Such was the wassailing at Duncton; descriptions from elsewhere in the county add a few other traditional features, especially firing guns at the trees and beating them, and occasionally putting a bit of toast in the branches; the verses vary slightly. Sometimes, in places where there was no regular wassailing gang, a farmer might carry out the ritual for himself; in 1941 a contributor to the Sussex County Magazine recalled how his father, born at West Chiltington in 1836, used to recite the rhyme alone – ‘deliberate emphasis was laid on each word, and the right hand was uplifted and circled on the last line’. In the same way, in 1964 a woman from Horsted Keynes remembered how, when she was a child, her grandfather would give her a penny to go and ‘howl’ to the apple tree in his garden and beat it with a stick.
In 1977 apple howling was revived by the Chanctonbury Morris Men at Furner’s Farm, Henfield, and by the Broadwood Morris Men from Horsham at Redlands Farm, Kirdford. It is now regularly done there. A wassail cake is placed in one tree and cider is poured over its roots; the traditional verse is spoken, the tree is thrashed, and some stick dances are performed; next comes a ‘general hullabaloo’ in which guns are fired and everyone shouts as loud as possible; finally, after cheers for the trees and the farmer, wassail cakes and ale are given out to everyone present.
Writing in 1827, T.W. Horsefield noted that beehives too were wassailed in some parts of Sussex, but the rite must have died out soon after his time, for all knowledge of how it was carried out seems to have disappeared. However, in the middle of the last century, the Revd G.A. Clarkson, then Vicar of Amberley, collected from an old man in his parish the words of a song which, it is thought, was sung to the bees on Twelfth Night:
Bees, oh bees of Paradise,
Does the work of Jesus Christ,
Does the work which no man can.
God made bees, and bees made honey;
God made man, and man made money.
God made great men to plough and to sow,
And God made little boys to tend the rooks and crows;
God made women to brew and to bake,
And God made little girls to eat up all the cake.
Then blow the horn!
The holiness here ascribed to bees is rooted in medieval symbolism; beeswax is used in church candles, particularly the great Paschal candle which symbolises the risen Christ, and which in Roman Catholic ritual is blessed in a prayer alluding to ‘the work of the mother bee’; honey is not only sweet but preservative, and is a Scriptural image of God’s grace and of Heaven (‘a land flowing with milk and honey’). The Sussex bee-wassailing song may well date back, in part at least, to medieval times.
Unlike wassailing, the traditional ceremonies for Plough Monday (the first Monday after Twelfth Night) seem almost unknown in Sussex. The only printed account I have come upon gives a vague dating, ‘afore everyone had a bicycle’, and does not name the village in question:
When Plough Monday come along – that was the first Monday after Twelfth Night – all the Tipteers [i.e. mummers, see pp. 151–3] used to dress all in white an’ hang garlands of paper flowers round their necks, and bits of ribbon pinned all over, an’ they dragged a plough round an’ asked for money at every house. Then they had a festical [a feast] after, with beef an’ plum pudding, an’ the prettiest girl in the village was always chosen to sit at the head of the table. She was always called Bessie.
The description in fact shows a rather diminished form of the true Plough Monday rites, in which the ‘Bessie’ or ‘Molly’ was not really a girl at all, but a man in grotesque female clothing who accompanied the mummers on their rounds. That such things were indeed done in Sussex was confirmed for me by one oral informant who vividly recalled how Plough Monday was celebrated in Shoreham in about 1906–09, when he was a boy aged between ten and twelve. He was once badly scared by a band of masked youths and girls who knocked at the door of his parents’ house, shouting and singing; the sight of their masks sent him fleeing upstairs in terror, but his father later told him he ought to have known that it was just because it was Plough Monday.
