And follow Peter Bell.
And nothing green must make its appearance at a Scotch wedding. Kale and other green vegetables are rigidly excluded from the wedding-dinner. Jealousy has ever green eyes, and green grows the grass on Love’s grave.
Some omens may be obtained by the single at a wedding-feast. The bride in the North Country cuts a cheese (as in more fashionable regions she is the first to help the wedding-cake), and he who can secure the first piece that she cuts will insure happiness in his married life. If the “best man” does not secure the knife he will indeed be unfortunate. The maidens try to possess themselves of a “shaping” of the wedding-dress for use in certain divinations concerning their future husbands.[11]
In all ages and all parts of our island maidens have resorted to omens drawn from flowers respecting their sweethearts. Holly, ribwort, plantain, black centaury, yarrow, and a multitude more possess a great reputation in love matters. The lover must generally sleep on some one of these and repeat a charm, when pleasant dreams and faithful indications of a suitor will follow. “The last summer, on the day of St. John the Baptist, 1694,” says Aubrey, “I accidentally was walking in the pasture behind Montague House; it was twelve o’clock. I saw there about two or three and twenty young women, most of them well habited, on their knees very busy, as if they had been weeding. I could not presently learn what the matter was; at last a young man told me that they were looking for a coal under the root of a plantain, to put under their head that night, and they should dream who would be their husbands. It was to be sought for that day and hour.”[12]
But the day of all others sacred to these mystic rites was ever the eve of St. Agnes (January 20), when maidens fasted and then watched for a sign. A passage in the office for St. Agnes’s Day in the Sarum Missal may have given rise to this custom: “Hæc est virgo sapiens quam Dominus vigilantem invenit;” and the Gospel is the Parable of the Virgins.[13] Ben Jonson alludes to the custom:—
On sweet St. Agnes’ night
Please you with the promised sight,
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers.
And a character in “Cupid’s Whirligig” (1616) says, “I could find in my heart to pray nine times to the moone, and fast three St. Agnes’s Eves, so that I might bee sure to have him to my husband.” Aubrey gives two receipts to the ladies for that eve, which may still be useful. Take a row of pins and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Paternoster, and sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him you shall marry. Again, “you must lie in another country, and knit the left garter about the right-legged stocking (let the other garter and stocking alone), and as you rehearse these following verses, at every comma knit a knot:—