Tag Archives: English traditions

British traditions: tea, tomatoes, and the House of Commons

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Is tradition any more important in Britain than it is in other countries? Probably. This is a country that, in advance of the monarch’s address to Parliament, searches nonexistent cellars for gunpowder because in 1605 some was hidden there. (The building had cellars then.) The people who do that searching wear uniforms that are traditional enough to have gone eye-catchingly out of sync with what your average human actually wears these days.

A relevant photo, which is a rare item around here. These are Yeomen of the Guard, in uniform, searching the nonexistent cellars, using lanterns and looking entirely serious about the whole thing.

During the address, a Member of the Commons (yes, they capitalize that) is ceremonially held hostage in Buckingham Palace until the monarch is safely returned from the hostile territory that is the Commons. That dates back to 1649 and Charles I, who was eventually beheaded and did, arguably, have a good reason to think the neighborhood was dangerous.   

So yes, tradition’s a powerful force. We’ll get to its role in politics in a minute. First let’s look at the breakfast table. 

 

Tea

If I’ve learned anything from living in Britain, it’s this: Don’t mess with the tea. It sits at the heart of British culture and outsiders shouldn’t meddle. I’m not sure about insiders, but they’d probably be wise not to mess around either.

Did it take me 17 years (and counting) to learn that? No, but however long it took I’ll pass it on to you for free so you’ll be spared the fate of American chemistry professor Michelle Francl, whose book Steep: The Chemistry of Tea has been greeted with caffeinated giggles on this side of the Atlantic.

What did she do? She told us to add a pinch of salt to our tea. If you’re American and don’t understand how that went over, imagine a British writer telling you to add–oh, I don’t know, let’s say ketchup to your coffee. If you’re not British and not American, I don’t want to go too far out on a limb but you could, just maybe, imagine me recommending that you take your national beverage and filter it through a pair of old socks.

What’s Francl’s salt supposed to do? Take the bitterness out of the tea. 

Am I brave enough to try it? Hell no. I did think about it and lost my nerve. So far I’ve only found one food writer who tried, and she admits that it “brings out savoury notes” in the tea, which she’s “not averse to,” although that’s not what you’d call an enthusiastic endorsement.

The others? They’re all either too outraged or laughing too hard to experiment.

Francl also recommends heating the milk before you add it on the grounds that it reduces the risk of it curdling.

Has cold milk ever curdled when I’ve added it to my tea? Only when it was older than me, in which case it was kindly warning me to pour out the tea and start over. 

To be fair, Francl also recommends some sensible things, like boiling the water, a trick your average American has trouble with. I don’t know what it is about Americans, but (generalization alert here) we’re convinced that if you allow lukewarm water in the same room as a stove, it’s hot enough to make brew tea. 

It’s not. You could get as much good out of your teabag by taking it into the bathtub with you.

So boiling the water is good advice, but it’s not enough to redeem her. Tea is British culture. It’s tradition. It’s what you turn to in a crisis. It’s what you offer someone who crosses your threshold (assuming you want them there). It’s–you know, it’s Britain. So that thing with the salt? It’ll see Francl banned from Britain forever.

 

Breakfast

Asking what’s for breakfast just became unexpectedly controversial. The English breakfast is under threat from no less traditional an organization than the English Breakfast Society.

Is there such a group? Yes indeedy deed, kids, it’s real. I’d have made it up if I could, but I don’t need to and it would never have crossed my mind anyway.

The society hit the headlines with an announcement that people should get rid of the mushrooms or tomatoes that are a longstanding part of the English breakfast (along with a fried egg, baked beans, bacon, sausage, toast, and of course unsalted tea) and add a slice of pineapple instead. 

The society’s founder and chair–

Hang on. Founder and chair? What is it, a closed shop? I’ll admit to wondering if the society has any actual members, but its website lists 31 fellows, so apparently it does. It also assures me that it’s a “learned society.” I feel smarter already.

Anyway, its founder and chair, Guise Bule de Missenden, said nobody ever liked the tomatoes anyway, “So why shouldn’t we swap them?” 

And he knows this how? Because he taps into the psyche of the entire nation when it sleeps, that’s how. He knows what people eat  not because they like it but because they feel they have to. He knows what they shove to the side of their plates. He’s the founder and chair of et cetera, after all.

And this being Britain, he bases his suggestion on history and tradition. Pineapples were a luxury item in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, he tells us (as if we didn’t all know that already). The elite ate them at breakfast, he says, and he doesn’t say but I’ve learned elsewhere that they served them at their fancy dinners. Then pineapples came down in price and, come on, what was the point of eating them if they didn’t demonstrate how rich and important you are? I mean, even if they do taste good. So they fell out of favor. 

Why add them to the English breakfast now? Because they’re traditional, at least if you bend your history around corners at just the right times. And maybe the society felt it was in need of a headline. Or got a kickback from the Pineapple Promotion Society. 

I don’t predict a long life for this new tradition, but then if you’d asked me whether baked beans would catch on as part of a traditional English breakfast I’d have laughed myself into insensibility. So don’t bet heavily against this based on my say-so.

 

How do we decide what becomes a tradition?

Good question, even if I did ask it myself. The tomatoes became part of an English breakfast sometime around World War I, so they’re not in the same category as thatched roofs or monarchy. Mushrooms and hash browns came along even later, but the English breakfast itself only dates back to the Victorian era, when it was the breakfast of the wealthy. Still, it’s been adopted enthusiastically, and maybe that’s the dividing line between tradition and non-tradition: enthusiasm trumps longevity.

Or maybe not. Let’s slide carefully onto thicker ice. A YouGov poll (you see how important this is) asked people what the essential ingredients of the English breakfast were. For more than half the people polled, they were bacon (89%), sausage (82%), toast (73%), beans (71%), fried egg (65%), hash browns (60%), mushrooms (48%), and black pudding (a lonely 35%). A whopping 83% said they liked a full English breakfast and 15% said they didn’t; 2% said, “Don’t bother me, I’m eating.”

 

Political traditions

Tradition, of course, isn’t only about food, it’s also about politics. As far as I can figure out from reading the papers in recent years, it’s perfectly acceptable to destroy the country’s infrastructure, safety net, and human rights record as long as you color within the lines that tradition dictates.

To wit: having very nearly drained his party’s talent puddle, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was driven to resurrect former Prime Minister David Cameron and give him the office of foreign minister, and that’s brought us all nose to nose with an obscure political tradition, and a slightly less obscure problem, which is that recent convention says ministers should be either MPs–Members of Parliament–or members of the House of Lords, and Cameron was neither.

Why is that a convention instead of a tradition? Beats me.You need a law degree and a dowsing rod to find the line between the two. What matters is that Sunak solved the problem by be-lording Cameron: making him a lifetime peer, entitled to sit in the House of Lords, wear a fancy robe on dress-up days, and collect £332 on any day he shows up for work and/or passes Go. Plus expenses and subsidized food and drink.

I can tell you–reliably, since I have a link right her on my computer screen, and now on yours –that this isn’t the first time a minister has been chosen from outside Parliament, so we’re still inside those all-important lines. Be-lording them is a recent way of handling the awkwardness, but it turns out not to solve all the problems, because if you’re not an MP, you can’t just walk into the House of Commons and address the country’s highest legislative body and its only elected one.

Why not? 

Because it’s not done.

Wait, though. MPs are expected to scrutinize what the foreign secretary’s up to. How are they supposed to do that if he’s not allowed in? 

Before we get to that question, let’s ask what  they mean scrutinize. 

Well, kiddies, it’s political-speak for giving him grief (if you’re in the opposition party) or support (if you’re in his own). The Commons is a raucous place that traditionally (see how I snuck that word in again?) rewards braying and hear-hear-ing and verbal bullying as long as the MPs say the people they’re berating are honorable, as in, “The honorable member has surely mistaken a Dr. Who episode for a budget.”

