In parts of Cornwall a straw figure dressed in cast-off clothes and called Jack o’ Lent was formerly carried round and then burned at the beginning of Lent. The effigy was probably originally meant to represent Judas Iscariot. Now the term is applied to a scarecrow, and, as a contemptuous epithet, also to persons (Nhp. Dor.).
The Sundays in Lent, beginning with the second Sunday, are thus enumerated in an old north-country saying: Tid, Mid, Misera, Carlin, Palm, Pace egg day. It is supposed that Tid is a corruption of Te Deum, and that Misera is based on the opening words of the penitential Psalm Miserere mei, Deus. The fourth Sunday in Lent is, however, more generally known as Mothering Sunday, the day on which it was always customary for the scattered members of the family to visit the mother in the old home, carrying some small present for her in their hands. Special cakes and dishes were associated with this festival, the most popular being simnel cakes, and frummety, a dish made of hulled wheat, boiled in milk, and seasoned with sugar and spice. In some places the usual fare was veal and rice pudding; and in others fig-pie—made of dried figs, sugar, treacle, and spice—was the standing dish. In Berkshire at the present time it is considered the proper thing to eat fig-pudding on Palm Sunday.
Carl Sunday, or Carling Sunday (Sc. n.Cy.), takes its name from the grey or brown peas prepared and eaten on this day. They must be steeped all night in water, and then fried in butter. To account for this usage one tradition states that it commemorates the action of the disciples, who, going through the corn fields on the Sabbath day, ‘plucked the cars of corn, and did eat, rubbing them in their hands,’ St. Luke vi. 1; whilst a second associates it with a famine in Newcastle, which was relieved by the arrival of a ship bearing a cargo of grey peas or carlings.
Palm Sunday
On Palm Sunday village churches used to be decorated with the catkin-laden twigs of the common sallow, or, as in Kent, with branches of yew, according to the local interpretation of the word palm. Going a-palming (Ken.) meant gathering yew twigs on the Saturday before Palm Sunday for this purpose. In some s.Midland counties Palm Sunday is known as Fig Sunday, dried figs being largely consumed on this day. The probable explanation of this practice lies in the fact that in the Gospel narrative the cursing of the barren fig-tree is the first recorded incident of the day following that of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, cp. St. Mark xi. 12-14, with the result that in the popular mind the events of two days were merged together, and the fig was adopted as an appropriate part of the Palm Sunday festival.
Good Friday
An old Cheshire name for Good Friday is Care Friday, a preservation of the original meaning of the word care, O.E. caru, sorrow, trouble; cp. Germ. Karfreitag, Good Friday. In Lancashire it was termed Long Friday, and also Crackling Friday, from a special kind of wheaten cake given to children on this day. The custom of eating Hot Cross buns is common even in towns, though probably nobody now preserves them throughout the year as a specific against diarrhoea. Up to the middle of last century people afflicted with eye-diseases used on Good Friday to visit St. Margaret’s Well, near Wellington, in Shropshire, a stone cistern containing spring water which was supposed on this day to possess eye-healing virtues. A Good Friday sport called cock-kibbit, practised in parts of Devonshire by boys, would seem to be a kind of survival of the old Shrove Tuesday cock-throwing. A live cock is put under an inverted earthenware milk-pan, and then cudgels or kibbits are thrown at the pan from a fixed distance until the pan is broken and the cock thus released. The cock is then chased by the whole company, and it becomes the joint property of its captor and the breaker of the milk-pan.
The custom amongst farmers of sowing and planting on Good Friday to ensure lucky crops we have already noticed in a previous chapter. For the sowing of onion seed, however, a still more propitious day is March 12, the Feast of St. Gregory.
The day after Good Friday was formerly known in East Anglia as Shitten Saturday, that is Shut-in-Saturday, the day on which the body of the Lord lay shut in the tomb.
Pace-eggs