In the physic garden, hellebore is flowering too. White hellebore is used with care: ‘Hippocrates in procuring a Vomit did very much use white Hellebore, which is poisonous and strangling’. As a purge in treating ‘quartain’ fevers: ‘After meate, you must prouoke vomite (if nothing let it) with white hellebore first commixed with radishe which if it worke litle or nothing, you must minister hellebore by it selfe’. ‘Quartain’ fevers recur at intervals of seventy-two hours, that is, on the fourth day. Radishes, luckily, are in season too.
Also used in sneezing powders for the apoplectic patient: ‘provoke him to sneezing with white hellabore’ – we remember that the almanac for 1588 marked February 2 as a good day to ‘purge the head by neesing’ – or as a cure for lethargy. And to flush away the winter blues, the dried root of black hellebore is a ‘safe remedy’ for ‘any infirmitie, that hath his originall, of a melancholicke cause’.
WHITSUNDAY
Quhissonday, May 26 1588
Whitsunday – ‘Quhissonday’ in Scots – is Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter or Pasche, and a moveable feast. In 1588 it fell on May 26 in the Julian calendar.
In Scotland, it was a legal quarter day, and the term day on which tenancies were agreed or terminated. (And still is. Whitsunday was redefined for legal purposes as May 28 in the Terms and Quarter Days (Scotland) Act 1990.) The term dates also shifted year by year, according to the date upon which Easter fell, until 1690–93, when Whitsunday was fixed at May 15. ‘Witsondays’ are agreements going forward from that date, while the ‘Whitsunday term’ may be retrospective too, covering the period since the previous quarter day, or since Martinmas. A ‘witsonday fee’ is one due at this time.
Now was the time of year for exchange of property. The Whitsun removal day was known as ‘flitting Friday’, the Friday before the feast of Pentecost. The Old Scots word to ‘flit’ (from the Middle English, originally Old Norse), in the sense of house removal, is in use today. In early legal documents it generally appears as ‘flit and remove’.
Whitsunday was also the name given to the third term in the academic year at St Andrews (until 1997, when semesters were introduced and reduced to two: Martinmas and Candlemas) and the other ancient Scottish universities, its context for the king’s commission in the story here.
May was traditionally a month of revelry, beginning with the May Day games or plays, the merry burgh pageants of misrule and plays of Robin Hood, which like Candlemas processions were an essential part of the early civic calendar, and were stamped out at the Reformation by a jealous Kirk. The writing was on the wall as early as 1555:
Concerning Robin Hood and the Abbot of Unreason:
Item, it is statute and ordained that in all time coming no manner of person be chosen Robin Hood or Little John, Abbot of Unreason, May Queen or otherwise, neither in burgh nor to land, in any time to come, and if any provost, bailie, council and community chooses such a personage as Robert Hood, Little John, Abbot of Unreason or May Queen within the burgh, the choosers of such shall forfeit their freedom for the space of five years and otherwise shall be punished at the will of [Mary of Guise], the queen’s grace, and the person who accepts such an office shall be banished out of the realm; and if such persons as Robin Hood, Little John, Abbot of Unreason or May Queen be chosen outwith the burgh and other landward towns, the choosers shall pay to our sovereign lady £10 and their persons put in ward, there to remain during the pleasure of the queen’s grace; and if any women or others in summer tries singing, makes perturbation to the queen’s lieges in the passage through burghs and other landward towns, the women perturbers, for the extortion of money or otherwise, shall be taken, handled and put upon the cukstule of every burgh or town.
Despite the law, the characters of Robin Hood and Little John, the Queen of the May (no Maid Marian here), and the Abbot of Unreason or Unrest, who played merry havoc in the ancient plays, were sometimes irrepressible. At the General Assembly for 1591, ‘Profaners of the Sabbath day by Robin Hood plays’ are included in a list of the vilest threats to assail the land, no better and no worse than Jesuits and murderers. Here is the plea from the Kirk to the Crown:
It is craveit, The acts of Parliament made for suppressing of the enormities following may be put to executioun: First, against Jesuites and the receipters of them; and of excommunicats... profainers of the Sacraments; privat men and wemen givers therof; idolaters, pilgrimagers, papistical Magistrates; sayers and heirers of the mess; givers of the Sacraments according to the papisticall forme, and receivers of the same; committers of apostasie; publick mercatts vpon the Sabboth day; violent invaders of Ministers be strikeing of them or shedding of thair blood; profaners of the Sabboth day be Robein Hoodes playis; murderers and blood shedders quhilk overflow the land.
