Midsummer Traditions and Folklore

A longer version of an essay included with the Folklore Tapes box Calendar Customs IV: Crown of Light

Midsummer is the most natural time of the year for a celebration marked by simple pleasure and unaffected joy. The midwinter rites of Christmastide, the diametric opposite of midsummer on the face of the annular calendar, have an air of fortification and remembrance – illumination kindled to hold back the dark and nurture a hope for solar renaissance. If midwinter is the time when the seeds of light are sown, midsummer is the moment when they flower to their fullest extent. The sun is at its apogee, its long arc across the sky vaulting to its utmost height. The earth, spinning through its axially tilting orbital dance, presents its northern hemisphere to bask in solar warmth, bringing out its summer colours – bright grassy greens and buttercup yellows, speedwell blues and poppy reds. Darkness has been cast aside, compressed into a few brief hours (or dispelled altogether if you travel far enough north into the Scottish isles or Scandinavian wilds). The triumph of light, of the spirit of life, is to be rejoiced in unreservedly, no matter how brief its moment of ascendance.

As with midwinter rites, including Christmas day itself, there is a slight misalignment with the precise moment of solstice division into maximal periods of light and dark. The summer solstice falls on the 21st June. The first rays of the rising sun shafting through the megaliths of Stonehenge onto its central ‘altar’ stone are greeted by Druid revivalists, rooted in 18th century reinventions. Thousands of bystanders respond to the morning solar radiance with the glinting digital scintillations of their mobile cameras and phones – a very modern form of worship, attracting a mass congregation, if only for this one day. The antiquarian dream of Stonehenge as a solar temple of the Druids is one which enchanted William Blake amongst others, as the image of a megalithic trilithon gateway for the giants of old Albion in his illuminated book Jerusalem attests. Mere fancy it may be, but it’s one which still exerts considerable influence on the contemporary imagination, mired in a materialistic present and yearning for a sense of connection with a magical past.

Traditional midsummer celebrations have not taken place at the time of the solstice, however, but three days later on the 24th, St John’s Day, and even more so on its preceding eve. This is the date which has come to be officially designated midsummer’s day. Further festivities were held on the joint saint day of Peter and Paul, the 28th. Many must have simply bridged the two festival days with continuous merriment. And remember, this is the time of Glastonbury weather (the Glastonbury festival being a modern manifestation of midsummer revels), so suggesting alternative dates for a festival which was of its essence an outdoors celebration was an eminently pragmatic hedging of bets.

There’s really only one way to celebrate the supremacy of the sun and whatever divinities are associated with it: build up huge fires on the high places of the landscape to reflect some of its flaring, mesmerically roiling photosphere back at it; to emulate some of its warmth, that radiance which makes the heart lighter, the spirit more buoyant. Poets have recognised the spiritual refreshment afforded by this time of light, its countermanding of wintry melancholy. Matthew Arnold, in Thyrsis, his elegy to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, asks of those who suggest their spirit departs with the falling blossom ‘too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?/Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,/Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,/Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,/Sweet-William with his homely cottage smell,/And stocks in fragrant blow;/Roses that down the alleys shine afar,/And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,/And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,/And the full moon, and the white evening-star.’

John Clare, the farm labourer poet, who suffered desperately from the depredations of depression, nevertheless revelled in the ecstatic moods of summer: ‘Now swathy summer by rude health embrowned/Precedence takes of rosy fingered spring/And laughing joy with wild flowers prankt and crowned/A wild and giddy thing/With health robust from every care unbound/Comes on zephers wing/And cheers the toiling clown.
Happy as holiday enjoying face/Loud tongued and ‘merry as a marriage bell’/They lightsome step sheds joy in every place/And where the troubled dwell/Thy witching smiles weans them of half their cares/And from thy sunny spell/They greet joy unawares’.

Accounts from as far back as the 4th century in the old French province of Acquitaine record midsummer fire festivals in which blazing wheels were set rolling down steep hillsides – the solar disc turning on its tumbling course. In mid 19th century Buckfastleigh in Devon a wheel with rim and spokes wrapped in straw was set ablaze and rolled from the heights on midsummer eve, accompanied on its fiery descent by villagers pelting alongside, attempting to steer it with sticks to a steamy dousing in the river Dart. If they succeeded in their endeavour, good fortune would prevail over the coming months, and a good harvest guaranteed. If not, they’d had a wild time and could repair breathlessly to the nearest alehouse to drown their thirst.

Font in Bratton Clovelly church, Devon

The representation of the sun as a wheel was common in medieval times. It symbolised both its daily progress across the sky and the procession of the solar year with its seasonal transformations. Solar wheels can be traced on many Norman fonts, often the oldest objects in rural parish churches. Like many other pagan symbols or allegorical beasts, they have been translated into a Christian idiom. This marked a process of continuity and fusion as much as an imposition of alien values. It was the cataclysmic historical and cultural rift of the Reformation which brought this continuum of belief and practice to a violent iconoclastic end.

John Aubrey

The fires of medieval belief and ritual were increasingly stamped out, both literally and figuratively. The antiquarian John Aubrey wrote, in his 1688 volume Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme (a pioneering folkloric work), ‘still in many places on St John’s night they make Fires on the Hills: but the Civill Warres comeing on have putt all these Rites or customes quite out of fashion’. Nevertheless, the tradition lived on the further reaches of the isles.

Hilltop fires were lit on St John’s Eve across England and Eastern and Northern Scotland and in the Northern Isles (less so in the Celtic lands of Wales, Ireland and the Western Isles). In Scotland, the sun’s progress would be ritually re-enacted by processing around the fields three times sunwise (ie clockwise) with blazing torches held aloft, the crops and herds thereby blessed. Bonfires were started as the sun slowly sank below the horizon, staining the sky with its tangerine and vermillion afterglow. In the Northern Isles, Johnsmas fires were built from varied materials including heather, fish bones, peat, flowers, seaweed and feathers.

