), and Folk-Lore (1890-1903). Popular accounts of French fêtes are given by E. Cortet, Essai sur les Fêtes religieuses (1867), and O. Havard, Les Fêtes de nos Pères (1898). L. J. B. Bérenger-Féraud, Superstitions et Survivances (1896), is more pretentious, but not really scholarly. C. Leber, Dissertations relatives à l’Histoire de France (1826-38), vol. ix, contains interesting material of an historical character, largely drawn from papers in the eighteenth-century periodical Le Mercure de France. Amongst German books, J. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology (transl. J. S. Stallybrass, 1880-8), H. Pfannenschmidt, Germanische Erntefeste (1878), and U. Jahn, Die deutschen Opfergebräuche bei Ackerbau und Viehzucht (1884), are all excellent. Many of the books mentioned in the bibliographical note to the last chapter remain useful for the present and following ones; in particular J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (2nd ed. 1900), is, of course, invaluable. I have only included in the above list such works of general range as I have actually made most use of. Many others dealing with special points are cited in the notes. A fuller guide to folk-lore literature will be found in M. R. Cox, Introduction to Folklore (2nd ed. 1897).]
The central fact of the agricultural festivals is the presence in the village of the fertilization spirit in the visible and tangible form of flowers and green foliage or of the fruits of the earth. Thus, when the peasants do their ‘observaunce to a morn of May,’ great boughs of hawthorn are cut before daybreak in the woods, and carried, with other seasonable leafage and blossom, into the village street. Lads plant branches before the doors of their mistresses. The folk deck themselves, their houses, and the church in green. Some of them are clad almost entirely in wreaths and tutties, and become walking bushes, ‘Jacks i’ the green.’ The revel centres in dance and song around a young tree set up in some open space of the village, or a more permanent May-pole adorned for the occasion with fresh garlands. A large garland, often with an anthropomorphic representation of the fertilization spirit in the form of a doll, parades the streets, and is accompanied by a ‘king’ or ‘queen,’ or a ‘king’ and ‘queen’ together. Such a garland finds its place at all the seasonal feasts; but whereas in spring and summer it is naturally made of the new vegetation, at harvest it as naturally takes the form of a sheaf, often the last sheaf cut, of the corn. Then it is known as the ‘harvest-May’ or the ‘neck,’ or if it is anthropomorphic in character, as the ‘kern-baby.’ Summer and harvest garlands alike are not destroyed when the festival is over, but remain hung up on the May-pole or the church or the barn-door until the season for their annual renewing comes round. And sometimes the grain of the ‘harvest-May’ is mingled in the spring with the seed-corn[384].
The rationale of such customs is fairly simple. They depend upon a notion of sympathetic magic carried on into the animistic stage of belief. Their object is to secure the beneficent influence of the fertilization spirit by bringing the persons or places to be benefited into direct contact with the physical embodiment of that spirit. In the burgeoning quick set up on the village green is the divine presence. The worshipper clad in leaves and flowers has made himself a garment of the god, and is therefore in a very special sense under his protection. Thus efficacy in folk-belief of physical contact may be illustrated by another set of practices in which recourse is had to the fertilization spirit for the cure of disease. A child suffering from croup, convulsions, rickets, or other ailment, is passed through a hole in a split tree, or beneath a bramble rooted at both ends, or a strip of turf partly raised from the ground. It is the actual touch of earth or stem that works the healing[385].