One farm at Horsted Keynes had a custom of its own to mark the beginning of the ploughing season, apparently unparalleled elsewhere in the county; it was called ‘Winning the Cock’, and a writer in 1927, drawing on his childhood memories, described it as follows:
This took place on the first Monday in the year, when spring ploughing began. The carter’s boy had to bring his whip into the kitchen on that day between sunrise and sunset, and thrash the table well, counting from one to nine while doing so. If he could do this three times, and get in and out of the house without having water thrown over him, he had ‘won the cock’. Well do I remember the bowl of water that was kept ready, but only once was a lad successful. He was then solemnly presented with three shillings and sixpence, which he transferred to his pocket with a great air of satisfaction.
For the rest, January lore is concerned with the weather, and is, naturally, depressing, being summed up in the belief that St Hilary’s Day (13 January) is the coldest day in the year, and moreover that
As the days lengthen,
So doth the cold strengthen.
FEBRUARY
February weather is dismal too, always either frost or floods:
February fill the dick [i.e. ditch],
Every day black or white.
Yet it also offers the first few hints of spring – on Candlemas Day, 2 February, the first snowdrop appears, and some say the birds start courting on that day, though most say they wait till Valentine’s Day, the 14th.
Two important movable feasts normally fall in this month, Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. Nowadays the former is of course marked by the almost universal custom of pancake eating and by a pancake race at Bodiam, but until at least the end of the eighteenth century it was chiefly marked, in many Sussex towns, by the cruel sports of cock-fighting and cock-throwing. Cock-throwing was a matter of hurling weighted sticks called ‘libbets’ from a distance at a tethered cock, which did however have room enough to dodge; whoever could stun the bird and pick it up before it recovered would have it as his prize.
A variant game, called Cock-in-the-Pot, was played in the Brighton Lanes. There, a cock was put in a large earthenware pot and strung up on a rope across the narrow streets, about sixteen feet up in the air; for the price of twopence one was allowed four shies at it with stout pieces of stick, and whoever broke the pot won the bird. There was a legend told to ‘explain’ the game, to the effect that it originated in Hastings in the days when the Danes ruled England. The oppressed Saxons had planned to massacre their masters, but the plot was spoiled by the untimely crowing of a cock, which woke the Danes too early. Later, when the oppressors had at last been driven out of the country, the English instituted this sport as their revenge on all cocks.
Such, at least, was the traditional tale; the game was played in the Brighton Lanes every Shrove Tuesday till 1780. The related customs were apparently dying out in the rest of Sussex at about the same period; the Lewes Journal stated in 1778:
It is with great pleasure that we can inform the public that the barbarous practice of throwing at cocks is now so universally exploded in these parts that Shrove Tuesday did not produce a single instance of those acts of riot and cruelty by which the day was long and shamefully characterised, in open defiance of all humanity and all civic authority.
However, this reporter must have rejoiced too soon, for twenty years later, on 11 February 1799, the Sussex Weekly Advertiser thought it news worth noting that there had been ‘no barbarous cock-throwing or cock-fighting’ that year, these sports being ‘totally abolished throughout the county’. It is to be hoped that this time they really were, but one author describing Mayfield as late as 1903 spoke of men then still living who remembered with gusto the cock-throwing they had taken part in in their youth.
A related custom which some old people still remembered in one (unnamed) Sussex village in the 1940s was ‘Thrashing the Hen’.
This was a game played on Shrove Tuesdays by the servants at the local ‘big house’, and was a form of Blind Man’s Buff:
‘… only they was all blindfolded ’ceptin’ the Hoodman, and he had a hen in a sack, and bells tied to his coat-tails. All the others had sticks an’ run after he, tryin’ to beat him, an’ he’d jump behind one of the others so he got hit instead… They was supposed to beat [the hen] to death, but Granfer says she didn’t never get killed that way, but when they got tired of the game she was killed and plucked, an’ then they all had her for dinner, boiled with plenty of fat bacon. An’ then they had pancakes.