Hear-hear? That’s what a minister’s supporters bray when they’re trying to drown out the opposition’s heckling. Yes, this is politics in the hands of adults.

Now tuck all that in your back pocket and let’s review the pieces of the puzzle: We need the minister in the room so MPs can bray and heckle and hear-hear and occasionally ask useful questions, but only MPs are allowed into the House of Commons. Because it’s a tradition. 

You may be wondering why only MPs are allowed in. Think of it this way: let’s say the room where the MPs meet is a chicken coop and let’s say the Lords are geese. You can see where this isn’t going to work. Different feet. Different ways of sleeping. Different requirements of all sorts. Even the subsidized champagne they drink is different.

Sorry, I slipped right out of my metaphor there.

A further convention (or possibly tradition) holds that ministers stand at the dispatch box to speak to the Commons and be scrutinized and generally made miserable. But allowing the newly be-lorded Cameron (or any other Lord) to walk that far into the Commons would “risk blurring the boundaries between the two houses,” according to a cross-party procedure committee.  

Disaster looms. What are they to do? 

The committee proposed having him stand behind an actual, as opposed to metaphorical, white line on the Commons floor. It’s called the bar and visitors aren’t allowed to cross it when Commons is sitting. Because that would violate the Natural Order of Things. So he can address the Commons from there.

Last I heard, the government hadn’t responded to the committee’s recommendation. They might be happier if the foreign secretary wasn’t available to answer questions just now.

Strange English Customs: The Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football Game

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Something in England’s soil nurtures bizarre traditions, from the soberly political (think Black Rod) to the brutally folkloric. The Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide football game belongs to the second category, and it puts the emphasis on brutal. 

What could possibly be more fun?

Basically, we’re talking about a mass football game that runs for two days. That’s eight hours each day. One article claims it has only two rules, you can’t move the ball in a motorized vehicle and you can’t murder anyone, but don’t take that too seriously. It has other rules, but not murdering anyone is important. It’s that kind of game. Although I’m not sure that’s a rule. One of the assorted articles I read says “unnecessary violence” is frowned on but it’s not banned. It doesn’t mention murder.

Irrelevant photo: a romantic-looking shed door.

 

Sounds like fun. How do I play?

It helps if you’re from Ashebourne, because the town divides into teams according to which side of the river you’re born on. Outsiders can throw themselves in on whichever side they want, but they’d be wise to be (a) large and (b) young enough to heal well. And probably male. I haven’t seen any women in the photos, and wild-eyed feminist that I am, I’m not about to campaign my way into this. Look at it this way: If a group of men decide to do something insanely stupid, being a feminist doesn’t mean I’ll join them in the name of equality. If someone else wants to, I’ll cheer her on, but I’ll do it from the sidelines. 

Here’s how the game works: Someone lets a ball loose in the middle of town and everyone tries to get hold of it, so it immediately turns into a shoving match involving hundreds of people. Odds are that for at least part of the time most of the players won’t have a clue where the ball is, so they’ll shove whoever’s closest and trust it contributes to the greater good. Or that it doesn’t, but at a certain point instinct takes over and who cares? Players get lifted off their feet. They get squeezed until they see stars–which actually does happen when your body doesn’t get enough oxygen. They get broken ribs, broken other things, bruises, black eyes, and injuries to any part of the human body that’s injurable.

The object is to get the ball to the opposite team’s goal–it’s a millstone–and the goals are three miles apart, so the rule about not using motorized transportation begins to make sense. Once you get it there, you hit the ball three times against the stone to score a point. 

It sounds like you need to jump in the river to do that. (See? There are rules.)

Then your teammates carry you back to the town center on their shoulders and if you made your goal before 6 pm, the whole thing starts over with a new ball and the game runs until 10. If it’s after 6, then play’s over for the day and everyone heads for the pub, where people buy you drinks. 

People will be buying you drinks for weeks to come, and you get to keep the ball, which is handmade and hand painted.

On the second day, everyone who isn’t too hung over does it all again.

 

And if I don’t want to play?

You’d be wise to stay well out of the way, because onlookers can get swept into the mayhem, as one reporter was, losing his notebook but gaining some experience in the process. At some point, someone grabbed him by the hood and yanked him out. 

The mob is called the hug and it isn’t entirely in anyone’s control, but it’s powerful. When I read about it knocking over walls, I thought I was reading a bit of poetic exaggeration. Then I saw a photo of a brick wall that had been pushed over. The reporter who lost his notebook wrote about the hug barreling through a barbed wire fence. Shops (wisely) board up their windows. 

And pubs? They sell a lot of beer. 

 

The history

No one knows how the tradition started, but that doesn’t stop people from making it up. According to one theory, it started with an execution. The severed head was thrown into the crowd (of course) and the fun began. You can choose to believe that if you like. No one can prove you wrong.

Or right, but that doesn’t bother people as much as it used to.

The game can be documented as far back as the seventeenth century but probably started long before. A fire wiped out the town records, so that’s as far back as we go. The medieval period’s not an irrational guess. 

A couple of other English towns have similar games at Shrovetide, but most places settle for running around flipping pancakes and seeing who crosses the finish line first.

 

What’s Shrovetide?

The days before Lent. And Lent is the days before Easter, the soberest holiday in the Christian calendar. You needed a Jewish atheist to explain that to you, right? As far as I can figure it out, the medieval approach to Lent was for people to give up everything they enjoyed–meat, dairy products, eggs. Sex. They’d eat one meal a day. 

People were supposed to go to confession at Shrovetide and do all that sober stuff in preparation for Lent. But flipping pancakes and shoving your neighbors through a barbed wire fence and into the river? That also makes sense as a preparation for a somber season. 

 

Mayhem and community spirit

Local people will swear that the point of the game is community spirit. “It’s the lifeblood of the town,” an Ashebournian told the reporter who lost his notebook to the hug. “The media focuses on the fighting, but that’s all forgotten the moment the game ends. The real legacy is how it brings people together.”

Backing that up, a different reporter got a quote from a local businesswoman: “It looks like Armageddon. It’s knee-deep in litter, there’s stuff everywhere piled up in the doorways, in the road.” But after the second day, “all the players will be out mending fences, they’ll help you take your boards down, they’ll be picking up litter, because they want it to continue the next year.” 

Quaint olde English laws

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London’s Millennium Bridge needed some work recently–some cleaning, some urgent repair, a good tooth brushing–and an ancient bylaw required the contractor to dangle a bale of hay over the side of the bridge to warn boats that the headroom had been reduced. 

How ancient is the bylaw? No one’s saying, but the contractor modernized the tradition by adding a light at night. Couldn’t do that in the old days. The hay would’ve caught on fire. 

News articles are talking about it all as one of London’s charming quirks, but what strikes me as far stranger is that five of the Thames river crossings are maintained not by local government but by a 900-year-old charity, which is British for a nonprofit organization. 

But any discussion of quaint bylaws leads, naturally enough, to quaint ordinary laws, and England does a flourishing trade in quaint. Let’s review a handful.

Irrelevant photo: Sunrise behind the village shop.

In England, it’s illegal to:

  • Wear armor in Parliament. 
    • A recent article about fashion–I usually skip those but by the end of the sentence you’ll see why this caught my eye–tells me that chainmail is a hot look this season, giving us chainmail-look dresses, miniskirts, tops, and unspecified menswear. “Chainmail is sexy,” someone or other is quoted as saying.  
      • I’m pretty sure you still can’t wear it in Parliament.
  • Walk a cow through the streets between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.
  • Be drunk in a pub. 
    • To be fair, the law bundles this together with being drunk in other public places, but pubs are the only places on the list that sell alcohol.
  • Be drunk when in charge of a cow, which neatly combines the two previous laws.
  • Cause a nuclear explosion, although who’ll be around to enforce that isn’t clear.  
  • Take off your black cocked hat at a ceremonial event, but only if a) you’re a woman, b) you’re a Thetford town councillor, c) it’s before 2016, and d) you don’t have the mayor’s permission. 
    • That was a loosening of the rules. Women used to have to keep the hats on, no matter what the god, the mayor, or the Grinch Who Stole Christmas said. A whole different set of rules applied to men–of course.  

