Our Lady of the Harvest

Helen Moran, Corn Dolly (Kern Babby) (2009), based on a photograph of one recorded by Sir Benjamin Stone in Northumberland in 1901

The corn dolly in the above photograph is the property of the Museum of British Folklore. According to the museum's Ben Edge,

Harvest Festivals celebrated the fact that the farmers had harvested the corn and this would mean that the community had enough to eat for another year. The last corn gathered would be made into a human shape, dressed in fine clothes and crowned with flowers and called the 'Kern Baby' or 'Harvest Queen'. 

[Ritual Britain]

For all their picturesque charm, harvest festivals themselves are unfortunately a Victorian invention. In fact Steve Roud specifically fingers one particular eccentric* clergyman in north Cornwall who gloried in the name of Robert Hawker. It's quite probable that Hawker's inspiration for his harvest festivals was indeed Lammas. But harvest festivals are also normally celebrated post-harvest, in late September or early October. (In Germany they decided on the first Sunday after Michaelmas - starting in 1933, as it happens!)

In the Middle Ages, the most important actual festival during harvest time was of course today's feast of Lady Day in Harvest - Marymas, or the Feast of the Assumption, as it is better known. And in secular terms it was in all likelihood the biggest "Lady Day" on the calendar, trumping in terms of eating and drinking presumably even its original Lenten equivalent in March.† In the Sarum Missal even the Gospel reading at today's Mass (Luke 10:38-42) seems implicitly to call the reapers away from their toil at their busiest time of the year.

On the other hand, even comparatively hard-bitten folklorists concede that corn dollies (of all kinds) may very well be of ancient origin. Frazer himself crunches enough references to the kirn dolly and comparable beings from all over Europe and going back to the seventh century. And of course even in Old England, before we had the likes of John Barleycorn we had similarly mysterious characters like King Sheave.

What magical uses corn dollies may ever have been put to is still more difficult. According to Mrs Baker,

The last stalks were worked into the mysterious figure of the corn or kern-dolly, baby, maiden, or ivy-girl (dressed by Kentish women in paper cut like finest lace), and kept at the farm, emblematic of the continuity of seasons. Corn-dollies in traditional shapes - Durham chandelier, Northamptonshire horns and Suffolk horseshoe - are now sophisticated craft objects, but witch-repellent red thread still ties them and protective magic lingers. An old man who visited Cambridge Folk Museum in recent years knew of the true corn-dolly-making from his grandmother who lived in Litlington and who died in 1903 aged 75. There, until about 1848, she said, after the harvest feast at which the final plaiting of the dolly was done and it was given a special char, the farmer, accompanied only by the farm-men, carried it carefully to the parlour and put it away on the top of the corner cupboard to rest safely until the next summer. As an awestruck child, she remembered creeping in to peer at the dolly lying limply there, guardian of the next harvest. Each year for over one hundred years, a family at Whalton, Northumberland, has made a kern-baby, the height of a sheaf of corn, which is left in the church until the following year. Mrs Ridley, a recent maker of the baby, and her sister, well remember their mother and grandmother doing the work. 

[Margaret Baker, Folklore and Customs of Rural England, pp. 28-9]

As ever, the principle use of English magic is to protect against other sorts of magic!

*He became a Catholic on his deathbed. 'Nuff said!
†The second most important may well have been 'the latter Lady Day' - a term for Our Lady's birthday going back to Saxon times - on 8th September. (Funnily enough though, St Swithin's Day - itself a time hardly without magical importance - has had a similar fate: even down to the present, it is commonly reckoned to fall not on the date of the saint's death, which one would expect to be his primary feast, but on 15th July - the anniversary of the translation of his relics.)

UPDATE: I realised a few days ago that I had probably made a rod for my own back by specifying 'Anglo-Saxon magic' in my strapline. 'Anglo-Celtic' may very well be more interesting. In any case though, for some Marymas magic from north of the border, see here.

[Most Holy Name of Mary, 2025]