Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/445

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Guy Fawkes Day.
421

go every year in the evening of the 2nd of November (All Souls' Day) to the adjoining common, and light up a number of small fires amongst the furze growing there, and call them by the name of Tindles."[1] In the same county, Derbyshire, in the early nineteenth century, the Dufiield people used to celebrate their Wake,—or rather that of Kedleston, the next parish,—which fell on the Sunday after All Saints' Day, "as the fifth is in other places, minus the Guy." On moonlight nights for some time previously the young men harnessed themselves to a cart and looted all the dead wood they could find; they collected money to buy coal, and early on the Monday morning made "a splendid fire," after which they went off with noise and "rough music" to the squirrel-hunt in Kedleston Park, as related in Folk-Lore.[2]

Besides the bonfires, there are other customs connected with Hallowmas which are now observed on Guy Fawkes' Day. The ringing of the church bells, which forms so marked and constant a feature of the Gunpowder Treason celebrations, was one of the special rites of Hallowmas, when the bells were rung all night on the Eves or Vigils of the two consecutive feasts of All Saints and All Souls. The practice was specifically forbidden as "superstitious" by both Henry VIII. and Elizabeth.[3] The Hallowmas "soul-cakes," which lingered in Shropshire almost within living memory, are replaced in the North of England by the Fifth of November Lancashire "parkin" or South Yorkshire "thar-cake,"[4] an unleavened cake of oatmeal, butter, and treacle.[5] The annual license to rob the neighbours' cabbage-gardens on Hallow E'en in Ireland (where the

  1. Ibid.
  2. Vol. xiv., p. 189.
  3. Brand, op. cit., vol. i., p. 394.
  4. Folk-Lore, vol. xix., p. 337.
  5. At Grinton and Reeth in Swaledale gingerbread, and sticks of a kind of toffee known as "Tom Trots," are made and eaten. (Information from correspondents.) At Ramsgate muffins split and spread with treacle are provided. (Folk-Lore, vol. v., p. 343.)