Ash Wednesday is marked, in some schools, by a custom of wearing an ash-tree twig; its white tip should be carefully blacked with ink or mud, and the children should not show anything white on their persons, for instance a handkerchief. Those who have no twig may, at any time up to the hour of noon, be pinched by the others, or even have their feet trodden on by every child who does have one. The custom was quite widespread in the 1940s and ’50s, and so may well be still extant.
But the most striking significance of Ash Wednesday in the secular calendar used to be that, in the days when street games were still possible, it marked the opening of the marbles season, both for children and for some adults, for instance the Brighton fishermen; the marbles season reached its climax and conclusion on Good Friday (see below, pp. 110–11), thus coinciding exactly with Lent. Other children’s games that began on this date were bat-and-trap and tip-cat; both were played in streets and open spaces, to the considerable inconvenience of passers-by. This was also the skipping season, and this game too attained a wider significance on Good Friday.
MARCH
The first of March was notable for its peculiar association with fleas. Everyone apparently agreed that on this date the creatures woke up and began hopping about, and that this was therefore the moment to try to get rid of them, but the suggested methods differed sharply. In West Sussex, the dominant belief was expressed in the rhyme:
If from fleas you would be free,
Let all your doors and windows open be.
Consequently, people would get up before dawn to fling their doors and windows open with the cry ‘Welcome, March!’; sometimes, also, the children would be given brushes and told to sweep all dirt away from the thresholds and windowsills. But some people, particularly in the eastern half of the county, recommended the opposite procedure, with the verse:
If from fleas you would be free,
On the first of March let your windows closed be.
The custom is still sometimes remembered, though presumably not acted on. For instance, an informant at Littlington in East Sussex said in 1965 that the reason the windows were always kept shut in March was that it was believed that the winds blew the fleas out of the thatch. The blustery winds of March are notorious, whence comes the saying that this month ‘comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb’; indeed, as the prevailing direction of the wind is from the west, I have heard the sarcastic comment that if the people of West Sussex are opening their windows on this date, it is only natural that those of the East should close theirs. Moreover, the people of Arundel had at one time a method of their own – on this date they went and shook themselves on Arundel Bridge, in the belief that this would keep them free of fleas for the rest of the year.
Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, would normally fall in March. However, it does not seem to have been much observed in Sussex in the old days, being more a custom of the West of England. In recent years, of course, it has become universally popular, and is much advertised by flower-sellers and the makers of greeting cards; the Church too has recently taken it up, with such pretty ceremonies as the blessing of small nosegays for children to give to their mothers. Some writers declare that the name originally sprang from an old ecclesiastical rule that representatives from each parish should visit the Cathedral, their ‘Mother Church’, on this day. With this in mind, some clergy now make the parish church a focus of ceremonial on Mothering Sunday; thus, at Firle in 1948, the church was encircled by a long chain of children holding hands, in a ceremony called ‘Clipping the Church’.
Palm Sunday, the sixth Sunday in Lent, is marked by the gathering of twigs of willows, sallows, and other catkin-bearing trees, particularly the kind known as ‘pussy-willow’. These are regarded as the English equivalents of the palm-branches mentioned in the Gospel describing Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, and are still much used as church decorations. At one time, young men used also to wear small sprigs of them in their buttonholes on this day. In the nineteenth century it was common for parties to go out into the woods to pick pussy-willow on Palm Sunday – a custom which, like so much popular merrymaking, tended to get out of hand. The Brighton Herald for 30 April 1831 reported that the people and farmers of Patcham had been greatly troubled on the previous Sunday, being Palm Sunday, by hundreds of people of both sexes who, on the excuse of ‘going a-palming’, had come out from Brighton and spent the whole day in breaking down and gathering all the willows or withies in the hedges that were covered with yellow flowers. In the evening they went to the local inn; here they drank excessively, so that the night ended with many brawls.