In Westernmost Cornwall, chains of fires were lit tracing the rugged, curving concave coastline of Mount’s Bay from Penzance to the Lizard. Cornish midsummer fire traditions were revived by the Old Cornwall Society in 1929, colouring them with druidic romance whose nationalist elements lent the proceedings a curiously formal, civic air. Beginning atop the tor of Carn Brea, the site of a Neolithic settlement, the fires are blessed in the old Cornish language and flowers arranged in the shape of a sickle thrown into the flames by a local girl designated the Lady of the Flowers. The sickle anticipates the harvest whilst the ceremony is a decorous and fragrant reminder of a more elementally superstitious past when a bountiful harvest required the offering of human life. Antiquarians in previous centuries dreamed of detecting remnants of the wicker giant sacrifices which Julius Caesar claimed to have witnessed in the Gaul of the 1st century BC in midsummer fire rituals, but there was really no evidence to support the fabric of their fancies.

Sir Benjamin Stone's picture of the Whalton Baal Fire rites in 1903

The Baal Fire at Whalton in Northumberland is lit on the village green on the 4th July, harking back to the old midsummer’s eve date before the rift between the Julian calendar and its Gregorian replacement opened up in September 1752, a faultline which swallowed up 11 days (precious moments guarded by the Paladin of the Lost Hour in Harlan Ellison’s short story). It’s a celebration which can lay claim to real continuity, perhaps even with a pre-Reformation tradition. The word baal could derive from the Celtic bel, meaning the sun, or light, or from the Anglo-Saxon bael, meaning fire (which is also the root of Beltane). Fuel for the fire is carried by hand to the place of burning, and children dance around the stacked tinder before it is set alight as the evening shadows gather. Couples take over from the children, dancing around the flames and later leaping over the crackling embers, as was the way with midsummer fires across the land. Leaping the fire and darting through its smoke, breathing in and wreathing the body with its heady woodscent aroma was an act of purification and invited good fortune.

A Shropshire monk writing in the 14th century described the ‘three manner of fires’ which were made on St John’s eve. ‘One is of clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John’s Fire’. The bonefire was a purifying conflagration, its evil stench and acrid smoke driving away malevolent forces and keeping pestilence at bay. The wake fire was the sociable circle of warmth around which people would gather for the night. St John’s Fire was a ritual blaze with a rather more solemn ambience.

It wasn’t just in rural areas that fires were started. The estimable John Stow, Elizabethan tailor and self-educated antiquarian (who we’ve encountered in previous Calendar Customs explorations) recorded his good-humoured observations of London midsummer celebrations in his invaluable and highly readable 1598 masterpiece Survey of London. ‘In the month of June and July, on the vigils of festival days, and on the same festival days in the evening after the sun setting, there were usually made bonfires in the streets, every man bestowing wood or labour towards them: the wealthier sort also, before their doors near to the said bonfires, would set out tables on the vigils, furnished with sweet bread and good drink, and on the festival days with meats and drinks plentifully, whereunto they would invite their neighbours and passengers also to sit and be merry with them in great familiarity, praising God for His benefits bestowed on them. These were called bonfires as well of good amity amongst neighbours before at controversy, were there, by the labour of others, reconciled, and made of bitter enemies loving friends; and also for the virtue that a great fire hath to purge the infection of the air’. As well as re-iterating the idea of fire and its smoke as a purgative and purifying force before the potentially arid and pestilential days of the long summer, Stow gets to the heart of the matter here; a communal fire acts as a focal point for gathering around and generates good spirits and an amiable atmosphere. It’s this as much as any symbolic, spiritual or magical purpose which explains the widespread popularity of midsummer fire ceremonies over so many centuries. Even an 18th century protestant cleric such as Henry Bourne, writing in his 1725 volume Antiquitates Vulgares, recognised the fundamental innocence of such impulses (unless taken too far, of course, he felt compelled to add): ‘when they (the fires) are only kindled as tokens of joy, to excite innocent mirth and diversion, and promote peace and good neighbourhood, they are lawful and innocent, and deserve no censure. And therefore when on Midsummer-Eve, St Peter’s Eve, and some other times, we make bonfires before shops and houses there would be no harm in doing so, was it not that some continue their diversion to too late hours, and others are guilty of excessive drinking’.

Fires burning in the streets of London naturally cast the looming shadow of King Mob, summoning the potential spirit of its mutinously grinning collective visage. It’s perhaps no surprise that the city watch played an increasingly prominent role in the medieval and Tudor periods. From the 14th century onwards, they were required to parade through the streets in their gayest finery, carrying flaming ‘cresset’ buckets on poles slung over their shoulders. No such finery for the black-clad, baton-wielding riot police who set about the latterday travellers intent on holding a free Solstice festival in the fields around Stonehenge in 1985, a one-sided altercation which became known as the Battle of the Beanfield (although ‘rout’ would be a more accurate description).

The Salisbury Giant and sidekick Hob-Nob

Midsummer parades grew in size and theatricality throughout the Tudor period, with passing pageants featuring creatures and characters from biblical and national mythologies. Giants were prominent (as they would be) along with saints, dragons, hobby horses, Moorish kings, Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, unicorns and Jesus Christ himself, all accompanied by minstrels and morris dancers and brought to moving picture life in the pixillating flicker of a hundred smoking torches. Such pageantry was another victim of Reformation and Civil War. As early as 1533, Henry VIII’s Royal Council was looking to curtail these potentially rebellious gatherings, and in 1539 he succeeded in suppressing the annual London march for the remaining 8 years of his reign. It was never the same again and soon faded away completely, a fate which befell similar parades across the country. A mouldering remnant of an effigy was discovered in 1844 in the backrooms of a Tailor’s Guildhall in Salisbury; a giant which once bestrode the midsummer parades, now a tattered, dimineshed shade of its former self. It now lies quiescent in the city museum.

Midsummer parades have been reinvented in some areas, though, notably so in Penzance. The Mazey Day festival has been fashioned around the old Golowan (St John’s Eve) celebrations. At midnight on St John’s Eve, a Penglaz ‘obby ‘oss is brought out, a flower-garlanded and gaily beribboned horse’s skull held aloft on a pole, its empty sockets filled with the night’s shadows, chomping incisors flashing an enamelled grin in the torchlight. A female ‘teaser’ leads it in a snaking serpent dance down to the quayside, the townspeople twisting and turning in its mesmerically swaying wake.