This doesn’t fit my nifty  it’s-illegal-to formula, but cab drivers are required to ask passengers if they have either the plague or smallpox. And that dates back only to 1936. I’m not clear what the driver’s supposed to do if the passenger says yes, but as a former cab driver, my impulse would be to get the hell out of there. Compassionate cab drivers do exist, but the job doesn’t push a person toward compassion.

Cab drivers are also forbidden to transport rabid dogs or corpses, and I’d like to put it on record that I never broke that law. And was never asked to. 

In another interpretation of the plague-or-smallpox law, the onus is on the passenger to tell the driver if he or she has the plague or smallpox–or any other notifiable disease. 

*

I doubt anyone other than me cares about the odd spacing between paragraphs. I’m sure there’s some way to control it, but I’m damned if I know what it is.

The Corby Pole Fair

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If nations could be patron saints, England would be the patron saint of weird-ass traditional festivals. Since it doesn’t work that way, it’s had to settle for holding them and glorying in its own oddity. 

Allow me to welcome you to today’s strange traditional festival, the Corby Pole Fair. 

What’s strange about it? It’s held once every twenty years.

Why’s that? Nobody knows.

Marginally relevant photo: A traditional British phone box, now converted into a second-hand bookstore that’s raising money to maintain a village defibrillator.

Anytime you write about one of these festivals, you’re pretty much required to use the phrase “nobody knows.” More than once. If I use it more than 15 times here, I owe you a drink. Of course, you’ll have to catch me first.

But before we go on, let me try to unbraid what’s English from what’s British–something I do regularly and usually get wrong. I’m not sure whether the other nations that make up Britain–or the UK, which isn’t quite the same thing but never mind that for now–are as strange about their festivals as England is. The spotlight falls most often on English weird-assery, so let’s go with that. I’m happy to hear arguments and corrections from anyone even remotely knowledgeable about these things. Or if not knowledgeable, funny. That’ll do at least as well. 

 

The Fair

The Corby Pole Fair dates back (according to one article) “to the 13th century, when Queen Elizabeth I granted the town a charter in 1585.” Which is awkward, because Liz hadn’t been born in the 13th century, and neither had 1585.

Okay, it was a typo and we can all stop being so smug. It’s not like we haven’t written something at least as embarrassing.

Typo aside, though, an alternative explanation of the fair’s origins is easily available. One–or two, or three–almost always is. Or are. That same article tells us that some people say, “It’s after the monarch was rescued from a bog by villagers.”

Is the it in that quote the fair or the charter? 

Hard to say. 

Do we care? Yes, but only a little. Guesswork will do well enough, so let’s nod as if it all makes sense and move on. 

A more coherent attempt at explaining the fair’s origins comes from the BBC–working, I’m sure, from the same press release but reading it more carefully. It says, “Some say it [that’s the fair] goes back to the 13th Century, some to 1585 when Queen Elizabeth I was rescued from a bog by Corby villagers and others to the 17th Century when Charles II granted the town a charter.”

Yes, I checked. Liz was alive in 1585. I can’t verify that she was in a bog or, for that matter, anywhere near Corby but we have at least taken a step in the right direction. 

The fair could also date back to 1226, when Henry III granted Corby (or someone, anyway) the right to hold a fair.

Was Elizabeth I ever rescued from a bog, by Corby villagers or anyone else? Possibly, but I can’t verify it. I asked Lord Google and got referred to scholarly papers that opened with her wanting to build a stable, peaceful country, but nope, no bog.

Next I found something about Queen Elizabeth and a blog. 

Did Queen Elizabeth keep a blog? Well, she did try, but the technology of the time didn’t support it and she gave it up to devote her efforts to more era-appropriate occupations. 

Lord Google’s related questions included, “What is Elizabeth the First known for?” Related answers do not include being rescued from a bog. 

So no, I can’t find any evidence that she was rescued from a bog. Equally, I can’t find any evidence that she wasn’t.  

 

Fairs and Charters

Why did they need a charter to hold a fair? Because that’s how things worked. The National Archive says that  “Early markets and fairs were generally held in one of two ways. . . . If they were held: 

  • “by virtue of a specific royal grant, you are likely to find a charter recording it; 
  • “by prescriptive right, that is, based on immemorial custom, you may not find any charter evidence.”

Charters could be issued to an individual or to something like a town or church. One fair, in Stourbridge, ran for three weeks. In addition to giving everyone a chance to let off steam, they also made money for whoever held the charter. And for whoever came to trade. 

Does any of that still matter today? Oddly enough, yes. The Ilkeston Charter Fair has permission to run for four days, and for more or less 800 years that’s what it did. Then, in 2018, it decided to run for a fifth day and had to apply to the home secretary for permission. Which meant it had to figure out what the correct procedure was. It’s that unusual. And if it got the procedure wrong, it could lose the right to hold the fair at all. 

And that’s where I bailed out and scuttled back to our Corby Pole Fair.

Corby resident Paul Balmer has looked for Liz’s charter but found only a later one, which dates from “1670 or 1682 depending on who you listen to.”

I’d love to explain that phrase to you, but that’s all I know. 

You see why the phrase “nobody knows” comes up so often?

 

Historical accuracy

The fair includes what Balmer says is a Viking tradition of riding the stang. 

“If you didn’t pay your toll [that’s your admission to the fair] you were carried on the ‘stang’ to the stocks and had to pay a penny to get out, but the villagers, because of the charter, were exempt from the toll.”

Why Viking tradition? Corby started out as a Viking settlement.

“Then there’s the greasy pole, which is most probably associated with the ox roast. The lord of the manor often gives an ox to villagers when they are celebrating a fair or a big occasion, the grease from the ox is put on a pole with a ham on the top and if you climb the greasy pole you get to keep it.”

This year, there’ll be a pole but no one gets to climb it. They couldn’t get insurance. 

Then there’s that charter. Remember the charter? At 6 a.m. the bells ring a.m., calling everyone to come hear the charter read out loud at all the entrances to the village.

There’ll also be historical re-enactments, including some Viking-type stuff. You know, a little light looting and pillaging. Some jousting. Some road closures. What could be more historically accurate than road closures? 

In the interest of historical accuracy, the decision to hold this year’s fair was made after surveying the community, holding focus groups and workshops, and meeting with groups and individuals and businesses, not to mention filling out and filing grant applications and advertising the whole mess–and then putting a discussion of it up on the website, presumably to prove the fair has community support.

“Decisions about the content of the fair were also influenced by what funding bodies would (and wouldn’t) be willing to pay for,” it says. I worked around nonprofits long enough to recognize a near-universal truth in that.

Town dignitaries get carried around in chairs. There’s a free breakfast for residents.

The fair also offers music. I haven’t seen any mention of morris dancers, so this may be the only safe festival in England for morris-haters.

 

The Details

When is it held? It was on June 3 this year, which means we’ve missed it and will have to wait until 2042. The date for that one hasn’t been set yet.

What? Do I look like a tourist site? You want to know about these things in advance, go someplace sensible.

There. I made it through without saying “nobody knows” more than twice. Or maybe that was three times. Either way, go buy your own drink.

What does freedom of the city mean?

