At Castleton burying cakes and warm ale were handed round at funerals. Burying cakes, said one of my informants, were three-cornered, and big enough to be carried under the arm. But another informant said they were round, and seven or eight inches across. They cut them into slices, and handed them round with warm ale.
At Castleton the funerals of poor people were known as “pay-buryings.” The guests used to give something towards the expenses, and an old woman with a white cap on used to sit in a chair in the corner, or in an armchair by the fire, and receive the money.
At Bradwell an old farmer called Jacob Eyre was expected to attend all funerals. A basket like a butter basket hung on one of his arms, and with the other arm he used to “deal out” pieces of bread to children standing round the door. Plenty of children gathered together at the funerals for the sake of the bread. The pieces of bread were three or four inches square, and they were either got from a bakehouse, or the relatives made it themselves. The old man was “very complimentary” to the children. He pleased them, joked, and made them laugh. What he said was very pleasant and nice. It was a regular custom in Bradwell, but it was not continued after Jacob Eyre’s death. He died many years ago.[126]
Mrs. George Middleton, of Smalldale, widow, aged 45, said that her mother used to dress coffins with flowers at Abney, where she lived. But she did not put thyme on them, for she said “they had nothing to do with time.” But she said that whenever one of the Twelve Oddfellows at Bradwell dies, the survivors march before his coffin and sing, each surviving oddfellow carrying a sprig of thyme in his hand, which he drops on the coffin. Mrs. Middleton thought that one of their printed rules provided for this being done, but I did not find it in them. Mrs. Middleton said that her mother was present at all births and laying out of corpses at Abney, not as part of her duty, but because she liked to be there. “Funeral bread,” she said, “was made in a peculiar way.” Mrs. Middleton said it was the custom at Abney to put thyme in a house after a death and before the funeral, and also southern wood, old man, or lad’s love, these being names for the same plant.
In Eyam there was a “custom of anointing deceased children with May-dew.”[127]
Wakes
At Thornhill near Hope they have two barrels of ale at the wakes, and they feast in a barn. They dance and sing.
Mr. Robert Bradwell, of Bradwell, aged 88, told me in 1901 that “every day weakened the wake time. A few old women used to stand across the road at Castleton at the end of the wake week with a rope to keep the wakes in. There is only one road in Castleton—that leading from Hope.” Mr. Bradwell said he had never seen a rope tied across the road to keep the wakes in, and that it was a superstition by which they intended to prolong the wakes. I put questions to many people in Castleton about this, but found nobody who had heard of it.
At Bradwell wakes, which begin on the second Sunday in July, children got their new clothes, and all sorts of cleaning and whitewashing were done against that time. At Castleton also the children had new clothes, and the houses were whitewashed. They “fettled and cleaned for the wakes.”[128]
At Castleton on wakes even, i.e., on the Saturday night before the feast begins, they pulled trees up in gardens, hung gates in trees, hid the farmers’ carts, and took them anywhere.