Folklore of Sussex

by Jacqueline Simpson

  In earlier centuries, 29 May was not merely an occasion for children’s pranks, but an official public holiday. Until well into Queen Victoria’s reign, the fishermen of Brighton used to decorate their boats with large branches of oak on this date, and a Brighton tavern called The King’s Head was similarly decorated.

  The civic festival of Mayor’s Day at Rye comes towards the end of May, and on this day the Mayor and Councillors scatter hot pennies to children gathered in the street, who scramble for them. Two stories purport to explain this custom; one says it dates from the time when a Mayor of Rye was also a Member of Parliament, and bribed voters by scattering money; the other, that once, in the days when Rye had its own mint, the town ran out of pennies on Mayor’s Day, and a boy sent to fetch new ones from the mint brought them back so fast they were still hot.

  The major movable feast that normally falls in May is of course Whitsun. The traditional fare for this day was roast veal followed by gooseberry pudding, but the latter might present a bit of a problem if the feast fell early, before the berries were ripe enough; it was always a great disappointment if the Whitsun gooseberry pudding could not be made. The tradition is still kept up in some families.

  Finally, it should be noted that Whit Monday has long been a popular and convenient date for such events as pageants, fêtes, sports meetings and the annual processions of benefit clubs and similar institutions. Such occasions sometimes include ceremonial features that are adapted from more ancient spring festival customs. One such is the Whit Monday procession of the Harting Old Club, which has been observed from 1812 to the present day. A description written in 1953 tells how those taking part carry peeled wands, ornamental staves, and flags; before the church service they march in procession, anti-clockwise, round a large beech bough which has been set up in the village square; after the service, they enjoy a festive meal at the inn, and then a cricket match completes the day’s enjoyment. To the folklorist, the beech bough is the most arresting feature in the ceremony, for the fetching in of fresh leafy branches to set up as decorations was an old form of May Day celebration; its reappearance in this context is a good example of the way in which customs can be transferred from one festival to another.

  JUNE

  In this month, there used to occur one of those major events of the farming year which, while they entailed a great deal of strenuous work, also gave an excuse for drinking and merrymaking – in this case, the annual sheep-shearing. Until well into the twentieth century, the Downland farms were celebrated for their huge flocks of Southdown sheep, the shearing of which required far more labour than an individual farm could provide; consequently, men who were nimble with their hands (often including town-dwellers such as tailors and cobblers, not merely shepherds and farm workers) used to form themselves into a shearing gang and tour a district, visiting several farms in turn.

  The leader of each gang or ‘crew’ was styled Captain, and wore some distinguishing mark in his hat, such as a gold band or a couple of gold stars, while his second in command, the Lieutenant, wore as his lesser mark a silver band or a single star. A typical gang would contain some dozen or score of actual shearers, an older man to stack the fleeces, and a young ‘tar-boy’ whose job it was to dress the wound of any sheep that got cut with tar or powdered lime, and to fetch and carry for the men.

  The season would start with a gathering at a pub, called ‘White Ram Night’, in the course of which the Captain would explain to his crew the itinerary he had agreed on with the farmers, the contracts he had drawn up on their behalf, and the rules they were to work by – including a list of agreed fines for various faults, such as swearing, leaving tufts unshorn, or letting a sheep wriggle out of one’s grasp. The shearing season would last three or four weeks, during which time anything up to 10,000 sheep might be dealt with; the work was very hard, though it was often enlivened with evenings of drinking, singing and horseplay among the shearers, who would take up their quarters in the farmer’s barn.

  When their circuit was complete, the men repaired once more to a pub for the final (and far livelier) ‘Black Ram Night’, at which the Captain would preside over the final share-out of wages, and also the paying of fines; the latter would form a fund to pay for the evening’s drinking. Needless to say, there were songs too that night; Bob Copper, whose great-uncle was Captain of a crew in Rottingdean around the turn of the twentieth century, describes the scene:

  The songs came thick and fast, for the more they sang, the more they drank – every song a drink was the rule – and the more they drank the more they sang. Frequently at the end of a song the whole company would join in this little chorus:

  A jolly good song and jolly well sung,

  And jolly good company everyone;

  And if you can beat it you’re welcome to try,

  But always remember the singer is dry.