This Whitsunday story is intended for a comedy, in the gentle spirit of the merry month. But like the plays themselves, the order and disorder represented there, and the mood against them, it has darker undertones.
WHITSUNDAY LORE OF THE LAND
For Meg Cullan in her garden, May is a busy time of year. She expects to spend much of it in the still house, making medicinal waters from the morning dew. But the full moon on the last day of April means it will be later in the month before she comes to gather it, for the dew is better when the moon is waxing full. She must also choose a day when it has not rained overnight, which if the almanac is accurate, will be hard to find. When she finds the perfect day, she will slip out before sunrise and go by the light of the moon to her brother’s fields, to draw off the dew with a cloth.
It is likely she will not be there alone. The dew is believed to be good for the complexion, and others will have come to wash their hands and faces in it, hoping to remove their blemishes and spots. Some of the water Meg collects will be used for cosmetics and perfumes, but most will be distilled with white wine, herbs and flowers to make the gentlest sort of medicines. It is said to be good, especially, for the eyes.
In this month, the finest kind of butter is made, with sweet new milk, delicate and fresh. It has the essence of new grass in it, the shimmer of the field, where the unripe corn is billowing in waves, and the butter has been churned into the palest primrose, speckled with crystals of salt. The butter is not only good to eat. Meg will wash it out in the morning dew, and use it as a base for all the oils and salves that require a grease. No other kind will do. Its quality has now become proverbial, so that looking as if ‘butter wouldn’t melt’, which is a favourite grumble of the preachers, is surpassed by one. His opponents engage in such
under-hand practises, and iuggling sleights of legerdemaine . . . with such a slie and nimble conueiance, as a man would hardly imagine, that not any other but May-butter it selfe could possiblie melt in their mouthes.
Meg has made on ointment of it, mixed with oil of tartar, which Canny Bett has sworn has washed away her wart.
In addition to the still, and the herbs in her garden which are coming into flower, Meg is concerned about her bees, for this is a time when they are prone to swarm. Because it is the spring, and the weather has been cold, she gives them a little honey on a stick, ‘else may they starve . . . or be out of heart’.
In the middle of this work, in blunders Lord Sempill, and the best of the bees may be lost. The physick he is using for his fundamental ailment would not be recommended by either Meg or Giles. It is a dangerous concoction of henbane which can cause unconsciousness, ‘if one doe but smell often to the hearbe and flowers thereof’:
The leaues, stalkes, flowers, seede, roote, and iuice, doe coole all inflammations, cause sleepe, and swage paine, but it may not be vsed too much. Seethe Henbane in water, and wash thy forehead and feete therewith hote, to cause sleepe in the hote euill, and apply a plaster of the seedes with womans milke and vineger hote to thy temples. And so it also destroyeth the Emerods
Here is the ointment itself:
To heale the griefes of the fundiment.
Take of the tender leaues of Henbane, and o
f Purcelane, and of crummes of bread infused in wine, the yolke of an Egge rosted hard, of eche like quantitie, of oyle of Roses as much as sufficeth, braye them all: then fomentate the place with the decoction of Roses, and of Mellilot [sweet-clover plant], and laye vpon it the Cataplasme [poultice] aforesaid.
Henbane is believed to be a witch’s drug, and its hallucinogenic properties may have led some to believe that they could fly. Witches could transform themselves, with the devil’s help, into any form. And Lord Sempill’s bird was found sitting in a hawthorn tree, which was believed to have magic properties. Hawthorn blossoms were not brought into a house, for fear they brought in death. The hawthorn has, in its chemical makeup, apparently some element that makes the dead flowers smell like rotting flesh.