Midsummer is not one of the festival periods during which the worlds of faerie are at a perigee point of proximity to the waking world. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its fairy court and mischievous sprites making sport with human destiny is, despite its title, set on May Day eve. Midsummer’s eve is still a time steeped in powerful magic, however. Although Midsummer is a solar festival, a daylit affair, this is also the point at which the astrological calendar moves into the house of Cancer, a sign associated with water and the moon.

It was thought to be a time when witches were active, going abroad to gather flowers and herbs whose potency was at its height on this night. As John Aubrey noted, ‘Midsummer Eve is counted or called the Witches’ Night’. Cornish Penwith witches were said to gather on Burns Down above Zennor on midsummer’s eve, the nomenclature denoting the many fires which were lit amongst the natural cauldrons of the granite landscape basins and on the tables of dolmen stones. The Witches’ Rock which was the ultimate site for their midnight assembly is no longer there, having been broken up and possibly used for stone wall construction in the nineteenth century. It used to be said that touching the rock nine times at midnight would afford protection against ill-fortune – a species of associative counter-magic. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the farm which lies beneath Burns Down is called Tregerthen, or Rowan Tree Farm. Rowan wood afforded powerful protection against the depredations of witchcraft, and twigs tied together with red ribbons and hung above stable and farmhouse doors would keep harmful magic at bay.

St John's Wort

Effigies of witches were burned in some fires, a tradition revived by the Cornish at St Cleer. A witch’s broom and hat are perched on the peak of the bonfire mountain. When it is lit, a variety of herbs and flowers are thrown onto the pyre to nullify their efficacy in any witchery attempted in the vicinity. The very flowers used for the purposes of witchcraft (or, as was more likely the case, herbal medicine) could be employed as magical protection. Garlands of vervain, yarrow, mugwort, plaintain, dwarf elder, corn marigold (the ‘summer’s bride’), orpins and, most powerfully of all, St John’s wort (or chase-devil) could be hung on doors to repel malevolent spells, or burned in midsummer fires to create a purifying incense. Yarrow hung up on St John’s Eve would ward of sickness for the coming year. Those seeking St John’s Wort on the evening when its magic was at its most potent might have a bit of hunt on their hands, however. It was said to be able to move to evade those intent on picking it.

Of course, midsummer flowers were beautiful decorations, magical powers notwithstanding. John Stow noted ‘on the vigil of St. John the Baptist, and on St. Peter and Paul the Apostles, every man’s door being shadowed with green birch, long fennel, St. John’s wort, orpine, white lilies, and such like, garnished upon with garlands of beautiful flowers’, their colours brought out in the evening by the illumination of hundreds of lamps to ‘make a goodly show’. Another tradition involved the creation of midsummer cushions; either an actual cushion upon which flowers were arrayed, or a stool covered in a layer of thick, clayish soil into which flowers were embedded. The poet John Clare loved such presentations and wanted to title one of his later collections The Midsummer Cushion.

Orpine

Midsummer was a time considered particularly propitious for divination, especially when foretelling romantic fortunes. Flowers play their part here too. The prominent floral aspect of midsummer rites and celebrations is hardly surprising given that this is the time of fullest flowering. Two orpine flowers were hung together, sometimes resting against a plate, on midsummer’s eve. If, on the following morning, they had inclined towards one another, love would blossom and fidelity was assured. If they turned away from each other, love would fade and loyalties stray. In the disastrous event of the orpines withering, a death in the household was foretold. Fortunately, this was highly unlikely. Orpine flowers were renowned for remaining fresh long after having been cut, hence one of their common names, life-long. Another such name was ‘midsummer men’, indicating how closely and widely they were associated with these divinations.

The magical potency of flowers reached its peak on St John’s eve, and in some cases this was the only time at which their power became manifest. A piece of mugwort ‘coal’ dug up beneath its roots (in actuality a rotted part of those roots) on St John’s Eve would afford protection from plague, ague, lightning, carbuncle and burning, and was thus a highly sought after natural treasure on this one enchanted night. Fernseed (the tiny spores on the underside of fern leaves) was particularly elusive, supposedly appearing on this one evening of the year and no other. If you were somehow able to gather it (and you would likely face opposition from witches jealously guarding their special patch) it would confer upon you the power of invisibility. Sacred springs or wells could also be used for divination, with the bubbles or ripples produced by offerings of coins, bent pins or flowers thrown upon the waters providing answers to questions of love and matrimony. These offerings, or coloured ribbons tied to adjacent trees, would activate the healing powers of the waters.

A sunwise circumnavigation of the well was often part of the ritual, as at the Pin Well in Alnwick Park in Northumberland. Processing or dancing in a circling, sunwise direction was a feature of many midsummer celebrations, modelling the ecliptic solar passage across the sky and thereby invoking its power and blessing. Never anti-sunwise (or widdershins), however; that would summon dark otherworldly forces into your life and invite ill fortune. The North Eastern antiquarian Moses Aaron Richardson, writing in the 6th volume of his mid-19th century collection titled, with exhaustively thorough accuracy, ‘The Local Historian's Table Book of Remarkable Occurrences, Historical Facts, Legendary and Descriptive Ballads, &c., connected with the Counties of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland, and Durham’, remarks upon the three holy wells near Longwitton-hall in Northumberland. ‘Great concourses of people from all parts, also used to assemble here in the memory of old people on “Midsummer Sunday and the Sunday following” and amuse themselves with leaping, eating gingerbread brought for sale to the spot, and drinking the waters of the wells’. He also notes the myth of the guardian dragon associated with the wells, a creature capable of making itself invisible and renewing itself by dipping its tail in the healing waters. It was defeated by one Sir Guy of Warwick, who noticed its secret and cunningly interposed himself between the beast and its source of power, hacking it about until it could take no more, curled up and died. The wells were thenceforth free for all to use. Three cheers for Sir Guy!

