November
In my poem ‘St Martin’s Eve’ (see eponymous collection) I have attempted to draw together aspects of the somewhat bloody yet joyful mediaeval festival that used to take place before the Reformation; bloody because it involved a wholesale slaughter of cattle in preparation for winter and joyful because of the knowledge that there would be enough food to last the lean and barren months. Of course the ironic thing is that the 11th of November is now commemorated as the day in 1918 when a great bloodletting ceased.
According to William Hone, November was the month of quite a number of festivals in pre-Reformation days. Now Hone was an interesting character. Born in 1780 he was what we would now call an investigative journalist, delving into injustice levelled on ordinary people, exposing government corruption, fighting against censorship and being in general a pain in the arse to those in power. A political satirist, he was tried for sedition but acquitted, sued for libel at times and was in effect the Ian Hislop of his day.
Yet in spite of his hard political nous he was also deeply interested in folkore, mythology, historical anecdotes and gossip ancient and modern. All this can be found in three books, The Everyday Book (1826), The Table Book (1827) and The Year Book (1830). Each was a miscellany of observations of nature, legends, poems, drawings and tittle-tattle of all kinds. I picked up all three books - original editions- in a second hand bookshop in Amsterdam some twenty years ago, also on a grey November day. Even now they are just the thing for browsing in when I look out of the window and see the red sky sinking into darkness, the trees silent and motionless.
In Hone’s books can be found the general mood that fits in well, on the one hand, with chill air, mists and a silent damp trudge towards winter and on the other hand with Walkyrie winds and fleets of scurrying cumulo- nimbus such as we had at the beginning of this month.
November has an eeriness about it, a crepuscular Gothic …or perhaps I’m just allowing too much free rein to my imagination. But, to return to Hone, he does give a fair amount of detail about the great November feasts and celebrations before the penitential sombreness of Advent.
This might be an odd thing to consider – November a month of parties and jollification. Yet the Americans have Thanksgiving and although there was quite a lot of retrospective 19th century political tweaking as regards the origin of this celebration, it was nevertheless done within a sound knowledge of exactly what the English November celebrations were. This not surprising. Washington Irving for example was well-acquainted with English legends and folk customs. Both he and his contemporary Hone were worried that the old holidays were becoming moribund.
But let’s have a look at some of those November festivals. For one thing, there was Bonfire Night, which really belongs to Samhain, one of the two Celtic New Years, the other being Beltain in May. But within a post-Reformation and indeed Restoration context it was politically appropriated to cover the yearly commemoration of the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1604. When I was a child my friends and I would earn our firework money by standing outside the pub with our stuffed effigy of a man in a wheelbarrow and asking for a ‘penny for the guy.’ Yet Guy Fawkes et al were not burned at the stake of course but were hanged.
Then we have the aforementioned St Martin’s Eve, which even now is celebrated here in the Netherlands in the form of children with lanterns going round the village singing St Martin’s songs and being rewarded with sweets or fruit.
Hone mentions the curious custom of bull-running on the 14th, which even as he was writing was being frowned on. A chosen bull, having survived the St Martin’s slaughter was released and followed wherever it went by crowds of villagers, with goads and prods. It became angry and began to run, the villagers trying to keep up. Eventually the bull was killed and the meat given to the poor of the parish.
Then we have St Cecilia’s day on the 23th of the month and I’m really not sure whether this is a neo-Classical imposition on an already existing day. But I doubt if villagers needed a special day to celebrate music.
And so we come to St Clement’s Day on the 23rd. It is a day of honouring blacksmiths and although I don’t believe it is celebrated anymore, it was, according to Hone recognised by the smith packing gunpowder into a hole in his anvil and striking it with a hammer so that sparks flew. After this apprentice smiths would dress up in disguise do the rounds of the houses and taverns claiming something to drink for ‘old Clem’.
On the whole the month of November is certainly redolent with a primeval desire to see out the winter well-fed and snug – if possible. So to all Americans out there, bear in mind that all your troughing and quaffing is done within a particularly British, if not European, tradition.
According to William Hone, November was the month of quite a number of festivals in pre-Reformation days. Now Hone was an interesting character. Born in 1780 he was what we would now call an investigative journalist, delving into injustice levelled on ordinary people, exposing government corruption, fighting against censorship and being in general a pain in the arse to those in power. A political satirist, he was tried for sedition but acquitted, sued for libel at times and was in effect the Ian Hislop of his day.
Yet in spite of his hard political nous he was also deeply interested in folkore, mythology, historical anecdotes and gossip ancient and modern. All this can be found in three books, The Everyday Book (1826), The Table Book (1827) and The Year Book (1830). Each was a miscellany of observations of nature, legends, poems, drawings and tittle-tattle of all kinds. I picked up all three books - original editions- in a second hand bookshop in Amsterdam some twenty years ago, also on a grey November day. Even now they are just the thing for browsing in when I look out of the window and see the red sky sinking into darkness, the trees silent and motionless.
In Hone’s books can be found the general mood that fits in well, on the one hand, with chill air, mists and a silent damp trudge towards winter and on the other hand with Walkyrie winds and fleets of scurrying cumulo- nimbus such as we had at the beginning of this month.
November has an eeriness about it, a crepuscular Gothic …or perhaps I’m just allowing too much free rein to my imagination. But, to return to Hone, he does give a fair amount of detail about the great November feasts and celebrations before the penitential sombreness of Advent.
This might be an odd thing to consider – November a month of parties and jollification. Yet the Americans have Thanksgiving and although there was quite a lot of retrospective 19th century political tweaking as regards the origin of this celebration, it was nevertheless done within a sound knowledge of exactly what the English November celebrations were. This not surprising. Washington Irving for example was well-acquainted with English legends and folk customs. Both he and his contemporary Hone were worried that the old holidays were becoming moribund.
But let’s have a look at some of those November festivals. For one thing, there was Bonfire Night, which really belongs to Samhain, one of the two Celtic New Years, the other being Beltain in May. But within a post-Reformation and indeed Restoration context it was politically appropriated to cover the yearly commemoration of the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1604. When I was a child my friends and I would earn our firework money by standing outside the pub with our stuffed effigy of a man in a wheelbarrow and asking for a ‘penny for the guy.’ Yet Guy Fawkes et al were not burned at the stake of course but were hanged.
Then we have the aforementioned St Martin’s Eve, which even now is celebrated here in the Netherlands in the form of children with lanterns going round the village singing St Martin’s songs and being rewarded with sweets or fruit.
Hone mentions the curious custom of bull-running on the 14th, which even as he was writing was being frowned on. A chosen bull, having survived the St Martin’s slaughter was released and followed wherever it went by crowds of villagers, with goads and prods. It became angry and began to run, the villagers trying to keep up. Eventually the bull was killed and the meat given to the poor of the parish.
Then we have St Cecilia’s day on the 23th of the month and I’m really not sure whether this is a neo-Classical imposition on an already existing day. But I doubt if villagers needed a special day to celebrate music.
And so we come to St Clement’s Day on the 23rd. It is a day of honouring blacksmiths and although I don’t believe it is celebrated anymore, it was, according to Hone recognised by the smith packing gunpowder into a hole in his anvil and striking it with a hammer so that sparks flew. After this apprentice smiths would dress up in disguise do the rounds of the houses and taverns claiming something to drink for ‘old Clem’.
On the whole the month of November is certainly redolent with a primeval desire to see out the winter well-fed and snug – if possible. So to all Americans out there, bear in mind that all your troughing and quaffing is done within a particularly British, if not European, tradition.
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