As the spring brings life back to the garden and the land, and laughter and pleasure to the people who inhabit it, so it brings the regrowth of the natural world, which begins to burgeon and encroach upon the town. The world of hill and stream, of apple and of hawthorn tree, where the careless lover may yet fall asleep, is the fairy world, which threatens to disrupt and disturb the human one. And though Meg makes attempts to shape and take control of it, its lawlessness and dangers are never far behind.
LAMMAS
Lammes, August 1 1588
Lammas was a term or quarter day on which legal transactions took place, and farm hands were hired for the haymaking. In Old Scots it is sometimes written ‘Lambes’ or ‘Lambas-tide’, leading to confusion with the lamb brought to church for the ancient feast of St Peter ad Vincula, or Petermas, also August 1. But the word derives from Old English hlaf, meaning loaf, and the festival to which it gave its name was a consecration of the first loaf of bread from the early harvest of the grain. In Scotland, barley ripens later than the English wheat, and on the first of August, even in the Julian calendar, it might still be green. But the promise would remain. ‘It is long to Lammas’ is a kind of joke, said ‘when we forget to lay down Bread at the Table, as if we had done it designedly, because it will be long e’er new Bread come’. In the ‘old days’, ‘if a farmer had neglected his work and his haymaking was still unfinished on August 13 (old style) he was called in reproach a Latter Lammas man’. Latter Lammas, in the proverb, is the day that never comes; the day of reckoning too: since Lammas was a term day for the settling of accounts, Latter Lammas may be judgement day, as it turns out here.
In St Andrews, Lammas is a fair or market day, the last remaining one of five. The date of the fair moved on to the second Tuesday in the month, following the change from the Julian calendar, to accommodate the shift in the agricultural year. It now lasts for five days, beginning on the Friday of the week before, with what as children we used to call the ‘shows’, a funfair spilling out over Market Street and South Street, and the lanes between, in the very heart of the town. It concludes with a market of traditional traders, setting up their stalls at the west end of the South Street, supplemented latterly by food stalls on the Market Street, of the artisan and continental kind. There are motions put each year by the local merchants and residents of South Street to move it from its place at the centre of the town to the outskirts. Residents complain of the use of the machinery to operate the rides, and its risks to the structure of a street of national heritage. Merchants complain of restricted access to their shops and businesses, and the loss of customers caused by a funfair just outside their doors. Everyone complains about the litter and the noise.
No doubt they always did. At the time of a fair, in the ancient burghs, normal restrictions to trading were lifted, and the local merchants were faced with competition they did not have to contend with at other times. The influx of the chapmen and pedlars, and of foreign ships massing in the harbours, may not have been welcomed by all. For the duration of the fair, certain burgh laws and rights were suspended, old debts and grievances could not be pursued, and special courts were convened to deal with disputes at the fair itself. These were known in England as ‘pie-powder’ courts, from Norman French and Latin, translating literally to Scots as ‘dustifute’. The allusion is to the itinerant merchant, who, in theory at least, should not be disadvantaged in the process of the law by his status as a stranger in the land. Outbreaks of violence were common at fairs, and liable to escalate, like the early racial hate crime which took place in St Andrews in 1591, and came to the attention of the Privy Council when the perpetrator failed to make amends. Robert Jackson, burgess from Dundee, had approached the servant of a London merchant at the senzie fair:
and inquired ‘giff he wes ane Englishman’. Complainer having admitted ‘that swa he wes’, the said Jaksoun not onlie injurit him maist maliciouslie be strykeing up of his chin with his hand and hurting thairby of his toung and mouth, bot als utterit verie mony disdainefull and contumelious speichis aganis the said complainer and his cuntrey.
Jackson later drew a dagger, and a pistol, on his victim, ‘“minding to have schote the said complenair through the body thairwith” – which he would have done had he not been prevented by those present’. Holiday tempers are easily frayed.
LAMMAS LORE OF THE LAND
‘The young goose to the old can say, see thee last at Lammas day’
Lammas is a time for the parting of the ways, as the harvest is begun and the season starts to change. The goose will be fattened up for Michaelmas, when it will prove the crowning glory of the ploughman’s feast. The young goose is put to graze in the stubble fields, unaware this fortune means its life will end, and enjoys its fill.