  Give the old bounder some beer.

  He’s had some, he’s had some.

  Well, give the old bounder some more.

  O half a pint of Burton

  Won’t hurt ’un, I’m certain.

  O half a pint of Burton

  Won’t hurt ’un, I’m sure.

  S.U.P.!

  The songs often included the charming ‘Rosebuds in June’, and also the ever-popular drinking-game and song ‘Turn the Cup Over’, without which no rural festivity in Sussex could be considered really complete (see below, pp. 133–4). But, above all, they had to include ‘The Sheep- Shearing Song’ itself, in which some long-forgotten shearer has summed up all the essence of the hard work, high spirits, and communal feeling of the gangs, culminating in the joys of Black Ram Night itself:

  When all our work is done, and all our sheep are shorn,

  Then home with our Captain to drink the ale that’s strong;

  ’Tis a barrel then of hum-cup, which we calls the Black Ram;

  And we do sit and swagger, and swear that we are men,

  But yet afore ’tis night, I’ll stand you half-a-crown

  That if you don’t have special care, this Ram’ll knock you down!

  Of calendar dates, the only significant one in June is the night of the 23rd-24th, Midsummer Eve. Like other turning points of the year, this was thought to be a propitious moment for making contact with the unseen world, or divining the future. It was, for instance, sometimes believed that fairies could be seen dancing in their rings on that night, or that at midnight the cattle would kneel down in the fields. Girls who wanted to learn who they were fated to marry could carry out either of two well-known rituals, that of hempseed and that of the chemise. As regards the first, Mrs Latham noted in 1878:

  It is some time since I last heard of any young persons seeking to ascertain their matrimonial fate by sowing hempseed, but the old belief still maintains its popularity. The maiden must steal out alone to the churchyard and sow a handful of hempseed and pretend to harrow it with anything she can drag after her, saying:

  Hempseed, I sow thee,

  Hempseed, I sow thee,

  And he that is my true love

  Come after me and mow thee.

  She is then to look over her left shoulder to see a man mowing as he follows her.

  The second form of divination for the same purpose is also described by Mrs Latham: a girl would wash her chemise and hang it up to dry in front of the kitchen fire just before midnight, leaving the kitchen door wide open; she would then wait in complete silence for someone to walk in and turn it – ‘in one case, I was informed, a very tall man in black came in, and turned the sark, and slowly walked away’. Another method mentioned by the same writer was to go to a stream and dip the left sleeve of one’s chemise into it.

  These practices of almost a hundred years ago are presumably quite forgotten now, but the following type of divination described by Miss Candlin may well be still current:

  When we were children, we made Midsummer Men. These were two pieces of orpine, known to us as ‘Live-long-love-long’. These we pushed through two
empty cotton reels and took them to bed with us. One reel was given the name of our particular boy friend and the other was ourself. In the morning we looked at the reels. If the plants had fallen towards each other, all was well. If they had fallen one in one direction and the other in the opposite, then our love would not be true.

  Midsummer Eve was also a likely date for the appearance of ghosts. Mrs Latham wrote:

  There stood, and may still stand, upon the Downs close to Broadwater, an old oak tree that I used, in days gone by, to gaze at with an uncomfortable and suspicious look, from having heard that always on Midsummer Eve, just at midnight, a number of skeletons started up from its roots, and, joining hands, danced round it till cock-crow, then as suddenly sank down again. My informant knew several persons who had actually seen this dance of death, but one young man in particular was named to me, who, having been detained by business at Findon till very late, and forgetting that it was Midsummer Eve, had been frightened (no very difficult matter, we may suspect) out of his very senses by seeing the dead men caper to the rattling of their own bones.