May-pole or church may represent a focus of the cult at some specially sacred tree or grove in the heathen village. But the ceremony, though it centres at these, is not confined to them, for its whole purpose is to distribute the benign influence over the entire community, every field, fold, pasture, orchard close and homestead thereof. At ploughing, the driving of the first furrow; at harvest, the homecoming of the last wain, is attended with ritual. Probably all the primitive festivals, and certainly that of high summer, included a lustration, in which the image or tree which stood for the fertilization spirit was borne in solemn procession from dwelling to dwelling and round all the boundaries of the village. Tacitus records the progress of the earth-goddess Nerthus amongst the German tribes about the mouth of the Elbe, and the dipping of the goddess and the drowning of her slaves in a lake at the term of the ceremony[386]. So too at Upsala in Sweden the statue of Freyr went round when winter was at an end[387]; while Sozomenes tells how, when Ulfilas was preaching Christianity to the Visigoths, Athanaric sent the image of his god abroad in a wagon, and burnt the houses of all who refused to bow down and sacrifice[388]. Such lustrations continue to be a prominent feature of the folk survivals. They are preserved in a number of processional customs in all parts of England; in the municipal ‘ridings,’ ‘shows,’ or ‘watches’ on St. George’s[389] or Midsummer[390] days; in the ‘Godiva’ procession at Coventry[391], the ‘Bezant’ procession at Shaftesbury[392]. Hardly a rural merry-making or wake, indeed, is without its procession; if it is only in the simple form of the quête which the children consider themselves entitled to make, with their May-garland, or on some other traditional pretext, at various seasons of the calendar. Obviously in becoming mere quêtes, collections of eggs, cakes and so forth, or even of small coins, as well as in falling entirely into the hands of the children, the processions have to some extent lost their original character. But the notion that the visit is to bring good fortune, or the ‘May’ or the ‘summer’ to the household, is not wholly forgotten in the rhymes used[393]. An interesting version of the ceremony is the ‘furry’ or ‘faddy’ dance formerly used at Helston wake; for in this the oak-decked dancers claimed the right to pass in at one door and out at another through every house in the village[394].
Room has been found for the summer lustrations in the scheme of the Church. In Catholic countries the statue of the local saint is commonly carried round the village, either annually on his feast-day or in times of exceptional trouble[395]. The inter-relations of ecclesiastical and folk-ritual in this respect are singularly illustrated by the celebration of St. Ubaldo’s eve (May 15) at Gubbio in Umbria. The folk procession of the Ceri is a very complete variety of the summer festival. After vespers the clergy also hold a procession in honour of the saint. At a certain point the two companies meet. An interchange of courtesies takes place. The priest elevates the host; the bearers of the Ceri bow them to the ground; and each procession passes on its way[396]. In England the summer lustrations take an ecclesiastical form in the Rogations or ‘bannering’ of ‘Gang-week,’ a ceremony which itself appears to be based on very similar folk-customs of southern Europe[397]. Since the Reformation the Rogations have come to be regarded as little more than a ‘beating of the bounds.’ But the declared intention of them was originally to call for a blessing upon the fruits of the earth; and it is not difficult to trace folk-elements in the ‘gospel oaks’ and ‘gospel wells’ at which station was made and the gospel read, in the peeled willow wands borne by the boys who accompany the procession, in the whipping or ‘bumping’ of the said boys at the stations, and in the choice of ‘Gang-week’ for such agricultural rites as ‘youling’ and ‘well-dressing[398].’
Some anthropomorphic representation of the fertilization spirit is a common, though not an invariable element in the lustration. A doll is set on the garland, or some popular ‘giant’ or other image is carried round[399]. Nor is it surprising that at the early spring festival which survives in Plough Monday, the plough itself, the central instrument of the opening labour, figures. A variant of this custom may be traced in certain maritime districts, where the functions of the agricultural deities have been extended to include the oversight of seafaring. Here it is not a plough but a boat or ship that makes its rounds, when the fishing season is about to begin. Ship processions are to be found in various parts of Germany[400]; at Minehead, Plymouth, and Devonport in the west of England, and probably also at Hull in the north[401].
The magical notions which, in part at least, explain the garland customs of the agricultural festival, are still more strongly at work in some of its subsidiary rites. These declare themselves, when understood, to be of an essentially practical character, charms designed to influence the weather, and to secure the proper alternation of moisture and warmth which is needed alike for the growth and ripening of the crops and for the welfare of the cattle. They are probably even older than the garland-customs, for they do not imply the animistic conception of a fertilization spirit immanent in leaf and blossom; and they depend not only upon the ‘sympathetic’ principle of influence by direct contact already illustrated, but also upon that other principle of similarity distinguished by Dr. Frazer as the basis of what he calls ‘mimetic’ magic. To the primitive mind the obvious way of obtaining a result in nature is to make an imitation of it on a small scale. To achieve rain, water must be splashed about, or some other characteristic of a storm or shower must be reproduced. To achieve sunshine, a fire must be lit, or some other representation of the appearance and motion of the sun must be devised. Both rain-charms and sun-charms are very clearly recognizable in the village ritual.