To retain the magical properties of plants and flowers gathered St John’s Eve, or the divinatory secrets of sacred waters, it was a general requirement that complete and solemn silence was maintained. The Moomins understood this, as Tove Jansson related in Moominsummer Madness. After sitting by their midsummer fire for a spell, Moomintroll, the Snork Maiden and the Fillyjonk venture out into the night meadows to gather nine kinds of flower (as we have seen with the Witches’ Rock, nine is something of a magic number). The Snork Maiden recalls previous midsummer evenings when ‘we went off to pick nine kinds of flowers and put them under our pillow and then our dreams came true. But you weren’t allowed to say a word while you picked them, not afterwards until morning’. This most magically-wise of creatures also knew some midsummer romantic divinatory rites: ‘First you must turn seven times around yourself, mumbling a little and stamping your feet. Then you go backwards to a well, and turn around, and look down in it. And then, down in the water, you’ll see the person you’re going to marry’.

Midsummer’s eve in the Moomin’s world was also the only time to sow the seeds which almost instantaneously germinate into the small, ghostworm creatures known as the Hattifatteners. More midsummer’s eve sowing magic could be achieved by a girl who walked 12 times (sunwise, of course) around a church, scattering hempseed in her wake whilst intoning the rhyme ‘hempseed I sow/Hempseed I hoe/Let him tht is my true love/Come after me and mow’. The phantom of her future love would then appear, trailing after her, completely under her spell.

A more unsavoury form of love divination is practised in the kitchen, with the midsummer’s eve baking of dumb cakes by a small gathering of women. Once more, the preparation and cooking must be carried out in complete silence. The ingredients are simple and few: half flour and half flour mixed into a dough with the piss of each participant. Each in turn makes a mark or scratches an initial on the cake (or cakes). After the rigorous observation of various scrupulously specified instructions (for this is a highly ritualised recipe) the baked cakes are taken out of the oven and the spectres of future husbands appear to break the piece of cake (or take the smaller bunlike variants) bearing the mark of their bride-to-be and present it to her. As with all supernatural procedures, there were attendant dangers. The anonymous author of the 1685 volume Mother Bunch’s Closet Newly Broke Open (Mother Bunch herself, perhaps) concluded his or her instruction with the saucily valedictory line ‘if there be any so unfortunate to hear a bell, I wish I had them to my bedfellows this night to prevent leading apes to hell’. Leading apes in hell, a phrase which turns up in a number of Shakespearean quotes, was the proverbial fate of old maids in the 16th and 17th centuries, although its precise meaning remains obscure. However, the fact that it is taking place in hell suggests that it’s unlikely to be pleasant. So, a recipe which risks bestial intercourse of whatever variety in the fiery pits. You don’t get that in Delia (as far as I’m aware).

The combination of summer heat and the heightened influence of the moon led to midsummer being considered a time of delirium and madness, particularly for those already affected by such states. Tove Jansson’s Moominsummer Madness plays on such associations, as well as on the theatrical elements which are also central to the novel. The phrase midsummer madness was common in Shakespeare’s time. In Twelfth Night, Olivia responds to Malvolio’s absurdly misguided advances by declaring ‘why, this is very midsummer madness’. Such tendencies lend St John’s eve festivities and edgily antic air, creating a sense of licensed lunacy and abandon. Midsummer sports such as swinging fireballs on the end of chains, running with tar barrels, leaping through flames or rolling burning wheels down hills were ways of toying with chaos, playing with scarcely contained elemental forces that could easily grow rapidly out of control and scorch, char or completely consume; A good analogy for those skirting the borders of mania. Perhaps by allowing the demons of the mind their night of wild freedom, their longer term ravages might be curtailed in the dog days to come.

The ephemeral nature of the sun’s triumph was acknowledged in rites which anticipated harvest time, the fruiting and going to seed of plants now in the full glory of efflorescence. The smoke from fires was partly intended to ritually cleanse the air, protecting crops and herds from pestilence and blight. In Herefordshire and Somerset, fires were lit adjacent to orchards to encourage a good crop in the autumn, as John Aubrey noted: ‘On Midsummer-eve, they make fire in the fields in the waies: sc. to Blesse the Apples’. The ephemerality of human life was also underlined by the south western custom of the midsummer’s eve church porch watch. On the long, hazy evening and short, balmy (hopefully) night of this enchanted evening, it was the phantoms of the living which drifted dreamily abroad, as we’ve seen in the context of a number of the divinatory rituals. The porch watcher could observe the villagers filing dumbly into the parish church, departing once more at midnight. If any remained inside, it was a sure sign that they would die during the following year (in some variations of the tradition, it was only those thus marked who entered the church in the first place). Once more, dangers attended this encounter with the supernatural. If the watcher was overcome with weariness and slipped into sleep during their nightlong vigil, they would join the phantom congregation remaining inside before the next St John’s eve.

For all that it kept one eye on the time to come, and on the dwindling of the light, midsummer’s eve and its ensuing day were all about celebrating the moment. The sun is rising now, climbing to the height of its radiant glory. Light and warmth and joy fill our hearts in this instant, This Instant! So let us gather around the convivial fires, revel in the amber glow bronzing one another’s faces and leap boldly through the flames and fragrant smoke. Surrender to the holy midsummer madness. We are alive. Blessings and thanks to Bright Phoebus, to the lifegiver, to The Sun.

Folklore Tapes: Occultural Creatures Vol.1 - Black Dog Traditions of England

The latest offering from the Folklore Tapes folk (Ian Humberstone and David Chatton Barker in this instance) is a treasure box filled with exquisite objects, a reliquary as the promotional copy casts it. The unholy contents are far from saintly, however. These relics are collected reports and rumours, historical remnants in the form of oral tales and myths in set down in ballad form. Here are dark terrors, tenebrous forms condensed from the night’s impenetrable blackness and given wild, bestial life. This is the opening release in a new Occultural Creatures series and the first supernatural manifestation to be sighted is the terrible, protean outline of the black dog.

At the heart of the project, its scholarly foundation and narrative bone structure, is Ian Humberstone’s investigative study of black dog traditions in England. It has academic heft and an authority anchored by extensive footnotes and bibliographic markers. Fervid poring over little consulted texts are supported by field expeditions and first hand explorations and interviews, mining local knowledge and gaining a feel for the geography of myth, the spirit of folkloric place. Where it succeeds over more dusty tomes is in its ability to bring the stories alive, to create a rich sense of atmosphere, conjuring time, space and mood and making the sense of dread and uncanny mystery palpable. These are accounts made to be read aloud, as indeed a number of them have been in a handful of compelling performances. The ‘prowling and ill-omened animation of the witching hour’ has been brought to life as a stark woodcut silhouette thrown onto a white screen of ghostly cloth by an overhead projector, backdrops shifted in the blink of an eye by a prestidigitator’s hand whipping away photographic transparencies. ‘Listen close and I will tell you all I know’, Ian begins. It’s as if we are gathered around the warm, hypnotically flickering radiance of a fire, the shadows cast to the periphery of vision by the beguiling coil and sway of its transient flames.