Palm Sunday was also one of the festivals for which a particular food was traditionally prepared – in this case, a rich buttery affair known as Pond Pudding. By rights, this ought to be cooked in a pudding cloth, not a basin, and made to the following recipe:
Roll out a thick piece of suet dough into a thick round-shaped piece, about the size of a dinner plate. In the centre place a large ball of butter, brown sugar, and spice; the quantities for a familysized pudding are four ounces of butter, a big handful of currants, and a pinch of spice. Pull the suet crust up round the butter ball till the pudding looks like a big apple dumpling. Seal the top with a piece of suet crust. Tie in a floured cloth and boil for two to two and a half hours. When serving, cut a slice off the top, and there revealed is a lovely yellow pond of sugary butter. In some homes, the currants are put into the dough; the pond is then surrounded by a sort of spotted dick.
APRIL
This month opens, of course, with April Fools’ Day, which is as dear to Sussex children as to those of any other county, but which is too well known to need description, and is in no danger of dying out. More unusual are various customs and beliefs formerly attached to the period of Holy Week and Easter.
Good Friday has always been an oddly inconsistent day in popular observance – to the church-goer, the saddest and most penitential day in the religious calendar, but to others, a day of holiday on which to indulge in certain traditional games. In Sussex, the chief of these were marbles, skipping, bat-and-trap and tip-cat, which were played on this day by adults in very many towns and villages, including Battle (which held a match against Netherfield), Brighton, Burgess Hill, Cuckfield, Ditchling, Seaford, Southwick and Streat.
Marbles was a man’s game – indeed it was more a ritual than a game, with a fixed season, beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending on Good Friday at noon, sharp. In the same way as some inns now have darts teams, during Lent they once had marbles teams. The grand climax to these games was a championship held on Good Friday morning, and in the nineteenth century the sport was so popular that Good Friday was often actually called ‘Marble Day’ – a name which is not yet forgotten among the older people. The last survival of the custom is the annual match still held at Tinsley Green, outside the Greyhound Inn, which is said to have been played there for over 300 years; it is played to the old rules, including that of stopping on the stroke of noon. The players claim that the custom started in the reign of Good Queen Bess because of the rivalry of a Sussex man and a Surrey man for the hand of a girl in Tinsley Green (the county boundary runs through the village); after competing in various sports in which they proved to be evenly matched, they decided to settle the issue by a game of marbles, where a draw is impossible.
Games of marbles were sometimes played in the village church
yard, as was the case at Cuckfield over a century ago, while in 1879 the Revd W.D. Parish noted that at Selmeston the men and boys were so eager for their game that they would play outside the church right up until service time, and then, as soon as the service was ended, would rush out again to resume their game; he remarked that people who would never dream of playing at any other time would play on Good Friday.
Another favourite Good Friday sport was skipping. In some villages men and women, adults and children, all enjoyed the sport equally; but in those where the men played marbles, the skipping would be confined to the women, who used their own clothes-lines for the purpose. It was group-skipping, not the individual kind; a long line would be swung by two people, while one or two more skipped in the middle; these were then joined by more and more, until a whole row was skipping in unison on the same rope, which never broke its rhythm. The skippers would keep at it till someone missed a jump, or till all were exhausted, in which case others would promptly take their places. The custom was immensely popular in Brighton among both children and adults, especially fishermen; ropes were frequently brought up from the beaches into the streets and the fish-market, and the day was known as ‘Long Rope Day’ or ‘Long Line Day’. Some said the custom had been instituted in memory of the rope with which Judas hanged himself. It reached its peak of popularity around 1900, and then gradually dwindled, though it was not till the Second World War that the closing of the beaches finally killed it.
In the early nineteenth century, the Good Friday games at Hove were even more spectacular. Hundreds of people used to assemble at a large prehistoric burial mound which then stood on the outskirts of the town (it was levelled in 1856/57), and there they would skip and play various other games, including kiss-in-the-ring, singing:
Hey diddle-derry,
Let’s dance on the Bury.
Folklore of Sussex Page 13