As rain-charms, conscious or unconscious, must be classified the many festival customs in which bathing or sprinkling holds an important place. The image or bough which represents the fertilization spirit is solemnly dipped in or drenched with water. Here is the explanation of the ceremonial bathing of the goddess Nerthus recorded by Tacitus. It has its parallels in the dipping of the images of saints in the feast-day processions of many Catholic villages, and in the buckets of water sometimes thrown over May-pole or harvest-May. Nor is the dipping or drenching confined to the fertilization spirit. In order that the beneficent influences of the rite may be spread widely abroad, water is thrown on the fields and on the plough, while the worshippers themselves, or a representative chosen from among them, are sprinkled or immersed. To this practice many survivals bear evidence; the virtues persistently ascribed to dew gathered on May morning, the ceremonial bathing of women annually or in times of drought with the expressed purpose of bringing fruitfulness on man or beast or crop, the ‘ducking’ customs which play no inconsiderable part in the traditions of many a rural merry-making. Naturally enough, the original sense of the rite has been generally perverted. The ‘ducking’ has become either mere horse-play or else a rough-and-ready form of punishment for offences, real or imaginary, against the rustic code of conduct. The churl who will not stop working or will not wear green on the feast-day must be ‘ducked,’ and under the form of the ‘cucking-stool,’ the ceremony has almost worked its way into formal jurisprudence as an appropriate treatment for feminine offenders. So, too, it has been with the ‘ducking’ of the divinity. When the modern French peasant throws the image of his saint into the water, he believes himself to be doing it, not as a mimetic rain-charm, but as a punishment to compel a power obdurate to prayer to grant through fear the required boon.
The rain-charms took place, doubtless, at such wells, springs, or brooks as the lustral procession passed in its progress round the village. It is also possible that there may have been, sometimes or always, a well within the sacred grove itself and hard by the sacred tree. The sanctity derived by such wells and streams from the use of them in the cult of the fertilization spirit is probably what is really intended by the water-worship so often ascribed to the heathen of western Europe, and coupled closely with tree-worship in the Christian discipline-books. The goddess of the tree was also the goddess of the well. At the conversion her wells were taken over by the new religion. They became holy wells, under the protection of the Virgin or one of the saints. And they continued to be approached with the same rites as of old, for the purpose of obtaining the ancient boons for which the fertilization spirit had always been invoked. It will not be forgotten that, besides the public cult of the fertilization spirit for the welfare of the crops and herds, there was also a private cult, which aimed at such more personal objects of desire as health, success in love and marriage, and divination of the future. It is this private cult that is most markedly preserved in modern holy well customs. These may be briefly summarized as follows[402]. The wells are sought for procuring a husband or children, for healing diseases, especially eye-ailments or warts, and for omens, these too most often in relation to wedlock. The worshipper bathes wholly or in part, or drinks the water. Silence is often enjoined, or a motion deasil, that is, with the sun’s course, round the well. Occasionally cakes are eaten, or sugar and water drunk, or the well-water is splashed on a stone. Very commonly rags or bits of wool or hair are laid under a pebble or hung on a bush near the well, or pins, more rarely coins or even articles of food, are thrown into it. The objects so left are not probably to be regarded as offerings; the intention is rather to bring the worshipper, through the medium of his hair or clothes, or some object belonging to him, into direct contact with the divinity. The close connexion between tree-and well-cult is shown by the use of the neighbouring bush on which to hang the rags. And the practice of dropping pins into the well is almost exactly paralleled by that of driving nails ‘for luck’ into a sacred tree or its later representative, a cross or saintly image. The theory may be hazarded that originally the sacred well was never found without the sacred tree beside it. This is by no means the case now; but it must be remembered that a tree is much more perishable than a well. The tree once gone, its part in the ceremony would drop out, or be transferred to the well. But the original rite would include them both. The visitant, for instance, would dip in the well, and then creep under or through the tree, a double ritual which seems to survive in the most curious of all the dramatic games of children, ‘Draw a Pail of Water[403].’