St. Catharine’s Day.
Old Barnaby Googe, from Naogeorgus, says—
“What should I tell what sophisters on Cathrins day devise?
Or else the superstitious toyes that maisters exercise.”
Anciently women and girls in Ireland kept a fast every Wednesday and Saturday throughout the year, and some of them also on St. Catharine’s day; nor would they omit it though it happened on their birthday, or they were ever so ill. The reason given for it was that the girls might get good husbands, and the women better ones, either by the death, desertion, or reformation of their living ones.[392]
St. Catharine was esteemed the saint and patroness of spinsters, and her holiday observed by young women meeting on this day, and making merry together, which they call “Cathar’ning.”[393] Something of this still remains in remote parts of England.
Our correspondent R. R. (in November, 1825,) says, “On the 25th of November, St. Catharine’s day, a man dressed in woman’s clothes, with a large wheel by his side, to represent St. Catharine, was brought out of the royal arsenal at Woolwich, (by the workmen of that place,) about six o’clock in the evening, seated in a large wooden chair, and carried by men round the town, with attendants, &c. similar to St. Clement’s. They stopped at different houses, where they used to recite a speech; but this ceremony has been discontinued these last eight or nine years.”
Much might be said and contemplated in addition to the notice already taken of the demolition of the church of St. Catharine’s, near the Tower. Its destruction has commenced, is proceeding, and will be completed in a short time. The surrender of this edifice will, in the end, become a precedent for a spoliation imagined by very few on the day when he utters this foreboding.