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Not long after Prince Andrew gave up on huffing and puffing until he blew down Virginia Giuffre’s house–in other words, after he settled her lawsuit out of court–the city of York rescinded an honor it had given him back when he looked a bit less sleazy than he does today: the freedom of the city.

This is significant because, um, why?

Well, it’s not, really. Or it is, but only if you take British traditions seriously, which I have some trouble doing but I’m sure Andy doesn’t. No one could run around dressed in those uniforms if they didn’t take it all seriously. 

Still, in the avalanche of bad publicity that’s fallen on him lately, York’s contribution is barely a pebble. But since it’s an intriguing pebble, let’s talk about what this freedom of the city business is.

Irrelevant photo: This was taken during either Storm Dudley or Eunice, although I’m damned if I remember which one. My partner swore they sounded like an aunt and uncle from Oklahoma–ones no one looked forward to seeing. All that white stuff? That’s foam. We had enough wind to whip the ocean into a meringue.

Starting at the beginning

Freedom of the city dates back to the middle ages, when lords were lords and serfs weren’t free and any sensible person would’ve told you this was the natural order of things. 

All that non-freedom is what made the freedom of the city matter.

According to a “purported law” of William the Conqueror’s–he’s the guy, remember, who won England as his very own plaything in 1066–“If serfs reside without challenge for a year and a day in our cities, or in our walled towns, or in our castles, from that day they will effectively be free men and forever free from their bonds of servitude.”

For a law that’s no more than purported, it seems to have had an impressive impact. It was repeated in various ways by various cities and rulers. Henry II gave Lincoln a charter saying, “Should anyone reside in my city of Lincoln for a year and a day without being claimed by any claimant, and he is contributing towards the customary dues of the city, and the citizens can prove (by the customary legal process of the city) that a claimant was present in England but made no claim upon him, thereafter he may remain in my city of Lincoln, undisturbed as before, as my citizen, without legal challenge.”

For claimant, you can substitute lord–someone with a feudal right to claim this person as, effectively, his property.

Elsewhere, you’ll find specific statements about a villein (that’s what you and I would call a serf) being freed of villeinage if he lives “undisturbed for a year and a day in any privileged town, to the point that he is accepted into its community (that is, gild) he is thereby freed from villeinage.”

Gild? That’s what we’d call a guild. Hold onto that word, because we’ll come back to it.

 

Consulting the grownups about this

Notice that bit about privileged towns. This year-and-a-day stuff didn’t work in just any town. You couldn’t hide out for the required time in your local market town and hope to be free. The magic only worked if the spell was written into the town’s charter. 

But not every town or city was welcoming to fugitive serfs.

Do I have details about that? I do not. The best I can tell you is that historians aren’t in universal agreement over how common it was for villeins to free themselves this way, or how welcoming or unwelcoming towns were. And since historians are the grownups in this discussion, we’ll leave this for them to work out while we go upstairs and do whatever they told us not to.

It’s worth knowing that free men didn’t live only in cities. They also lived in the countryside, working the land more or less as serfs did. The difference was that they rented their land, didn’t owe the lord any service in kind, and were free to leave, although they couldn’t necessarily afford to. You could be free and as poor as the neighboring serf–or poorer. 

Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

 

Two footnotes 

  1. Becoming a free man didn’t make you a freeman. That was a different category and we’ll get to it in a minute. What being a free man did do was make you not-a-serf, which was a major change in status,even if it wasn’t the solution to all your problems. 
  2. Almost everything I’ve found talks about free men. Only the Guild of Freemen of the City of London website acknowledges references to women having been guild members. Given the English language’s counterproductive tradition of sometimes insisting that men means both men and women and the rest of the time insisting that men means only men, figuring out what we’re talking about here isn’t easy, but the year-and-a-day thing does seem to have applied to women. As far as I can tell.

 

Guilds, freemen, and free men

It’s not just the men and women who are hard to tell apart. Several websites get woozy about the difference between free men and freemen. So when the city of Birmingham, by way of example, explains what freemen means, it’s hard to know if it applies to both free men and freemen.

Don’t you just love the English language?

What does the Brimingham website say? “The medieval term ‘freeman’ meant someone . . . who had the right to earn money and own their own land. People who were protected by the charter (rules) of their town or city were often ‘free’, hence the term ‘Freedom of the City.’ ”

Are you confused yet? 

Good. Then you’re following the discussion. You could live in a city and be free, but not be a freeman, and therefore (at least as time went by) not someone who had the freedom of the city. To become a freeman of a city or town, you had to be accepted by one of its guilds, and they limited their membership. If too many people have the right to practice as, say, goldsmiths, prices will drop.

The medieval guilds were powerful organizations, made up of merchants or craftspeople (who weren’t always men). They had a monopoly on their corner of the economy and regulated trade, standards,  apprenticeships, and prices. Each one protected its interests, and they often controlled city or town governments.  

If you couldn’t become a member–and unless you had connections, you probably couldn’t–you might well be free and a man, but you were stuck working as a laborer. You weren’t a freeman of the city.

 

More about freemen

The Portsmouth City Council website skips over free men and goes straight for freemen: “The institution of freemen or burgesses dates from the early beginnings of municipal corporations in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Freemen or burgesses enjoyed considerable political privileges, being entitled to elect the officers of the corporation and its representatives in Parliament, although they were not necessarily resident in the borough of which they were burgesses or freemen.”

In this context, the corporation was the city government.

“In choosing freemen or burgesses, boroughs found it convenient to admit men of national importance who might be able to secure greater economic or political privileges for the area. Prominent local landowners with interests in a borough would reward their supporters by securing their admission as freemen or burgesses–between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries a very high proportion of the known burgesses in Portsmouth were not resident in the borough.”

In other words, freemen were a select group of a city’s residents (or, just to confuse the picture, non-residents). They were people with power and money. That held until 1835, when the Municipal Corporations Act established city councils. After that, they might very well still have held power, but they had to exercise it differently.

 

Can we confuse the issue a bit more?

Of course we can. Let’s go to Texas, where a couple of Freedom of the City certificates are sitting in the Ransom Center, which led the center to write about them.

One certificate was issued in London in 1776 to Michael Dancer at the end of his apprenticeship. It was big–2 feet by 5 inches–and came with a tube so Mick could roll it up and carry it around with him. The Ransom Center swears that people would have carried these the way we might carry a passport or driver’s license today, to prove identity and citizenship. 

I offer you a grain of salt to go with that explanation. They might well have needed the document for one thing and another–only people who’d been granted freedom of the city could exercise a trade within London’t city limits, and that held true until 1835–but I’d guess it was too important to cart around the streets every day like a driver’s license. 

The Ransom Center tells us that along with a freedom of the city certificate, London also presented its new members with “a book titled Rules for the Conduct of Life, which was intended to guide them in their life as freemen. While providing many basic laws and recommended codes of conduct, the book also outlined several interesting freedoms available only to freemen.  For example, the book notes freemen have the right to herd sheep over the London Bridge, go about the city with a drawn sword, and—if convicted of a capital offense—to be hung with a silken rope. Other ascribed privileges are said to include the right to be married in St. Paul’s cathedral, to be buried in the city, and to be drunk and disorderly without fear of arrest.”

I’m not exercised about where I get buried–I hope to be past caring by then–but that silken rope might make freedom of the city worth pursuing. 

 

What does being a freeman of the city get you today?

Not much. Let’s limit ourselves to London: You can’t drive sheep across London Bridge anymore. Capital punishment’s been abolished, so if you want to be hung with a silken rope you’ll have to make your own arrangements. I’m not sure what the law is on drawn swords, but I‘d recommend doing some research before you try it. Folks get twitchy about swords these days, no matter what certificate you’re carrying.