  JULY

  The July calendar contains two saints’ days to which folklore is attached – St Swithin’s, the 15th, and St James’, the 25th. The best known belief about the former, still very often mentioned, though only as a joke, is that if it rains on St Swithin’s Day it will rain for forty days thereafter. Less common is a belief that rain on this day ‘christens’ the apples, and is a favourable omen for a good crop; some people, indeed, assert that apples are never fit to eat unless St Swithin has christened them.

  St James’ Day, the 25th, at one time marked the start of the season for trapping wheatears on the Downs, since it was about this date that migratory flocks of these birds would visit Sussex on their way to Africa. Catching them was an important source of extra income to Downland shepherds, who sold them as a delicacy for the table. They were snared in T-shaped trenches cut in the turf, with a hair-spring in them, for they were such timid birds that they would fly into any available hole at the least alarm. But the ‘birding’ season was not marked by any particular ceremony or festivity at its opening; the feasting came later, in the form of a dinner given by some poulterers to the shepherds who supplied them with these delicacies.

  This date is also that of the oddest and most interesting of Sussex fairs, the Ebernoe Horn Fair. This small village holds a fair on St James’ Day, and challenges one or other of its neighbours to a cricket match. While the game is in progress, a whole sheep is roasted in the open air, on the edge of the village green, and at the end of the match the man who has scored the highest number of runs for the winning side is presented with the head and horns of the sheep to keep as a trophy. The custom is locally alleged to be 500 years old, though such a claim cannot of course be proved; what is certain is that after having lapsed ‘for a great number of years’, it was deliberately revived in 1864, and that since then it has been kept up with only one interruption – that caused by meat rationing between 1940 and 1954. Even during that interruption, it was at least sometimes possible to hold the cricket match itself, with a pair of antlers from the deer in Petworth Park as a substitute prize.

  There is a folk-song associated with the Ebernoe Horn Fair, of which one version was noted down by Vaughan Williams in 1904, and another and better one collected from an old man, Jimmie Booker of Warnham, who died in 1951. This latter version is now sung every year at the Fair:

  As I was a-walking one fine summer morn,

  So soft was the wind, and the waves on the corn,

  I met a pretty damsel upon a grey mare,

  And she was a-riding along to Horn Fair.

  ‘Now take me up behind you, fair maid, for to ride.’

  ‘Oh no, and then oh no, for my Mammy she would chide,

  And then my dear old Daddy would beat me full sore,

  And never let me ride on his grey mare no more.

  If you would see Horn Fair you must walk on your way,

  I will not let you ride on my grey mare today;

  You’d rumple all my muslin and uncurl my hair,

  And leave me all distressed to be seen at Horn Fair.’

  ‘Oh fairest of damsels, how can you say No?

  With you I intend to Horn Fair for to go;

  We’ll join the finest company when we do get there,

  With horns on their heads, boys, the finest at the Fair.’

  The last couplet is probably to be explained as an allusion to some now long-forgotten custom, dating from an earlier period in the Fair’s history, requiring those present to be dressed up with horns – that ancient symbol of cuckoldry which was a source of so many jokes from Shakespeare’s time until well into the nineteenth century. Bawdy humour of this sort is exemplified in Sussex by the eighteenth-century Cock Fair at Ticehurst, at which, according to the Sussex Weekly Advertiser’s report of an unfortunate street accident which spoilt the fun in 1788, the landlord of the Cock Inn was ‘according to annual custom presented with a load of wood, on condition that he could get it drawn home by men having the appellation of cuckolds, of whom he had assembled a sufficient number and provided them with a waggon for the purpose.’ Whether the self-confessed cuckolds of Ticehurst were expected to wear the symbols of their state the newspaper unfortunately does not say; but a grotesque procession of this sort is known to have taken place regularly in Kent up to 1768, at the famous Charlton Horn Fair, which was notorious for its rowdy and bawdy goings-on, and where horns were prominently featured. The Ebernoe song, with its barely veiled allusions to seduction and cuckoldry, would fit well into such a context of licentious merry-making. It is to be feared that, if all were known, today’s respectable cricket match and sheep-roasting would turn out to have a somewhat less respectable ancestry.

