The Antiquary.

NOVEMBER, 1882.

Martinmas.*

EN these days of material progress and secular ideas, it requires a considerable effort of imagination to throw oneself back into the state of mind of our medieval ancestors, so as to realize fully the depth and intensity of that religious feeling which led them to associate every action of their daily lives with the hopes of eternity, under the direct teaching and guidance of the Church. In business as well as in pleasure, in the market as well as in the house, in public as well as in private, they looked in all their doings for the guiding and protecting influence of one or other of the numerous saints-either deceased martyrs, or other holy members of the church, or angelic beings-who, according to their conceptions of the universe, stood between them and God.

This feeling was strongly manifested in the specific appropriation of certain saints' days, or other festivals of the Church, to particular transactions of civil life. This particular form or mode of its manifestation does not carry us back to primitive society. It was essentially Christian, and medieval. It may have been similar in spirit to the feelings which actuated men in earlier times, but the development was its own. The philosopher who sacrificed a cock to Esculapius may have been the forerunner of the devotee who gave his offering at the altar or the shrine of his

*We have edited this article from the materials collected by the distinguished scholar who had engaged to write it. Just before the time when we should have received the MSS., a severe family bereavement, for which we cannot but express our sincere sympathy, prevented him from finishing the article. -[ED.]

VOL. VI.

patron saint, but the methods were certainly different, though the principle may possibly have been the same. The medieval method was neither a survival nor a revival of specific forms, but a new growth, or at least a new manifestation in form, if not in substance.

Of the eight established quarter-days, including the four main quarter-days and the four so-called cross quarter-days, five are designated by the word mas. These are, in fact, the last five in the order of succession, reckoning Lady Day as the commencement of the year; but this may be accidental. The names stand thus :

Lady Day (Easter):

Whitsuntide.

Mid-summer:

Lammas.

Michaelmas :

Martinmas.

Christmas:

Candlemas.

The natural associations of Midsummer have maintained their ground, and the name of Saint John the Baptist has not superseded the designation of Midsummer-day, although the name of Christmas has superseded that of Midwinter.

The word mas in Lam-mas, Michael-mas, Martin-mas, Christ-mas, and Candle-mas, means a feast or festival, though it is not now used as a separate word in that sense. Whether this word has any connection with mass, meaning the Host or Eucharistic service in the Roman Catholic Church, and if so, what are the nature and extent of the connection, are interesting but difficult problems. If the two words are connected, we are naturally led to inquire whether a "massday," in the sense of a feast day, holy day, holiday, was so called because it was commemorated by the celebration of the "mass;" or whether the mass was so called because it was a commemoration of the last feast or supper of Christ and his disciples. The laws of Alfred use the word in the law (c. 43) which provides for the "mass-days," ie., holidays, to be allowed to freemen. The full text of this law, in Thorpe's translation, (Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, vol. i. p. 93) is as follows:

Of the celebration of Mass-Days. 43. To all freemen let these days be given, but not to theow'-men and 'esne'-workmen: xii days at Yule, and the day on which Christ overcame the devil, and the commemoration day of Saint Gregory, and vii days before Easter and vii days after, and one day at Saint Peters's tide and Saint Paul's, and in harvest the whole week before Saint Mary-mass, and one day at the celebration of All Hallows and the iv Wednesdays in the iv Ember weeks. To all 'theow'. men be given, to those to whom it may be most desirable to give, whatever any man shall give them in God's name, or that at any of their moments may deserve.

It may be worth while to note, however, that a very different, or rather an exactly opposite, view of the origin and meaning of the expression, was entertained in the eighteenth century by some English lexicographers. Thus, Fenning's Dictionary, 1741, gives the following curious explanation of the word mass"-"In Divinity, this word originally implied only a festival, and was in this sense used in the word Christmas, long before the introduction of the sacrament of the mass, but at length it was used to signify the Eucharist, and is at present appropriated

to the office or public prayers, used by the Romish Church in the celebration of the Eucharist." This explanation is repeated in Rider's Dictionary (1759), and in Barlow's Dictionary (1772).

Into the question of the association of St. Martin with the popular customs of the times we do not propose to enter. This subject opens up a much broader issue than the limits of an article devoted to one particular festival; because the history of the absorption of pagan customs into Christian ritual and observances has yet to be written. Many writers have touched upon the subject, and there are ample materials for its elucidation, but it is a complicated and extensive study, which will afford a rich mine of investigation to the author who succeeds in working it out satisfactorily. It appears to us, however, that the matter may be put generally in this manner. Under the early rule of Christianity, the people did not so much give up their pagan customs and beliefs as they crystallized them, so to speak, round some celebrated holy day of the church. Thus St. Martin's Day is essentially a feast day. Sir Henry Ellis gathered together in his edition of Brand the evidences of this. It was the time when

the people slaughtered their cattle, and stored it for winter use. Under the extending influences of commerce we cannot quite understand how this should have been sufficiently important a custom to have become so significantly impressed upon the folklore of our land. But just step back into the past a little. Imagine every village of England a self-supporting community-its own arable lands, its own grazing lands. Contemplate the approach of winter to this isolated community, and we can contemplate the festivities which would usher in the season for preparing the food store for the coming months of cold and snow. This appears to be the general

association of Martinmas with the circumstances of a very ancient past. But the general association can be intensified into some more definite identification with early village life than this. Almost every act of the primitive villager is more or less connected with a very extensive and honoured housereligion. The homestead of early man was protected not so much by a village police as by the house-religion. Every house was a

