Formerly, on this day, boys used to go about clacking at doors, to get eggs or bits of bacon wherewith to make up a feast among themselves; and, when refused, would stop the keyhole up with dirt, and depart with a rhymed denunciation.—Book of Days, vol. i. p. 240. We learn also from Fosbroke’s British Monachism (1843) that in days gone by boys used on the evening of Ash Wednesday to run about with firebrands and torches.
In former times during the season of Lent, an officer denominated “The King’s Cock-Crower” crowed the hour every night within the precincts of the palace, instead of proclaiming it in the ordinary manner. On the first Ash Wednesday after the accession of the House of Hanover, as the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., was sitting down to supper, this officer suddenly entered the apartment, before the chaplain said grace, and crowed “past ten o’clock.” The astonished Prince, not understanding English, and mistaking the tremulation of the crow for mockery, concluded that this ceremony was intended as an insult, and instantly rose to resent it; when, with some difficulty, he was made to understand the nature of the custom, and that it was intended as a compliment, and according to court etiquette. From that period the custom was discontinued.
The intention of crowing the hour of the night was no doubt intended to remind waking sinners of the august effect the third crowing of the cock had on the guilty Apostle St. Peter; and the limitation of the custom to the season of Lent was judiciously adopted; as, had the practice continued throughout the year, the impenitent would become as habituated and as indifferent to the crow of the mimic cock as they are to that of the real one, or to the cry of the watchmen. The adaptation to the precincts of the Court seems also to have had a view, as if the institutor (probably the Royal Confessor) had considered that the greater and more obdurate sinners resided within the purlieus of the palace.—Gent. Mag. 1785, vol. lv. p. 341.
The beginning of Lent was at one time marked by a custom now fallen into disuse. A figure, made up of straw and cast-off clothes, was drawn or carried through the streets amid much noise and merriment; after which it was either burnt, shot at, or thrown down a chimney. This image was called “Jack o’Lent,” and was, according to some, intended to represent Judas Iscariot. Elderton, in a ballad, called Lenton Stuff, in a MS. in the Ashmolean Museum, thus concludes his account of Lent:
“Then Jake a’ Lent comes justlynge in,
With the hedpecce of a herynge,
And saythe, repent yowe of yower syn,
For shame, syrs, leve yower swerynge:
And to Palme Sonday doethe he ryde,
With sprots and herryngs by hys syde,
And makes an end of Lenton tyde!”
N. & Q. 1st S. vol. xii. p. 297.
In Ben Jonson’s Tale of a Tub, occurs the following:
—“On an Ash Wednesday,
When thou didst stand six weeks the Jack o’ Lent,
For boys to hurl three throws a penny at thee.”
Brand’s Pop. Antiq. 1849, vol. i. p. 101.
It was once customary for persons to wear black cloth during Lent. Roberts in his Cambrian Pop. Antiq. (1815, 112), says this usage was entirely laid aside in his time; but of late years it has been somewhat revived.