That makes the freedom of the city something you can put on your resume, if you have one, but that’s about it. It’s just a bit of English tradition that you’re welcome to take seriously if you can.

A quick history of the English breakfast

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Every country has its myths, and I suspect one of England’s is, as the English Breakfast Society puts it, that the English breakfast is “a centuries old . . . tradition, one that can trace its roots back to the early 1300’s.” 

Yes, there is an English Breakfast Society. That should tell us something about how central the myth is. Or, if you like, how central the reality is. Or how odd the country is. 

Or possibly how odd any country is.

Never mind. It tells us something or other. Can we move on?

I found the quote on the society’s website, right below the picture of a wealthy couple from the long-dress-and-maid-serving-breakfast era. They’re sitting at a table looking unhappy. The man’s taken refuge behind his paper and all we know about his face is that he has eyebrows–two, I believe–but that’s enough to let us know he has no time for the woman right now because he’s attending to serious business, which by definition excludes women. The woman’s turned away from him, looking bored. Not to mention sulky. She’s not reading a newspaper because, c’mon people, ladies didn’t back then. 

The maid’s leaving the room and if I had to be one of these three people I’d be her because at least she gets to walk out, even if she can’t stay gone for long. 

But never mind the picture. It’s a red herring. I only mention it because it’s such bad publicity for the English breakfast that I couldn’t resist. If you want to promote the beauty of a meal, bury this picture someplace deep.

Irrelevant photo: a slightly battered rose, blooming in February.

Several other websites make more or less the same claim about how far back into history the English breakfast reaches. But let’s stay with the English Breakfast Society. Not only do they say the English breakfast dates back to the 1300s, but in a different paragraph they say it reaches back to the 13th century, which through a quirk of mathematics or accounting or something numbers-related isn’t the same thing at all. And, they say, it was developed by the gentry, “who considered themselves to be the guardians of the traditional English country lifestyle and who saw themselves as the cultural heirs of the Anglo-Saxons.”

I suspect we’re looking at a bit of time slippage there. The Anglo-Saxons hadn’t come into fashion in the 1300s/13th century. If you wanted to get ahead in whichever of those two centuries we’re talking about, you needed to and downplay whatever Anglo-Saxon traditions your family had kept alive and speak Norman French. Chaucer, who first broke the English language into the publishing world, earning rave reviews on Amazon and GoodReads, wasn’t even born until 1340 and didn’t start writing until several years after that. 

So forget the Anglo-Saxons. I’m pretty sure they’re another red herring. Let’s take the rest of the claims apart.

 

First, who were the gentry?

To belong to the gentry, you had to own enough land to live off it without getting your hands dirty or doing any actual work. It was a loosely defined group, though. The nobles–the people who held titles–were easy to count, and people did count them, totting up fifty in the early 16th century, some 200 in the 18th. Once you had a number, you could be sure you’d gotten them all back on the bus after they’d gotten off to see the attractions or use the restroom.

The gentry, though? Sorry, but if you left a few dozen behind at Tower Bridge, no one would know.  

But let’s not compare the gentry to the nobility. That’s another red herring, and one I dragged in. I got tempted by those numbers. Sorry. Let’s compare the gentry to the peasantry instead. The most striking difference is that where the peasants were hard working and often hungry, the gentry ate well and prided themselves on their hospitality.

Hospitality to people like themselves, that is, or people further up in the hierarchy. It wouldn’t do to get too hospitable to the lower orders. They’d start to think they should eat like that every day.

No, I’m not cynical, just fed up with how little has changed. 

But we were talking about the English breakfast. In this telling, the gentry used breakfast to show off their wealth and hospitality. They made it an important social occasion. 

Take weddings. A wedding mass had to happen before noon (don’t ask me; maybe god had afternoons off), so weddings took place in the morning and then the bride and groom ate a wedding breakfast. With who knows how many well-wishers and hangers-on and family members.

Cue a grand spread for breakfast.

Skip ahead a few centuries and along comes a wealthy middle class. Not all of the middle class was wealthy, mind you, but part of it was, and because it drew its wealth from (gasp, horror) trade instead of land, it couldn’t be part of the gentry. But it could sure as hell eat, and it copied the gentry’s breakfasts, along with many of their other habits.

 

The tale of the English breakfast, version two

In Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain, Pen Vogler tells the tale differently, and I have a hunch more reliably. The earliest courtly records, she says, don’t say anything about breakfast except that people who rose early would have bread and ale. 

Who rose early? Well, it wasn’t the nobles and it probably wasn’t the gentry. Breakfast for them seems to have been a blank. In the medieval monasteries, an early meal was for people who did physical work. Monks and nuns were supposed to have their minds on higher things than stuffing their bellies, at least first thing in the morning.

By Tudor times, though, Katherine Parr’s maids were eating beef for breakfast, and by the 17th century breakfast had become pretty much universal, although the harder you worked (and the poorer you were) the earlier you ate. Samuel Pepys (we’re still in the 17th century) was eating meat left over from last night’s supper, either cold or reheated. (No, the microwave hadn’t been invented and they didn’t have electricity anyway so it wouldn’t have done him any good it if had been. He ate it fried.) For one breakfast, he ate radishes. Make whatever sense of that you can. 

By the time we come to Jane Austen (1775 to 1817), we find her mother writing about visiting cousins and having a breakfast of cakes, rolls, bread, toast, coffee, tea, and hot chocolate, although Austen has one of her characters eating pork and mustard for breakfast and another, boiled eggs.

If I can translate all of this, it means that the English breakfast wasn’t what’s now known as an English breakfast. It was breakfast and it was in England, but that’s where the similarity ended. 

By Victorian times, the owners of a grand country house might show off with French food at dinner, but breakfast would be about showing off what the owner’s land produced, so we find ham, sausages, eggs, and bacon, as well as things I think of as un-breakfasty: beef, meat pies, pheasant, kidneys, smoked fish, and kedgeree, which is an Indian-inflected mix of fish and rice–a sign of that the British were messing around in India and had brought home the idea that if you added a bit of spice to your food your taste buds would wake up and do a little dance. 

 

The current components of an English breakfast

What’s now known as an English breakfast is heavy enough to stop a train, but a lot of the dishes I mentioned slid off the plate long ago and were replaced with others. It now involves some or all of the following: eggs, sausages, bacon, grilled tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, toast, and fried bread. Plus tea and antacid. 

Did I miss the marmalade and the fried potatoes? I did, along with the assorted regional variations.

So how deep into history do the components go? As far as I can tell, not very. The baked beans that are now an integral part of the English breakfast didn’t land on the plate, or in the country, until 1886, when Fortnum & Mason began selling them as an American luxury.

There’s no accounting for taste. 

As for the eggs, if you leave chickens to their own devices, they stop popping out eggs during the winter. Or so Lord Google tells me. I’ve never raised chickens, so I’ll have to take his word for it. It’s only when you keep the chickiebirds warm and add artificial light to their lives that they get in the mood to produce eggs all winter. So even among the rich, eggs wouldn’t have been available year round.

And even when they were in season, they were a luxury in a working person’s diet.

Eventually  the 20th century came, though, along with artificial lighting and ways to heat a hen house that didn’t risk setting it on fire, and eggs–or maybe that’s chickens–began to be farmed intensively. In the years before World War I a recognizable version of the modern English breakfast started to show up in hotels and in bed and breakfasts. 

Meanwhile, in the country houses of the rich, breakfast changed after World War I. They no longer had the massive number of servants it took to serve grand breakfasts anymore, and they began to simplify.

I know. It’s tough.

Bacon and eggs get a mention here, along with gastronomical boredom.

During World War II, with rationing in force, in many working-class homes the breakfast protein went to the men and boys and the toast went to the women and girls, with some of the trimmings added in on weekends and holidays. That was caused by a collision of sexism and the men and boys doing heavier work, either in reality or in theory. I know the men worked like dogs in many industries, but I’m not sure how heavily to bet on the women and girls carrying a light load.