The prose has a bewitching cadence, an enchanting use of the language of romance which lends it a bardic quality. Read it in your head in measured metre with a soft Scottish brogue to hear it in its optimum form. Ian Humberstone traces the development of the ubiquitous black dogs of legend and folklore from demonic beasts, embodiments of hellish power, to the less corporeal though no less terrifying outlines of spectre-hounds, haunters of dark lanes and wild moors or guardians of magical hoards. He gathers together the linguistic branches of the black dog family, the regional vernacular which produces barguests, shocks and hooters, gytrash, padfeet and skrikers. They are manifold but tend to share common characteristics; uncommonly large black hounds with eyes as big as saucers. Occasionally they swell in size, expanding to take on an aspect of cosmic horror, becoming indistinguishable from the terror of the night’s dark abyss.

Ian travels the length of the land to gather tales of these dread beasts, tracking their footprints to Devon, Herefordshire and Norfolk, Yorkshire, Somerset and even to the dark, stinking heart of old London town. Photographs, soft with film stock grain, add eyeflash instants, impressions of landscape and the particularity of place. Tudor ruins with their long-cold fireplaces; the graveyards of flinty East-Anglian churches; stygian fern and ash-leaf veiled cave-mouths; and the imprint of the black dog on weather vanes, pub and road signs. Our fearless and intrepid explorers, messrs. Humberstone and Chatton Barker, are glimpsed as figures in these landscapes, picking their way through the tumbled limestone trail of Troller’s Gill, measuring out the distances of the high moorland or soaking up the sun outside the Black Dog Inn.

There are also stills from the celluloid strips of David Chatton Barker’s 16mm film, also included in the box. The stock is deliberately corroded, subjected to weathering and bio-chemical erosion by elements taken from different black dog sites. The patterns thus produced lend an air of antiquity to the film (an antiquity already inbuilt, in these our accelerated times, by the physicality of the medium, the care and labour required for its development). These are strips of film steeped in long time, partaking of the slow geological transformations of the world. They also reflect the transformations of the tales marking the brief moment of human presence in the landscape. Tales whose articulation of a forbidding wildness, an essential otherness, express a subconscious awareness of the tenuous provisionality of this habitation. The blotched and cracked surfaces of the filmstrips are like relief charts for some hidden territory, Ordinance Survey maps for the otherworld or route maps for the inner landscape. The black dogs traverse these celluloid terrains like mental emanations, suggestive silhouettes etched onto the retina via inky Rorschach smears. ‘So what do you see in this one?’ ‘The spectre-hound of hell’. ‘Ah, most interesting….’

The treasure box also houses a 12” LP, which summons up sonic atmospheres to bring the book’s manifestations to life. It is best heard with the lights down low. It begins with the comforting flutter and weave of birdsong, allowing a moment of calm before the black dog is summoned. A dull, metallic clang, a bell with no ecclesiastical resonance, no hint of heavenly overtones, sounds like a huge feeding bowl being struck with a giant’s wooden spoon. ‘Here boy, fresh bones’.

The moaning of a nocturnal wind sets the scene for the Barguest of Dob Park Lodge, the discomforting accompaniment to the night journey of the treasure hunter who ventured into the underworld beneath the old, deserted Tudor mansion. It’s a wind gusting in from elsewhere, a chill otherworld. As Ian Humberstone puts it, ‘here we leave the known world behind and step ovesr the threshold into myth’. Deep, echoing booms sound out the cavernous spaces, hinting at far-off activity, hammering, pounding labours or the earth-shuddering thuds of giant footsteps. There are small chittering sounds closer at hand, dry scuttling and stridulation in the impenetrable shadows. The rustily rotating wheels and gears of some clanking, ratcheting machinery can be heard in the muffled distance, gradually becoming clearer and more defined in the aural spectrum, growing steadily nearer; the clockwork mechanics of fate winding through its inexorable motions.

The inquisitive hoot of an owl signals a change of scene as we head down south again to listen to the Devon landlord’s tale. The landlord of the Black Dog pub, naturally. Glinting clusters of zithery notes suggest raindrops shivering from the eaves outside, or sparks spitting from the hearth of the inn at Uplyme. Our host talks of ‘inheriting’ the legends along with the pub. It is the landlord’s duty to tell the tales which have been passed on to him, to perpetuate the local legends which tend to find their oral node in the convivial communal space of the pub. Marina Warner writes of the local folklore and memory encoded in pub names, citing the old Mother Redcap in London. For many years it commemorated a neighbourhood character, an old witch of great and dubious renown in the area. Novelty pub names of contrived eccentricity imposed by the large brewers erased this marker of history, character and custom. As she wrote in her 2006 article for the Guardian, ‘Pub names and signs are some of the oldest surviving traces of exchanges and folklore in a particular place. More and more names and phrases in the public arena are tied to adverts and commodities – global creep of meanings for everybody and no one’.

The Black Dog in Uplyme remains, however, and the dog who once took up a regular inglenook residence in the evening was a benevolent guardian, a spectral companion like the one which watches over Tarkovsky’s stalker as he lies down to rest in the Zone. The one encountered outside is far more to be feared, a shape torn from the fabric of the night, swelling to take on the dimension of a dark constellation.

The coming of the beast said to be a reincarnation of the restless spirit of Black Vaughan, the unloved lord of the manor of Hergest Court in Herefordshire whose malign influence seemed to persist beyond the grave, is foretold by dolorous doom chimes. These are soon overlaid by wintry minor key toy piano melancholy, the deadened notes falling like snowflakes. Menacing synth brood adds a final unsettling layer of ground mist to this lost John Carpenter theme. Something is padding towards us in the darkness, and there is nothing we can do to evade it. The legend of Black Vaughan, his fate and the curse of his black dog haunted ancestors, along with the theories that the origins of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, lie here on the Herefordshire borders rather than on the moors of Devon, form the basis of The Prayer of the Night Shepherd, one of Phil Rickman’s excellent novels featuring the diocesan deliverance consultant (or, to use the old parlance, exorcist) Merrily Watkins.