Geese could be eaten both young and old:
there are two periods at which the goose is fatten’d for market: first, when it is very young. It is distinguished at these times by different names, the green goose, and the stubble goose
The right age for taking up the gosling to fatten it for a green goose, is at five weeks
For fattening the stubble goose . . . Taking them up soon after the harvest season is a favourable time; because in running in the stubble fields they will have got into tolerable flesh.
Green goose should be served in a sorrel sauce, and stubble goose with vinegar and mustard.
According to Giles Locke, the goose is by nature a melancholic bird, the melancholy manifest in its exceeding watchfulness, moody disposition, and blackness of flesh, making it hard to digest. Yet
taken whilst they are young, green feathered, and well fatted with wholesome meat, and eaten with sorrel sauce to correct their malignity . . . no doubt their flesh is as nourishing as it is pleasant and sweet. But of all other young stubble goose feeding itself fat in wheaten fields, is the best of all; being neither of too moist nor too dry a flesh.
The older goose he will not touch at all, unless it comes with garlic, exercise and drink.
In the meantime, for the month of August, there are two ‘evil’ days noted in the almanacs, the nineteenth and the twentieth. ‘Not so evil’ are the first (though the characters in the Lammas story may have disagreed), the twenty-ninth and thirtieth. Still, ‘it hurteth not to abstain from pottage, and all hot meats, and drinks of spicerie’. Such foods are not meat for the summer months.
At Kenly Green, the cherry trees have finished bearing fruit, and Meg collects the stones. The neighbours are astonished that she grows them here, from cuttings which were brought from Balmerino Abbey, grafted onto apple trees. Giles believes the fruits are very hard and sour, but that is no bad thing, for before a meal they mollify the stomach and prepare digestion, while eaten after it, they soothe a burning heat. The sour ones are more wholesome than the sweet.
There are, at this time, a great many herbs and flowers to be cut, in both the physick and the kitchen gardens, which are in the process of a harvest of their own. In this month Meg collects most of the seeds she uses in her medicines, and the still house is filling up with seed cups and leaves, left in the sun to be dried. The apricots and plums are almost ready too, for bottling or for making into marmalades for Yule.
The fruit and the beehives must be
kept from wasps, and garlic cloves are used to put them off the scent. Which goes to show, says Hew, that sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander, after all. Soothing for the stings, Meg says, are bruised leaves of mint.
MARTINMAS
Martinmes, November 11 1588
Name given to the first term of the
university year at St Andrews
Martinmas is November 11, the feast of St Martin. It was often known as ‘Martinmas in winter’ to distinguish it from the feast of the translation of St Martin on the fourth of July. In Scotland it was the half-yearly quarter day when, with Whitsunday, landlords’ rents were paid, and servants were contracted or discharged. It was also killing time, when cattle would be slaughtered and prepared for winter stores, and the winter’s supply of candles would be made. To that end, it became a fair day in St Andrews in the nineteenth century, in place of the old St Andrew’s Day and Michaelmas markets, for the hiring of farm hands to despatch the herd. A ‘Martinmas coddoch’ is a cow which has been fattened up for slaughter at this time; a ‘ladinar-mairt’ is salted to last until spring (a ‘ladinar’ is a larder; a ‘mairt’ or ‘mart’ is a fattened beef-cow).
A variant is ‘Martlemas’, shortened to ‘Martel’, obsolete in English since the seventeenth century. It is snatched in a song, ‘Oh, Martel’s wind, when wilt thou blow And shake the sear leaves off the tree?’, a melancholy reference to the time of year. Engravings which depict the labours of the months show November slaughter in the midst of storms, and in 1588 it is storms at sea that define the story here, causing the destruction of the Spanish fleet, and the landing of a group of shipwrecked Spanish sailors not far from St Andrews on November 26, when the minister James Melville was woken in his bed early in the morning by the news that the Spaniards had arrived ‘nocht to give mercie bott to ask’ for it. Melville was presented with ‘a verie reverend man of big stature, and grave and stout countenance, grey-heared, and verie humble like, wha, after mickle and vey law courtessie, bowing down with his face near the ground, and twitching my scho [shoe] with his hand, begang his harang in the Spanise toung’.
1588 A Calendar of Crime Page 29
