ENGLISH CUSTOMS

Taranaki Daily News, 27 January 1934, Page 14 (Supplement)

ENGLISH CUSTOMS

ROOTED IN THE PAST MEMORIES OF THE VIKINGS. RIDDLE OF STONEHENGE. Like all the time-honoured customs of the country, the London Lord Mayor’s Show has roots which strike down into reality. It is an annual assertion of the fact that the Lord Mayor is the sovereign of the single square mile of the city, that the King himself cannot enter the' city without halting at Temple Bar and obtaining the Lord Mayor’ permission to proceed, says a writer in the New York Times. In this respect, it is a little like Guy Fawkes Day. Guy Fawkes Day also has its roots in reality, but its foliage has long been a carnival of bonfires, fireworks, and small boys who roatn the streets with daubed faces, begging pennies and dragging with them effigies of the original Guy. It sprang from the gunpowder plot to blow up James I and his House of Lords in 1605, and in the houses of Parliament it has been formalised into the solemn search of the basements which still occurs on the night before the opening of a new Parliament. But in the country at large, its thousands of bonfires have retained their original anti-Catholic character only at Lewes in Sussex, where, for some mysterious reason, the historic Cliffe Bonfire Society still uses the “No Popery” banner and bums effigies of Guy Fawkes and Pope Paul IV, who is regarded as the real author of the gun-powder plot. In a country like England both the Lord Mayor’s Show and Guy Fawkes Day have to be regarded as comparatively young rather than old customs. Not until we reach the winter solstice customs which cluster about Christmas and New Year’s Day, the spring festivals which Easter ' and May Day have inherited, and, the oldest of them all, the pilgrimage to Stonehenge at dawn .on Midsummer's Day, do ve get' into customs whose roots sink far out of sight into the folklore of pre-history. STRIKING CUSTOM. One of the most striking pf these customs, and perhaps one of the least known, is the festival of Up-Helly-Aa, which occurs annually towards the end of January at Lerwick, in the Shetland Islands, to the north of Scotland. It is striking not only in itself but also because it flows naturally from the Viking blood and the Viking traditions which influence so much of Shetland life. How ancient it is nobody knowns, but it obviously goes back to the funeral customs of the Viking period when the bodies of Viking leaders were . turned adrift in blazing galleys at sea. The festival begins early in the evening, darkness having set in about the midde of the January afternoon. A Viking galley some thirty feet long, with the uplifted dragon’s head at the prow, is ready, mounted on wheels. Twenty men with shields and the winged Viking helmets take the oars, and their leader in armour mounts the little, deck art

Then the procession, begins; the great galley and its crew are dragged through the dark streets, surrounded by men with flaring torches, followed by hundreds of other torches, and led by a band playing old Viking tunes. The procession moves slowly down to the sea-front where it is. greeted by rockets and fireworks from the fishing trawlers lying out in the darkness of the harbour. There it stops and the torches close up around the galley. The captain starts “The Norseman’s Home” and everybody within earshot takes it up. When the song is finished the ' crew leaves the galley, the, burning torches are flung in, and in a moment the whole vessel is ablaze from stem to stern. So striking a festival would be one of the bestknown in the British Isles if it were not separated from Britain by more than 100 miles of January seas.

AID FOR POOR Easter is associated. with so many customs everywhere that it is difficult to isolate those which are peculiar to England. Throughout the. country Easter seems to be a favourite time for the distribution of doles to the poor under medieval wills, but the most famous dole, as well as the most famous Easter custom, is that of thie distribution of Maundy money on the Thursday before Good Friday. It is the only survival in England of the gorgeous ceremonial of the medieval Easter such as King Alfonso used to celebrate in Madrid. James II was the last .King of England to carry out the full Easter ceremonial. Since his time the curious ceremony which is held in Westminster Abbey at noon Maundy Thursday has been the only public royal function of Holy Week. The dole is distributed to as many recipients as there are years in the King’s age, and consists of as many pennies .to each. The present King on the last Maundy Thursday was 67. Accordingly there were sixty-seven recipients and each received sixty-seven pennies. The pennies are specially minted for the occasion in tiny silver coins of one to four pence in denomination. They are done up in small leather purses to which long red and white strings are attached. The purses are placed on a golden plater with the long strings hanging down like a fringe. This is borne into the Abbey by a yeoman of the guard from the Tower in full Tudor dress of scarlet and gold, attended by a sergeant major, and the presentation is attended By the Dean of the Abbey in a simple white gown instead of his'golden vestments. A few shillings or so apiece', to the recipients may not seem to be a very royal gift, but the specially minted coins used are in great demand by collectors, and the recipients can get several pounds for a set if any want to sell.

ON MAY DAY. May Day shares with Easter perhaps more curious customs than have clustered about any other dates in the English calendar. It is at this time of year that most of the well-dressing ceremonies occur, consisting of the decorating of the wells with inscriptions and garlands and the holding of brief openair services before them. May Day and Whitesuntide also bring the Morris dances, perhaps the most picturesque of all the long-established customs of the country. As far as any antiquarian knows, the oldest site in Britain which is associated with a surviving custom _ is the group of stones on the bare tableland of Salisbury Plain known as Stonehenge, and the custom of awaiting the dawn there on midsummer’s day on June 21 continues to attract a crowd of several thousand every year. Every aspect of Stonehenge is a riddle over which volumes of debate have been poured out. It is a stone circle which was built long before the Druids’ time, but is believed to have been used by them. The midsummer’s morning festival there, may at one time have been a service of sunworship at which human sacrifice occurred, but nowadays it is only the spell of the place which draws the annual gatherings. The idea to-day is to get there eariy enough to take up a position which, on a clear morning, will let you catch the rising sun perched on the tip of the stone

known as the Friar’s Heel. On a perfect morning the sun in this position seems to bathe the Slaughter Stone with blood - but such mornings occur only on about one Midsummer’s Day in a decade. Most of the did English fairs are held in September and October. Much of their old importance has been taken from them *

by the railways, but they are still a rich mine of antiquarian interest. They preserve some of the oldest civic and folk usages in England—including many of the best-known folksongs in the country—but some of them, the horse and pony fairs r especially, are copiously overlaid, with gypsy life.