But back to the components of the English breakfast: The tomatoes and mushrooms weren’t added until the 1960s and 1970s. Sadly, they’re harder to make fun of.

*

If you’re not tired of me by now, I have an article online about the difference between writing for a lesbian audience and writing for a crossover audience. It touches on the gay and lesbian liberation movement in the 1970s. Yes, I really am that old. In fact, I’m older. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the English breakfast.

You can find it at The Bookseller.

Strange British Festivals: The World Custard Pie Championship

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To prove that the pandemic is nothing to mess around with, the 2020 World Custard Pie Championship–like so many other non-essential events–was canceled.

But was the contest truly non-essential or was that just the decision of some self-serving, soulless sort with a scrub brush for a brain? Did they consider its obvious cultural, political, and academic importance? 

Ah, well, let’s not be too hard on self-serving, soulless scrub brushes. It’s been a rough year for everyone.

And it doesn’t matter anymore, because barring a major step backward in the U.K.–that’s pandemically speaking, of course–the competition will take place in 2021, so let’s learn what we can about the details, quick before it’s too late to enter. 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia, I think. In fact, I’m reasonably sure. Of course it’s a camellia. What else would it be? A snowmobile?

The World Custard Pie Championships fits nicely into the category of strange traditional festivals that England (or maybe that’s Britain) is so good at, even though this particular tradition is no older than fifty or so years. That makes it modern, at least by British history standards, but it’s a good enough imitation to fool my filing system. 

And if someone would help me sort out whether these festivals are a particularly British thing or a particularly English one, I’d be grateful. I’m sure it would help me understand the country better. Are people this strange in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland?

 

Origins, rules, & important stuff

The origins of most truly traditional traditions have been lost by now, but since this one’s a newcomer–a nontraditional tradition–we can document it: Coxheath, Kent, needed to raise money for a village hall and came up with the idea of inventing a tradition. Or at least that’s my interpretation. I’m reasonably sure no one put it that way when they were sitting around the pub figuring out what to do.

The pub’s also my interpretation. I’m convinced that these traditions all started in the pub. Even before pubs were invented.

How does the championship raise money? It costs £60 for a team to compete and £40 to set up a stall. Unless you’re selling food and drink, in which case that’ll be £80, thanks. If a town can keep its festival going for a few years and get itself some publicity, it’ll raise enough to buy a bucket of paint or three. 

By now the custard festival’s had enough publicity for teams to fly in from around the world. Or so the website says. They manage not to say how many teams have flown in. Two’s enough to justify a plural.

The rules are simple. Each team’s made up of four people and they line up and throw pies at someone–I assume it’s another team. Using their left hands. I’ll go out on a twig and guess that if you’re left handed you throw with your right. If you’re ambidextrous, you’re disqualified. If you’re amphibious, you can throw from under water, but it won’t be an advantage–at least not in terms of scoring. You’ll be a hit with the crowd, though.

Scoring? Your points depend on where your pie hits your opponent–six points for a pie in the face, three if it hits from the shoulder up, and one for any other body part. 

If you miss three times, you lose a point. 

The judges’ decisions are final. 

Throwing pies at the judges when you don’t like their decision is frowned upon, but they don’t say that for fear of putting the idea in some suggestible person’s empty little head. And yes, having to throw with your nondominant arm is a perfect excuse for not being good at it.

Unlike dwile flonking, you don’t have to be drunk to do this, but this being England (or should I say, “This being Britain”?), you’re more than welcome to show up dressed in something silly. Or as they put it in British, in fancy dress. Don’t wear anything you’re attached to, though, because by the end of the day everyone’s wearing custard.

And now the bad news: They don’t use real custard–it’s not the right consistency–and the formula for whatever they do use is a closely guarded secret. Presumably, neighboring towns are just dying to poach the festival and that’s all that stops them. The only ingredients they’ll admit to are flour and water. The Calendar Customs website recommends not eating whatever it is.

The contest’s usually held in May or June, but this year, with the number of vaccinated people going up and the number of Covid cases (“so far,” she said nervously) staying low, it’s been rescheduled for September 21. 

They’re expecting 2,000 pies to be thrown. The day begins around noon with a wet sponge competition for kids, who as any fool knows can’t be trusted with pies.

*

Some time ago Autolycus suggested that I might want to write about another great British tradition, rhubarb thrashing, and I did try, but I couldn’t find enough information to go on. Besides, it’s a perfectly sensible game where two people stand inside trash cans and whack at each other with rhubarb  sticks, and where’s the laugh in that?

Why more isn’t written about it remains a mystery. It’s one of those rare subjects where Lord Google offered me no more than a single page of links, most of which were to a kids’ program, the BBC’s mysteriously named Blue Peter, which decided many and many a year ago that this was what the kiddies needed to know.

Those kiddies have now grown into adults. If you want to know what’s wrong with the world, look no further.

I am, as always, grateful for people’s topic suggestions, even when I don’t end up writing about them. Some–like rhubarb thrashing–just don’t lead anywhere, but you never know. Some are glorious.

Dwile flonking: another strange English tradition

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If you ask the BBC about dwile flonking (and who doesn’t at some point?), you’ll find them asking a question of their own: 

Does dwile flonking really date back to the Suffolk harvests of 400 years ago or is it just a good excuse for getting drunk and celebrating Christmas in August?

They don’t answer the question and neither can I, but in my relentlessly shallow exploration of the topic I did find some faint linguistic evidence either that the game has a long history or that whoever invented it did their homework. Dwile comes from the Dutch word dweil, meaning floor cloth. Or it seems to, anyway. The word was probably introduced to England by Flemish weavers during the Middle Ages. Or, as Wikiwhatsia says (at the moment–it could change at any time), dwile is Dutch for a mop and the word worked its way into the Norfolk dialect. 

Irrelevant photo: The fields after a frost.

I try to avoid using Wikiwhatsia as a reference, but for dwile flonking? Why not? It’s right in the spirit of the game. It also says that flonk is “probably a corruption of flong, an old past tense of fling.”

Who knows. It might even be true. And when no one’s looking, sheep could just possibly type. If they had typewriters. 

The BBC agrees that flonk could be an archaic past tense of fling. If you squint hard. Meanwhile, Etymology Online gives us as a Middle English past tense flang with the past participle flungen. Which is no help at all but likely to be more reliable than anything else in the past few paragraphs. 

What is reliable is that Flonk is also a brand of ale, but that’s got to be recent than the rest of that mess. 

If you feel the need to watch dwiles being flonked (and if the pandemic ever ends), period costume is encouraged. I expect that’s in the spirit of imitation authenticity, although I’m not sure there’s any agreement on what period we’re talking about, so either pull one out of a hat (then wear the hat) or check out one of the videos on YouTube and do whatever you think best. After a few beers, no one will care and neither will you. 

Preliminaries

To play (did I say that dwile flonking’s a  sport?), you need two teams. Then you toss a sugar beet (which the BBC misspelled, she said without in the least betraying how smug she felt about catching that) to decide which team flonks first.

Then you choose a dull-witted person to serve as referee. That’s the jobanowl. He or she starts the game by shouting, “Here y’go t’gither!”

But wait. Before the match can start (and quite possibly before the jobanowl calls out his or her line), the teams have to sing “Here we ‘em be together.” It was written by Amos Thirkle, who was adopted as the patron saint of dwile flonking.

And why shouldn’t he be? Without even progressing past the letter A, I found patron saints of abdominal pains (Erasmus), for protection against mice (three, in fact: Gertrude, Servatus, and Ulric, and they were listed as “Against mice, protection against,” which is a double negative, but saints may be above grammatical quibbling) and of pain in the arms (Amalburga). 