  Charmingly innocent, by contrast, is Little Edith’s Treat, which is held at Piddinghoe on 19 July. This celebration consists of a church service, children’s races and a children’s tea, and was instituted in memory of a baby named Edith Croft who died in 1868, when she was only three months old. Her grandmother set up a fund of £100 in order that her memory should be preserved in this way.

  AUGUST

  August is nowadays a month without folk-customs, at any rate in Sussex, and has been so for some while. Not that it was a time of unrelieved hard work, even for farm labourers, but that what fairs and festivities there were (including, since 1871, the August Bank Holiday) did not develop any fixed rituals or ceremonies.

  There was, however, one minor children’s custom which could still be seen in Brighton in the 1860s, namely the building of ‘grottos’ of oyster shells on the street pavements on 5 August, to mark the fact that oysters were in season. The choice of date (which could in fact vary slightly) can be explained by the alteration of the calendar by eleven days in 1752; 5 August in the new calendar corresponds to 25 July in the old, and this last is the feast of St James, whose symbol is the pilgrim’s scallop shell. The grottos were built of pebbles and shells, piled up about a foot high, and lit from inside by a stump of a candle; children would beg passers-by for ‘a penny for the grotto’, in the same way as they do nowadays for a Guy.

  In Hove in the 1920s there was a rather similar children’s custom aimed at earning a little money by displaying a cost-free but skilfully made object. It was not bound to a specific date, but might be done at any time in summer. Hove children called it a ‘poppy show’, but poppies were not essential, and similar objects in other regions were called ‘poppet’ or ‘puppet’ shows; they seem meant as a child’s version of the peep-shows so popular in Victorian and Edwardian times. An informant recalls:

  We used to make these Poppy Shows, mostly in old shoe boxes, or sometimes in the upright cocoa tins which were then used – round, and quite large. My usual container was a shoe box. We used to sit on the front steps of our respective houses, and make them, and then usually two of us would go together, to give each other moral support, I suppose, and also to increase the interest, and
knock of the front doors of our mothers’ houses, and friends’ mothers, and other ‘tried as friendly’ adults. We used to try to get one penny a go, or a halfpenny from younger children.

  We would line the bottom of the box with pebbles (from the beach usually), or ferns and/or moss. I remember a front garden with large fern leaves which was a very convenient source for our base. Then we would pick flowers, usually from our own and other gardens and hedges. Poppies, I suppose, gave the name to the show, but we picked mallow from the beach and fuchsia from someone’s hedge, and little bits and pieces of coloured glass, feathers, shells, anything to make a pretty pattern. Coloured paper from a sweet wrapping made a good background. I remember I used to cut three-cornered slits in the box so that it could be opened out for the customer to look in. Sometimes three openings were cut, or just the lid of the entire box opened if one was lazy. Patterns and lovely colours were what we aimed for, and there was a lot of competition between us to decide whose box looked nicest. At the end of a session we would count our money and the girls usually shared it out. Boys sometimes participated, but usually it was to knock on the door only, and to share the proceeds, but not often in actually making the box.

  SEPTEMBER

  In September (or sometimes late in August, if the weather was exceptionally kind), the harvesting would be over, and the farm workers could enjoy that most friendly and jolly of festivities, a Harvest Home or Harvest Supper. It was commonly held in the largest barn available, as soon as the last load had been carried in from the fields, and was, as Arthur Beckett once put it, ‘an event celebrated for heavy feeding, curious songs, and big drinking feats’ – and no wonder, for it marked the triumphant climax of the agricultural year.