A brief interlude of light, a respite from night’s oppressive terrors. Birdsong pastoral sets the scene for a playfully piping synth gavotte (or somesuch renaissance caper), a reconstructed parade to Dog Village conducted according to the fanciful colourations of the modern imagination; pageantry with all the authentic antiquity of recollected horror films and pysch-folk albums. And none the worse for it.

The Eastern legends of Black Shuck are related by Malcolm Busby with an estuarine Essex matter of factness. He’s a natural storyteller, a conspiratorial narrator. We feel the beguiling magic of these oral histories, and are compelled to lean in a little closer to tell the tales as they were told to him. Spectral winds shiver and moan in the background, carrying with them the sharp, salty tang of the coastal marshes. This is another fireside gathering on a night you wouldn’t care to be abroad. To be out….there. At the end, after empty glasses a slammed onto the table with an air of determined finality (this one really is the last), yearning synth melodies and hazy chorales suggest our genuine need for such stories, for the presence of something other in the world, the persistence of mystery, of the wild unknown, even if it produces shudders of terror (shudders which are secretly to be relished).

We head north again to seek out the Barguest of Troller’s Gill. As we pick our way cautiously through the scree and boulder rubble littering the passage of this narrow valley scarring the limestone landscape we hear an eerie descending trill. Otherworldly bird calls with a coiled metallic sheen, made (we might imagine) by lamp-eyed, sharp-beaked creatures of the kind found perching in the blasted branches of the spook-infested woods surrounding the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West. The voices, which don’t sound like they come from any creature of flesh and blood, multiply, as if a sinister flock were gathering – deathbirds anticipating a carrion feast. A trickling stream and footsteps navigating rocky ground sound an aural map of the terrain. A folkish tune with plinking, bicycle wheel accompaniment suggestive of raindrop splashes develops into a haunting, gliding music box melody. A dance of fate, a death waltz.

An ominous drone heralds the London tour guide’s tale, a grim Newgate legend from the foul heart of the famine-blighted middle ages involving sorcery, cannibalism and a murderously vengeful hound. As if to emphasise that the shadows of the past are not easily exorcised, particularly when attached to places of such dark notoriety, he ends by pointing to the old site of Dead Man’s Walk (now Amen Court), the passageway leading from the cells to the gallows, where the shade of the black dog can still sometimes be seen flitting across the ill-lit wall. Naturally, such sightings do not bode well for the unfortunate observer.

Finally we ascend to the moorland heights of Somerset to encounter the Watchdogs of the Wambarrows. A metallic shimmer evokes the uncanny nature of the landscape, and swooning waves of blurry sound conjure up a delirious, hallucinatory atmosphere. Amorphous, transient forms wisp into being before dissipating and swirling away with the mists. A ghostly howling emerges from and is absorbed into the blustering perturbations of the chill air. Nothing is certain in this charged, uncanny topography.

This is a highly entertaining and imaginatively engaging survey of the black dog legends of England which wears its in-depth research lightly, making it accessible to all. Beautifully presented as ever, it is an exquisite work of art underpinned by genuine scholarship. This is a labour of love long in the birthing, and its been well worth the wait. So read the book as you listen to the record, and don’t be surprised if you hear the padding of phantom feet, the distant hint of wild, haunted howling. Wherever you are, the black dog is on your trail.

Midwinter Rites and Rituals

This is a slightly longer version of the essay included in the splendid Folklore Tapes release Calendar Customs III.

Midwinter is the low ebb of the year, the heart of the lifeless season when the sun describes a wearily flattened arc across the sky, it luminosity dimmed and wan, its passage brief. Shadows lengthen, the branches grow bare and bony, temperature drops and darkness prevails. The spirit sinks and a general sense of lassitude fills the soul. It is a season of shivering and sighs in which summer warmth and light become a hazy memory. There is a need for cheer, for hope and conviviality, for reminders of Spring’s renewal to come. Old midwinter rites and rituals, centring around Christmastide observances and celebrations, bring a little warmth and light into this chill time of scarcity and spiritual despond.

In the pre-industrial age, the pattern of the pastoral and agricultural year shaped the rhythms of human labour and rest. The midwinter period between December and early January encompassed weeks when there was little to be done save a bit of dung spreading. The holidays could extend from St Nicholas Day on the 6th December to Plough Monday, the first to fall after Twelfth Night. Plough Monday marked the recommencement of the agricultural year. It was a still interval of cessation during which the coming year could be contemplated and good fortune invoked through the observance of certain propitiatory acts (or the studious avoidance of others). Bells were tolled in various parishes on Christmas Eve to keep the Devil and his ill-doing at bay over the ensuing months. At All Saints, Dewsbury in Yorkshire, this involved sounding one clangourous knell for every year since Christ’s birth, spaced at even intervals between the hours of 10 and 12 (and thus requiring precise calculation). This feat was known as Ringing or Tolling the Devil’s Knell, a long funereal watch which, in keeping with the inversions characteristic of the season, was cause for celebration.

Wassailing was (and still, to an extent, is) a means of ushering in the luck of the new year. The word derives from the old Anglo-Saxon greeting ‘waes haell’, or ‘good health’. The standard response (although not necessarily in Anglo-Saxon England) was ‘drinc haell!’, or ‘I’ll drink to that’, presumably accompanied by the raising of a goblet or drinking horn and the hearty quaffing of its contents. Wassailers, who were predominantly women, would travel from house to house singing their wassailing song and bearing their wooden wassailing bowl (sometimes decorated with ribbons and evergreen boughs). The bowl was full of spiced ale with variant combinations of roasted apples, toast, nutmegs, sugar, eggs and cream; a dubious concoction, half drink, half bread pudding, sometimes known as lamb’s wool. The householder accepting the offered libation and offering food or other gifts in return would bring luck into their homes for the approaching year. The luck of the house was of particular concern at this time, what with the retreat into the domestic space in the face of encroaching cold and darkness.

