youths run about with burning besoms dipped in tar; while the children dance and shout,
'Gunpowder plot
Shall never be forgot
So long as Old England
Stands on its spot.'"
But there is no mention of a Guy nor of a procession. In fact, but for the date and the rhyme, the whole festival might be just the same had the "plot" never been "contrived To blow up the King and the parliament alive."
Though the day is not kept in the East Riding villages with the ceremonial usual in towns, yet you will notice that it is not relegated to the small boys only, as in most country places, but observed as a general holiday, equally with the Duffield Hallowmas Wake in Derbyshire. The reason why it thus flourishes probably lies in the fact that Yorkshire and Derbyshire are among the few counties in England where the servants' annual hirings take place in November, when the year's work on the land is completed, and the winter season begins. For the first of May and the first of November are still reckoned by old-fashioned people as the beginning of the two seasons. Summer and Winter, and the beginning of Winter, among Celtic and Teutonic peoples alike,[1] was anciently the beginning of the year. And to farming men of Peakland and the East Riding, who move from place to place at the beginning of November, Winter is in a very real sense the beginning of the year. A general holiday, rejoicing over a year's work completed and a year's wages earned, and a bonfire to make a clearance of the year's accumulated rubbish, even to the old brooms with which it has been swept up, forms a very appropriate winding-up of their term of service, even apart from any more mystical associations, any "looking before and after," any memories of the Departed, any pryings into futurity,
- ↑ Sir J. Rhys, Lectures . . . Celtic Heathendom (Hibbert Lectures), pp. 514, 676.