You can make me the patron saint of pain in the ass if you like. Informally. Thirkle isn’t listed with the Church-approved saints either. 

I also found Amand, the patron said of bartenders, bar keepers, and bar staff in general. He’ll be busy during the match, and after. 

Rules

Here’s where it gets complicated and where I damn near decided to write about toadstools, or anything else that might turn out be less peculiar. But you can’t grasp the basic insanity of the game without slogging through the rules, so let us slog:

The team that isn’t flonking holds hands and dances in a circle (that’s called girting) while one person from the other team (that’s the flonker) stands in the middle with a driveller–a 2- to 3-foot pole made of hazel or yew. On the end of the driveller is the beer-soaked dwile. 

Remember the dwile? The floor rag/mop?

The flonker turns in the opposite direction from the girders and flonks the dwile at the opposing team, trying to hit someone. If the dwile hits a girter’s head, that’s three points. If it hits the body, it’s two points. A leg shot’s worth one.

If it misses, it’s called a swadger and the flonker takes a pot of ale and  has to drink it all while the girters form a line and pass the dwile from hand to hand, chanting, “pot, pot, pot.”

The pot? It’s what’s known as a gazunder–a chamber pot, called that because it goes under (goezunder–blame English spelling if you can’t make sense of the joke there) the bed. 

Well, what do you drink your ale out of?

When everyone’s had a chance to flonk, the game’s over and the points get counted up.

Teams lose a point for every person who’s sober at the end of the game. 

Dwile flonking is not recommended for people who go to AA meetings.

Want photos? Of course you do. These are from Beccles, 

And from Coventry, where the opposing team didn’t show up,

And more generally, from the BBC Suffolk, which describes the game as an adult version of All Fall Down.

And of course, you’ll want a video. YouTube is happy to oblige.

So now that you have this information, what do you do with it?

Well, once we get past the pandemic (nothing to it) you could always organize a dwile flonking competition where you live. Failing that, you could go down to the bar or pub and throw a beer-soaked rag at someone, then tell them they just participated in the ancient ritual of dwile flonking. 

One of two things will happen:

  1. They’ll stop in their tracks, wondering why they seem to have a beer-soaked rag on their heads when just a moment before they didn’t have a beer-soaked rag on their heads. (You’re not dancing around, so let’s assume you get a three-point hit. And you’ll have thrown the rag in the normal way, which will improve your aim. No magic two- to three-foot magic dwile flonking wands in the bar. ) If you’re in England when you do this, the other person will think, Dwile flonking. Of course. Because even if they’ve never heard of it–which is likely–England understands mysterious celebrations. Cheese rolling. Flaming tar barrels. Why not dwile flonking? Or,
  2. They’ll hit you so hard you’ll fall off your bar stool. 

Life’s a gamble. 

*

Endless thanks to Autolycus for suggesting that I write about this. I do worry about him. He also mentioned something about rhubarb thrashing. I’m saving that. It’s good to have something–however bizarre–to look forward to in these dark times.

Turning the Devil’s Stone: One of Those Strange English Traditions

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Every November 5, when the rest of England is lighting bonfires and pretending to burn a long-dead Catholic rebel, at 8 p.m. the bellringers of Shebbear, in Devon, go to the village green and turn the Devil’s Stone. 

Because that’s what you do in Shebbear on November 5 if you’re a bellringer.

But first they ring a discordant peal of bells and listen to the minister either tell the tale of the Devil’s Stone or say a short prayer, depending on who you want to believe (or possibly who the minister is that year). 

Then they turn the stone. 

Some time before all that, someone lets the morris dancers loose, although they’re not part of the ceremony. They’re–oh, think of them as the frosting instead of the cake. They’re decorative but not essential.

Irrelevant photo: We’ve forgotten what these are, but they have berries at this time of year. I’m running low of flowers.

Actually, only one website mentions morris dancers. That could be because they’ve gone invisible to everybody else. Hold a festival and the odds of morris dancers showing up are high. Hold an odd one and the odds rise to 106-odd %. After a while, people just stop seeing them.

But that’s fine. You can tell you’re deep into folklore when every source contradicts some other source. In fact, in The English Year Steve Roud says that local people also call the stone the Shebbear Stone. He could be right, but the village website calls it the Devil’s Stone and says it’s also called the Devil’s Boulder. It doesn’t mention the Shebbear Stone.

Be happy with this. Everything is as it should be in this best of all possible worlds. 

And I am the queen of Romania. **

Why do they do it?

Because if they don’t, bad things will happen. During World War I and again during World War II, when people had other things on their minds and the village’s hefty young guys were running around in other countries carrying guns, the village let the date pass without turning the stone and bad things happened.

What bad things? No one I’ve found is specific about World War I, but during World War II one source says the war news got so bad that after a few days of bad news some people flipped the stone anyway. They were late, but at least they got the job done, the Allies won the war, and the world has continued on its erratic and weary course. Thank you, Shebbear, for saving us all.

According to another explanation of the ritual, they do it to keep the devil away. Maybe that’s the same thing as keeping bad things from happening. A biblical scholar I’m not. On the Calendar Customs website, someone named Sam left a comment to say, “Your all blooming mad none of this is in the bible….. your all off your trolley.”

Sam is probably not the ritual’s target audience. 

Methodists, alcohol, and folk traditions

As far as I can tell–and remember, I’m an immigrant here, so I’m bound to (almost obliged to) get a lot of this stuff wrong–this is the only ancient festival in Britain that doesn’t involve heavy drinking, although I did find a comment involving rain diluting a spectator’s pint, so you can be assured that (a) it rains a fair percentage of the time, as it should, and (b) drinking is accepted as a peripheral activity. Still, even though the stone is between the church and the pub, and even though the pub is called the Devil’s Stone, nothing I’ve read about the event mentions it either starting or ending at the pub. The closest I’ve found is a mention of the pub selling refreshments, but it does that every day of the year, unless a pandemic gets in the way.

Carrying on like that could get a festival kicked out of the Folkloric Society.

It might be relevant that John Wesley–the founder of Methodism–came through Shebbear and that Methodists don’t drink. Or it might not be relevant. The church the bellringers belong to isn’t Methodist, it’s Church of England. 

For whatever it’s worth, though, the village had the second oldest Methodist school in the country, founded in 1829 to train boys as ministers. It’s possible that before John Wesley showed up, turning the stone involved getting pie-eyed, but that’s pure speculation. It doesn’t seem to now. 

Roud mentions a website that called this the “oldest folk custom in Europe” but he says there’s no evidence of it earlier than the twentieth century. That’s not proof that it doesn’t go back many centuries, it just says there’s no record of it. But he does speculate that it could have started as a prank by bellringers, “or even that it was the result of a drunken conversation in the pub.”

If he’s right, Shebbear can hold its head up at the next meeting of the nonexistent Folkloric Society. The pub will have elbowed its way into the tale.

If you ask Lord Google, he’ll tell you that a Folklore Society does exist, and that it’s a learned society. But since I made up the Folkloric Society, I can assure you that it’s not learned. It involves heavy drinking, some morris dancing, obscure traditions, and disagreements about almost everything.

 

Why this particular stone?

The stone is notable because it doesn’t match the local stone. Depending on who you want to believe:

  • The devil dropped it out of his pocket when he fell from Heaven to Hell.
  • The devil dropped it when he was fighting with god and it fell on him and flattened him. 
  • The devil’s imprisoned underneath it. If you actually believe in the devil, that might make you think twice about turning it, but what do I know? 
  • St. Michael dropped the stone on the devil.
  • The stone was an altar stone belonging to a pre-Christian religion.
  • The stone was quarried for the foundation stone of Hanscott Church, which is nearby, and the Devil moved it to Shebbear. Every time someone moved it back to the church, it turned up at Shebbear again.
  • The devil threw the stone and the church and missed.
  • The stone’s a glacial erratic–something the glaciers picked up in one place and dropped in another. Glaciers were known for their sense of humor. The one carrying the stone said to another glacier, “Watch this. I’m going to set this thing down right here, then we’ll check back in thousands of years. I bet those annoying little hairless creatures will be worshiping it.”