temple of its own-the house-father was the priest, the house-mother, her children, and the servants and family adherents the worshippers. Thus much we know of primitive society from very many survivals of this prehistoric culture which have been gathered together by the student of primitive man. And Martinmas has preserved a custom which enables us to take it back to a similar

pre-historic past. It is not sufficient, then, that the fact of a general time for the killing of cattle and storing of food should fall upon the student of folklore with some special significance-this must be connected with the old house-religion to make the chain of evidence sufficiently strong to carry back the customs of Martinmas to a remote past. How it is so connected will be very clearly shown by an Irish custom. Mr. Dyer quotes, (1819, vol. iii. p. 75), the following imporfrom Mason's Statistical Account of Ireland Athlone, which took place on St. Martin's Day: tant description of the custom at St. Peter's,

Every family of a village kills an animal of some kind or other; those who are rich kill a cow or sheep, others a goose or turkey; while those who are poor and cannot procure an animal of great value, kill a hen or cock, and sprinkle the threshold with the

blood, and do the same in the four corners of the house, and this ceremonious performance is done to exclude every kind of evil spirit from the dwelling when this sacrifice is made till the return of the same day the following year.*

This very curious custom at once gives us the clue to a very long history of the connection of cattle-rearing with the old housereligion. The household gods of the primitive Aryan encroached into the domain of the gods of agriculture. The lines along which that encroachment gradually worked are very clearly traceable in the science of comparative folklore, but even without going into this wide field, we have seen that the customs congregated round the festival of Martinmas tell us a similar tale. Before the food slaughtered and collected could be eaten, the ceremony of sacrificing to the house-god must be gone through. This ceremony is most curiously preserved in the Athlone Martinmas custom. Folklore presents other items of evidence in the same line. Thus, when the young calves cannot be reared, Mr. Henderson tells us that in Durham they take the leg and thigh of one of the dead calves and hang it in the chimney.† In Ireland the custom survives, though in not so complete a form-the portion of the dead calf not being placed in the chimney but simply brought into the house. Essentially the pasture-festival, as distinguished from the grain-festival, Martinmas, whatever its motif in medieval days, has preserved relics of prehistoric times.

There is one other record we must note in these rough jottings of festival lore. A very important relic of the early village life is preserved in the custom of holding the village assemblies on an eminence in the open air. Martinmas, the cattle-festival, has preserved a curious relic of this, in which cattle again play a not unimportant part. Dugdale, in his Antiquities of Warwickshire, gives an account of the meeting of the Knightlow Hundred moot, but Mr. Gomme preserves, in his Primitive Folkmoots, a more detailed account, sent to him from personal observation by Mr. W. G. Fretton, F.S.A. It is as follows:

Five and a half miles north-east of Coventry, on the old coach road from Birmingham to London, just

*Dyer's British Popular Customs, p. 420. + Folklore of the Northern Counties, p. 167.

within the parish boundary of Ryton-on-Dunsmore, and on the ridge of elevated flat land at the top of Knightlow Hill, stands what remains of an old way. side cross. It rests upon a mound of artificially raised earth, or tumulus, to the left on ascending the road, and from this mound the hill is said to derive its name. A new piece of road here was made in the early coaching days to give easier ascent and descent to the hill, so that now the site is hid from view when one is upon the road. From this high and elevated spot a good view is seen of the surrounding country, with the spires of Coventry in the distance. Here at this stone is annually collected for the Duke of Buccleuch, by his steward, on Martinmas Eve, at sun rising (November 11), what is called wroth (or ward) money, from various parishes in the Hundred of Knightlow. The tumulus upon which the cross rested is about thirty or thirty-five feet square, with sides running parallel to the road, having a large fir tree growing at each angle, of which the people round about say that the four trees represent four knights who were killed and buried there. The portion remaining of the cross is thirty inches square at the

top, with a hole in the centre to receive the shaft, and the whole structure would correspond with those at present in existence at Meriden and Dunchurch. Its date was probably the time of Edward III. There is a mason's mark on one side in the shape of a cross, six inches long, which shows it was set up by a master mason of his trade guild. The wroth money has been collected from time immemorial, excepting for a few years about the beginning of this present century, but the Scott family subsequently revived it, or kept up "the charter," as it is locally called. On the eve of St. Martin, November 11, 1879, the annual custom was gone through at 6.45 in the morning, when the wroth money was collected. There were thirty-four persons present to witness the ceremony. The steward, having invited the party to stand round the stone (the original custom was to walk three times round it), proceeded to read the "Charter of Assembly," which opens thus :-"Wroth silver collected annually at Knightlow Cross by the Duke of Buccleuch, as Lord of the Manor of the Hundred of Knightlow." The next proceeding was the calling over of the names of the parishes liable to the fee, and the amount due from each, when the parish, by their representatives present, cast the required sum into the hollow of the stone. The amounts collected were5. d.

Astley, Arley, Burbery, Shilton, Little Wal

ton, Barnacle, and Wolfcote (one penny each parish). Whitley, Radford Semele, Bourton, Napton, Bramcote, and Draycote (three halfpence each). Princethorpe, Stretton-on-Dunsmore, Bub

benhall, Ladbrook, Churchover, Waverley, and Weston (twopence each) • Wolston, Hillmorton, Hopsford, and Marton (fourpence each)

0 7

I •

I 2

4

Leamington Hastings (twelvepence)
Long Ichington (two shillings and twopence)
Arbury