Wassail songs are a species of celebratory folksong all to their own. A typical and particularly well-known one (largely due to its collection by Ralph Vaughan Williams) comes from Gloucestershire and the opening verse gives the general flavour, as well as revealing the wassailers on the occasion of the song’s recording to be male:
Wassail! Wassail! All over the town.
Our bread it is white, our ale it is brown:
Our bowl it is made of the Maplin tree,
We be all good fellows who drink to thee.
The renowned 17th century lawyer and scholar John Selden found the wassail ale very sour and grumbled about ‘wenches with wassells at New-Years-Tide’ who ‘present you with a cup and you must drink of the slabby stuff, but the meaning is, you must give them monies, ten times more than it is worth’. There was certainly an element of minor wealth redistribution to this and many midwinter traditions, and well-off men like Selden often found cause for complaint. Christmas might be a time of generosity and openness, but who were the deserving poor? And whey did they have to be so forward about claiming their share? Similar complaints were voiced about the annuities known as ‘boxes’ granted to tradesmen or those in the delivery trades on what came to be known as Boxing Day. The change of the day’s name from that of the first Christian martyr, St Stephen, to one marking what amounted to a holiday bonus charts a trajectory from the sacred to the secular and pecuniary which has been marked since well before the Victorian era. It was one reason why the parliamentarians banned Christmas.

This was an opportune season for the less well-off to earn a little extra in a time of scarcity and scant labour. They sold their entertainments, decorations and blessing (an possibly the cessation of their nuisance-making) whilst wielding the implicit threat of diminishing the luck of the house, or even of cursing the inhabitants on these spiritually charged days. The Scots, needless to say, were particularly good at the cursing part. A New Year song sung on South Uist whilst seeking hogmanay, or gifts, from local households had an extra verse in reserve should such generosity prove lacking:

The curse of God and the New Year be on you
And the scath of the plaintive buzzard,
Of the hen-harrier, of the raven, of the eagle,
And the scath of the sneaking fox,
The scath of the dog and cat be on you,
Of the boar, of the badger and of the ghoul,
Of the hipped bear and of the wild wolf,
And the scath of the foul polecat.

That’s some heavy duty scathing.

Another wassailing tradition involved the blessing of an apple orchard. The wassail bowl was filled with cider, some of which was poured onto the roots of the greatest tree, the apple tree man. Trees were beaten with sticks and a regionally varying species of cacophony conducted via pots and pans, gunshots or ‘apple howling’. Was this driving out evil spirits lodged in the wood or waking the trees? Or was it simply for the visceral and slightly illicit joy of making a right racket to echo through the night air at such a dank and lifeless time? Pieces of toast soaked in the wassail cup’s contents were also hung from the branches or wedged into their forks; an offering for the robin, always a cheerful symbol of the season and a bird of good omen. A Somerset wassailing song praises the tireless creature: ‘a poor little robin sits up in a tree/And all day long so merrily sings he/A widdling and twiddling to keep himself warm,/And a little more cider will do us no harm…’

Good luck and its opposite, ill-fortune, were attached to particular days. Christmas Eve, or Adam’s Day, was a day on which supernatural and demonic forces were in abeyance. Therefore, it was a good time for auguries and divinations (particularly as regarded fortunes in love), activities which might otherwise attract unwanted attention. Ghost stories have always been popular on Christmas Eve, a tradition extending into the TV age, with the glowing set replacing the suggestively flickering fire and bringing the chilling tales of MR James into warm living rooms. Perhaps there was a vestigial sense that this was a safe time for their telling.

If you were born on Christmas Day you would be blessed with a blindness towards ghosts and spirits. Holy Innocents Day on the 28th December, on the other hand, was a cursed date. Sometimes known by the vaguely unnerving name of Childermas, it marked the slaughter of the innocents by King Herod. It was considered unwise to begin any important task on this day; it would only come to ruin. Fishermen refused to go to sea, the washing went undone (you might be ‘washing away’ one of your kin) and it was generally best to do nothing and just sit it out.

The earthing of malignant magic seems to have spread to St Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day) if the tradition of hunting the wren was anything to go by. Particularly prevalent in Ireland and Wales, this involved the ‘wren-boys’ setting traps in the early morning and then displaying their prize in a specially made and decorated cage in a laddish parade through the town or village. At any other time of the year this would have been the height of folly. The wren was sacred, the king of the birds, a crowning which ironically acknowledged its tiny stature. To kill it would have invited great ill-fortune into the foolhardy hunter’s life.

That it was permissible and safe at this time is indicative of the inversions of the natural and social order which were a feature of the season. This delight in turning the world upside down also manifested itself in the appointment of Lords of Misrule in wealthy, noble or royal households or university communities to oversee, with their retinues of mock courtiers, the reign of merry chaos which brought life to the dark days. The Lord (or his regional variants such as the midwinter sovereign or Abbot of Unreason) was a burlesque version of his master, with gaudily regal robes and a degree of pseudo-authority, right up to the ability to stage ‘executions’ on a prop gibbet. The masters of the household would affect to serve their staff during the ‘misrule’ of the temporary Lord, albeit to a limited ceremonial extent.

In ecclesiastical circles there was a similar tradition of appointing Boy Bishops for a period extending from St Nicholas’ Day on the 6th (the Turkish saint having a particular connection with children) and Holy Innocents Day on the 28th. The Boy Bishops would lead some aspects of the services in their specially tailored vestments and go on tours of the surrounding parishes. In Bristol, the Boy Bishop of St Nicholas Church and his retinue were invited to a lavish banquet on the saint’s day. The tradition continues or has been revived in some areas. The Boy Bishop’s tenure at Hereford Cathedral is particularly renowned, and forms a major plot element in Phil Rickman’s novel Midwinter of the Spirit, featuring the diocesan deliverance consultant (or exorcist) Merrily Watkins. The first Merrily Watkins novel, Wine of Angels, begins with a night-time orchard wassailing which ends disastrously. Rickman knows his calendrical rites and customs.

