An old woman of the North Riding once asked a friend of mine whether it was wrong to wash on Good Friday. “I used to do so,” she said, “and thought no harm of it, till once, when I was hanging out my clothes, a young woman passed by (a dressmaker she was, and a Methodist); and she reproved me, and told me this story. While our Lord Jesus was being led to Calvary they took Him past a woman who was washing, and the woman ‘blirted’ the thing she was washing in His face; on which He said, ‘Cursed be every one who hereafter shall wash on this day!’ And never again,” added the old woman, “have I washed on Good Friday.”
Now it is said in Cleveland that clothes washed and hung out to dry on Good Friday will become spotted with blood; but the Methodist girl’s wild legend reminds me more of one which a relation of mine elicited from a poor Devonshire shoemaker. She was remonstrating with him for his indolence and want of spirit, when he astonished her by replying, “Dont’ee be hard on me. We shoemakers are a poor slobbering race, and so have been ever since the curse that Jesus Christ laid on us.” “And what was that?” she asked. “Why,” said he, “when they were carrying Him to the cross they passed a shoemaker’s bench, and the man looked up and spat at Him; and the Lord turned and said, ‘A poor slobbering fellow shalt thou be, and all shoemakers after thee,[1] for what thou hast done to Me.’ ”
In the Midland counties, bread and cakes made on Good Friday are thought to be preserved through the holiness of the day from becoming mouldy. I have heard of a cross-bun being kept for a year, and then soaked, warmed, and eaten with a relish, not being in the least mouldy. And throughout the whole of England we here and there find it maintained that such bread has great virtue either of healing or preserving life. The Sunderland wives see that their husbands take some to sea with them to avert shipwrecks. In Sussex it is, or has been,
- ↑ This curse is suggested, I presume, by the legend of the Wandering Jew; Cartaphilus or Ahasuerus, whichever was his name, having been a shoemaker, and cursed, it is said, by Our Lord, for refusing to allow Him to rest on the doorstep of his shop.—S. B. G.
