At Castleton the boys also kissed the girls on Valentine’s Day, and the schoolmaster had to let the girls go home before the boys to prevent the boys from kissing them.
“Cucking” was a very rough practice, and it sometimes led to charges of assault being made before the magistrates. At Castleton it was sometimes done by putting a “fork stale” or fork handle under the girl’s legs and lifting her up. It required two young men to do this. More frequently two men seized a girl by the arms and shoulders, tossed her up, and caught her as she fell. It is said at Bradwell that more girls were seen out on Unlousing Day than on any other day. The day is sometimes known as Cucking Day.
At Bradwell and Castleton parents tell their children to put pins into wells on Palm Sunday, or if they fail to do so they will break their bottles on the following Easter Monday. The pins must be new and straight, not crooked. I have talked to children who have done this, and one of them, a girl about fourteen years old, said the children go in great numbers on the afternoon of Palm Sunday to a well in Bradwell, “behind Micklow.” She took me to the well herself in October, 1901. It is divided into two parts by the boundary wall of a field, and is so small that I should never have found it alone. The Bradwell children used also to drop pins on this day into a well in Charlotte Lane, and also into a pond between Bradwell and Brough. Mr. Robert Bradwell, of Bradwell, aged 88, told me that on Palm Sunday “the children used to put new pins into lady wells, and the lady of the well would not let them have clean water unless they did that.” There is a lady well at the back of the castle at Castleton, from which the children used to fill their bottles at Easter, and there is another at Great Hucklow, or Big Hucklow, as some call it, from which they filled their bottles. Mr. Bradwell said the object of the children was “to get clean water by the lady’s influence. They had to do what the lady required. It was a fairy, or else an insect. On Easter Monday, a father or mother would say to a child, ‘If tha’s put no new pin in, there’ll be no clean water for thee.’” Mrs. Harriet Middleton, aged 83, once lost her slippers in the snow when she was going to put a pin in the well near Micklow. She and other young girls would have gone through snow or any weather to put them in.
The Keep: Peverel Castle.
Little Hucklow: Folk-Collector’s Summer House.
At Castleton, Bradwell, and other places in the neighbourhood, Easter Monday is known as Shakking Monday. At Bradwell the children get glass bottles, such as medicine bottles, and fill them with water. They then put in pieces of peppermint cakes of various colours, but generally pink. These peppermint cakes are quite different from ordinary peppermint lozenges. They are big things, two or three inches wide, and are square or oblong in shape. The children break them up, put the broken pieces into the bottles, shake the mixture, and drink it. Some of the children tie the bottles round their necks. The sweetened water lasts for many days, and they take a drink of it from time to time. At Castleton and Aston the children put Spanish juice or “pink musks” into the water.
They say at Bradwell that unless you wear something new on Easter Sunday the birds will drop their excrement on you.
On Good Friday the lead-miners of Bradwell would on no account go into the mines. They would do any other kind of work on that day.