The inversion of the natural order is also a central component of mummer’s plays, or mumming. These are generally enacted on Boxing Day, New Year’s Day or Twelfth Night. They are fixed routines which are carried out with ritualistic solemnity, the stock cast of characters stepping forward like mechanical figures ratcheting forth from a town clock’s doors to introduce themselves and deliver their lines. ‘In steps I’ say the likes of St George (or another hero figure), his foe the Turk (or some other adversary reflecting contemporary antipathies), Bold Slasher, the quack doctor, a fool named Tosspot and occasionally a dragon or, trailing a whiff of sulphur, Beelzebub. Roland Hutton likens the latter, with his club and frying pan, to the Irish god The Daghdha. In parts of the Westcountry the play was introduced by Father Christmas, who stood outside of the rote action and had a little more leeway to extemporise a commentary. An element of guising (the donning of disguise) was also involved. Participants would blacken their faces, turn their jackets inside-out, bedeck themselves with ribbons or strips of newspaper and indulge in cross-dressing. The centre of the ‘drama’ (although the proceedings were studiously undramatic) was the combat leading to the death or dire injury of St George or his foe, who was resurrected by the concoctions brewed by the doctor. Their comically self-evident inefficacy hinted that magic rather than medicine was at work here. It was a resurrection myth in capsule form, an invocation of the dormant powers of life and a rite to bring fortune and abundance in the coming months. The mummers took the routing round the houses, bringing luck to those who rewarded them and finding their way by and by to the local inn.

In the North-East, mummery was accompanied by sword dances, although the mumming aspect gradually faded away. The sword dances, using flexible blades or sometimes lengths of wood, culminated in the formation of a locked pattern in the form of a pointed star (a significant form?) or rose. This was usually lowered around the head of one of the attendant fools or cross-dressing ‘bessies’, offering a mock sacrifice where once the death might have been all too real.

Another form of ritualised drama taken round the houses over the Christmas period involved the parading of a horse’s head on the end of a stick, with the bearer hidden beneath a covering sheet. These heads were wooden in the case of The White Mare of the Isle of Man or the Poor Old Horse of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. But the Mari Lwyd of Wales was the bleached skull of an actual horse, its eyes glassy marbles, its hair strands of coloured ribbon. It was a nightmarish apparition, and one which haunts M.John Harrison’s Viriconium and Light novels and stories. The Mari Lwyd also goes through the pantomime of death and resurrection, and its difficult not to see a symbolic enactment of the seasonal cycles. The Hooden Horse of North Kent is accompanied by a team including a mollie, or transvestite, and its is still paraded through the streets of Whitstable, its health assiduously maintained by the Ancient Order of Hoodeners. I like to imagine the long-term Whitstable resident Peter Cushing observing the ceremony, perhaps even taking part, leading the Hoodeners with a solemnly purposeful yet kind and compassionate Van Helsing gaze.

A celebration in time of darkness requires light, and fires were indeed started with due ceremony. If Christ was the light of the world (John 8:12), then the fixing of his date of birth at the Council of Tours in 567 also served to usurp the claims of others to bring light into the world. The Mithraic celebration of divine birth in the world also fell on the 25th December, as did that of the cult of the unconquered sun, or Sol Invictus, which the Emperor Aurelian established as an official state religion which lasted between 274-323. With the Roman Saturnalia and Pagan solstice festivals also occurring around this time, it was good sacred territory to tactically stake out and colonise. There is inevitably a sense, however, if not of Pagan roots showing through, then at least of a continuity of human experience and spiritual need. The warmth and conviviality engendered by a fire or flickering candle flame serve as a reminder that the summer sun will be reborn.

In Stonhaven, near Aberdeen, fireballs were swung in small cages at the end of long chains or ropes, forming small, whirling meteorite trails through the evening air. Allendale has its flaming tar barrels, lit as the old year turns into the new and worn like Arthur Brown hellfire bonnets. It’s an enthusiastically revived and maintained carnivalesque tradition celebrated in the Unthanks’ beautiful song Tar Barrel in Dale. In a variant of wassailing traditions found in the border counties of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, and similarly intended to bless the next year’s crop, twelve bonfires were lit in a circle on Twelfth Night, often with a larger central one – Old Meg as it was sometimes known. In Ross On Wye, an effigy was erected in the centre of the fires and burned.

Plough lights were kept burning in many parish churches, often glinting off the idle blades of the plough itself which was kept propped against the wall until Plough Monday. Candles also served to light the evergreens which were brought into the house – holly in the living room, ivy in the porch, and sometimes bay and broom as well. The ashen faggot was burned in Devon on Christmas Eve, a bundle of ash twigs which crackled and kindled one by one, marking the progress of the evening like an irregular clock. As each popped and hissed into flame, the onlookers would take the opportunity to stand up, loudly wish each other good cheer and pass around a large communal cup of cider.

The best known Christmas flame came from the yule log, however. It was a large log prepared over a lengthy period and giving off plentiful light as well as heat. It was to be lit from a piece of kindling saved from the pervious year’s log, and kept burning for Christmas Eve and Day to preserve the luck of the house. Richard Carpenter warmly depicts the yule log tradition in a Christmas episode of The Ghosts of Mottley Hall, although unfortunately the wood chosen is inhabited by an old elemental spirit which spreads discord and ill-humour through the house before being coaxed to its airy freedom. The word yule itself derives from the old Saxon, via Nordic languages: the Norse Jol, Swedish Jul and Danish Juul. These were words for the Scandinavian midwinter festival, suggesting further layers to the hybrid and ever-evolving native traditions.

The contemporary character of Christmas and midwinter festivities bears little resemblance to the old celebrations and observances. We have inherited wholesale the imports and reinventions of the Victorians, which themselves have been recast in hyper-commercialised late capitalist mould. The frenzy accompanying the season can sometimes seem to verge on the psychotic. But the genuine excitement many still feel indicates a certain continuity with the spirit our ancestors. There is a continuum of human experience, a need to find comfort and light in a time of darkness. Even with the pitiless and relentless glare of shopping centres providing the permanent, blazing illumination of a false sun, we are not fooled. We still need to be reassured that the true sun will return in radiant glory. The dying of the light is not permanent. There will be resurrection, new life, a new year with all that fortune may bring.
So a jolly WASSAIL! to you all.