According to various edges of the internet run by people who I suspect know as much about stones  as I do, the stone is granite, the stone is quartz, and the stone is “of a composition unknown anywhere in Europe.” 

No one claims that it’s of a composition unknown anywhere on this planet and everyone agrees that it weighs about a ton. 

 

Important information

Shebbear is pronounced SHEBBeer. I mention that because with English place names you can’t take anything for granted. They’re all glacial erratics–they got picked up in one place and dropped someplace else, and there’s no explaining why they’re either pronounced or spelled the way they are.

My thanks to Bear Humphries for reminding me of the Devil’s Stone, which is more or less local to us both.

 

** Adapted–or stolen–from a poem by Dorothy Parker:

Comment

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.

Strange British Customs: The Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival

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Can any country without a straw bear festival claim to have a culture? 

Well, possibly. I hesitate to throw whole cultures into history’s extensive trash can. Especially since, no matter how much I try, they never do stay thrown. 

But either way, let’s talk about the Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival. Because it exists. Because it takes place (when the country isn’t in lockdown) in January and this is June, and that makes it an obvious topic right now. And because I thought a quick break from the serious stuff might do us all good.

The festival started before Whittlesea’s collective memory kicked in, so no one knows how far back it goes. Britain’s full of events like that. This one involves what an 1882 newspaper called the confraternity of the plough. That sounds like an organized group but the writer was probably just trying for a cute and condescending way of talking about farm workers.

Irrelevant photo: No flower this time, just sunlight and leaves.

What does seem to be known–and remember to take everything with a teaspoon or two of salt because of that problem with collective memory–is that each year they’d pick a man or boy to be the bear. Then on Plough Monday (British spelling because what the hell it’s their holiday) they’d drag a plow (American spelling because I can only be well behaved for just so long) through town and lead the bear around, with lots of singing and dancing. 

And drinking.

We’ll get around to the Plough Monday part later. 

The newspaper article describes the straw bear dancing in front of  “the good folk who had on the previous day subscribed to the rustics, a spread of beer, tobacco and beef.” So basically, the well-to-do got entertainment and the badly-off got roaring drunk and went away with their bellies (and lungs) filled, and a good time was had by most.

Until the next morning. But there’s me spoiling the fun again.

As a counterbalance to that above-it-all description, let’s quote a book by Sybil Marshall about life in the fens in the 1890s. This isn’t specifically about the straw bear, but it’s close enough to be useful.

“Living where we did and how we did, we used to make the most of anything a bit out o’ the ordinary, and we looked for’ard from one special day to the next. Looking back on it now, I’m surprised to see how many high days and holidays there were during the year that we kept, and we certainly made the most of any that children could take part in at all. . . . The Molly Dancers ‘ould come round the fen from Ramsey and Walton all dressed up. One would have a fiddle and another a dulcimer or perhaps a concertina and play while the rest danced. This were really special for Christmas Eve, but o’ course the dancers cou’n’t be everywhere at once on one day, so they used to go about on any other special day to make up for it. They’d go from pub to pub, and when they’d finished there, they’d go to any houses or cottages where they stood a chance o’ getting anything. If we ha’n’t got any money to give ’em, at least they never went away without getting a hot drink.”

Whittlesea’s straw bear tradition lapsed in the early twentieth century, when a police inspector (speaking of spoiling the fun) decided the whole festival was a form of begging. Then it was revived in 1980, by (I’m taking a wild guess at this) either a group of guys who’d had too many beers or a group of promoters who decided it would bring the tourists in. 

Or a group of promoters who’d had too many beers. Why have two groups when one will do?

These days the festival involves a procession with the bear and a team pulling a plow (or a plough, which with all those extra vowels has got to be heavier) through the streets, and of course music, dancing, and (I’m guessing, since I haven’t been to the festival) a lot of drinking. The festival website’s FAQs includes the question, “Can I drink on the streets?” 

Answer: No. The cops are watching. Drink in the pub. Drink outside the pub but use a plastic glass. Play more or less nice.

The bear’s led around the town to dance in front of pubs, which is no mean trick because the costume weighs 5 stone.

A stone? It’s one of those insane, traditional British measures and it equals 14 pounds. Because who doesn’t like to multiply by 14? So 5 stone is–

Will you give me a minute here? I’m working on it.

It’s 70 pounds. Or 31.7515 kilos, give or take a gram. In other words, heavy enough that we should all be impressed by someone wearing it for long, never mind dancing in it. 

At the end of the festival, the bear costume is burned.

And of course, the festival includes morris dancers. Love ‘em or hate ‘me, you can’t hold a traditional festival in England without morris dancers. 

It also involves molly dancers, and I thought we’d get to take a break from anything serious, but I never do know where a topic will lead me, so buckle up, kids, ‘cause it’s about to get serious.

According to the Morris Ring website, molly dancing traditionally involved white men blacking their faces and dressing in women’s clothes. The blackface may have been to disguise themselves or it may be good old-fashioned racism. It could easily have been one twisted around the other. At this point, I doubt anyone can unpick the threads. 

The winds are blowing hard against blackface these days, and some molly dancing groups have dropped it. Others defend it on the grounds–and this is an argument I’ve never heard outside of Britain–that it isn’t (or wasn’t) meant to be racist, and so it isn’t racist. I’ve argued that through with more than one person and have yet to change a single mind.

The website of a molly dancing group called Pig Dyke explains its decision to drop blackface: They don’t want to be linked to the minstrel show tradition, where whites blacked their faces and played out a grotesque image of black people. It says, “Molly dancers in the past blacked their faces for disguise, weirdness, and loss of personal identity: we achieve that” without blackface. 

I looked through the Whittlesea website photos hoping to find that all the groups had dropped blackface. They hadn’t. If I was around to ask the dancers why they still do it, I’m sure they’d tell me it’s not racist because it was never meant to be racist. And because they’re not racists. And I’d try to convince them that their intent (or the originators’ intent–take your pick) isn’t the center around which the universe pivots–that our intent doesn’t control our impact. 

I’d leave wondering why I bothered. 

I won’t take a guess at what they’d be thinking. I don’t expect it’d be flattering. So let’s leave them to be unflattering and talk about the dressing in women’s clothes part. 

Pig Dyke connects the word molly to London’s molly houses, which were eighteenth-century gay and transvestite brothels. Whether they’re right to make that connection is anyone’s guess. There’s a strong British tradition of straight, non-transvestite men cross-dressing, and it’s widespread enough to make me think it was independent of the molly houses, although they may share a common root. But that’s guesswork. Let’s just chalk it up to another one of those collective memory blank spots.

I promised we’d get back to Plough Monday. The Molly Dancing website says it fell on ”the first Monday after Epiphany (or twelfth night) and was the first day after Christmas that farm-workers were meant to return to work, so they didn’t! Instead they decorated a plough and pushed it round the village, calling at the houses of the well-off villagers to beg for money. If the householders weren’t forthcoming with donations then they threatened to plough up the garden, or if there wasn’t a garden, the doorstep.”

That accounts for why the Morris Ring website says molly dancers ”could be destructive, drunk and disreputable.” 

These days, no one plows up gardens or doorsteps, drinking on the streets is only allowed outside the pubs, and storytelling groups gather the kids around so that they can take home something wholesome–something full of mental fiber and emotional green vegetables.