Paul Pitcher Night

As well as being St Timothy's Day, today is of course Paul Pitcher Night.

At one time, all across Cornwall, people came together to smash pots and pitchers to celebrate Saint Paul’s conversion to Christianity. This was particularly popular in Bodmin where the young people of the town used to carry their broken pots in a procession. 

[Paul Pitcher Night | Cornwall For Ever!]

My feeling is that this was simply the miner's version of Plough Monday - commemorating (perhaps, seemingly, belatedly!) the beginning of the new year by smashing last year's beer pots.

Happy Red Squirrel Appreciation Day!

St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,

Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith. 

[John Keats, 'The Eve of St Agnes'] 

St Wulfstan

F. Sebastian Bowden, Miniature Lives of the Saints for Every Day in the Year

St Kentigern

St Kentigern* finding the wizard Merlin, healing him of his madness, and converting him to Christianity (Stobo Kirk, Scotland)

 
*In the Harry Potter books he is mentioned by his nickname St Mungo, the patron saint of those suffering from magical maladies and injuries. 

'Deficiénte vino, * iussit Iesus impléri hýdrias aqua, quæ in vinum convérsa est, allelúia.'

Christ performing his first miracle, in a stained glass window at Winchester Cathedral by Hugh Easton, unveiled in 1939 to commemorate the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth 

Plough Monday 2026

The agent said we had a choice: We might go or stay,
But either way our horses would be sold.
For what takes us a week could now be done in ’alf a day 
By newer ways. (At least that’s what we’re told!)

For the harness and horse colour gather dust upon the wall.

There’s no work now for the ploughboy or the team.

For there’s rust upon the ploughshare, empty echoes in the stall,

Now the ploughing’s done by contract, and with steam.

The ploughman once within the stable yard was king,
And Lord ’ee was a tyrant if ’ee found a horse abused,
’As lost ’is place, been pensioned off, as if to ease the sting,  

Still reckons that ’ee finds ’imself ill-used.

For the harness and horse colour gather dust upon the wall.

There’s no work now for the ploughboy or the team.

For there’s rust upon the ploughshare, empty echoes in the stall, 

Now the ploughing’s done by contract, and with steam.

 

The girl who with the ploughboy spends ’er evenings walking out
Now says she finds ’im out of touch and slow,
And because she wants a man ’oo knows what ’ee’s about 

Takes a greasy-handed driver for her beau

For the harness and horse colour gather dust upon the wall.

There’s no work now for the ploughboy or the team.

For there’s rust upon the ploughshare, empty echoes in the stall,

Now the ploughing’s done by contract, and with steam.

 
No more the cheery whistle! No more the whiplash crack!
No more the single furrow straight and true!
But an iron-throated whistle, then another answers back,
As a wire rope pulls seven furrows through.
 

Now the harness and horse colour gather dust upon the wall.

There’s no work now for the ploughboy or the team.

For there’s rust upon the ploughshare, empty echoes in the stall,

Now the ploughing’s done by contract, and with steam.

 
There’s smoke above the headland where the horses used to turn,
The air is filled with oil and with steam,
And over all the reek of coal the traction engines burn,
Now that strangers do the ploughing with machines.
 

For the harness and horse colour gather dust upon the wall.

There’s no work now for the ploughboy or the team.

For there’s rust upon the ploughshare, empty echoes in the stall,

Now the ploughing’s done by contract, and with steam.

Now the ploughing’s done by contract, and with steam.

Plough Tuesday

The Straw Bear of Whittlesea, Cambridgeshire (Museum of English Rural Life)

Pristina nomine...

And of course on this very day one would wish a happy 172nd birthday to the immortal Sherlock Holmes:

“What a lovely thing a rose is!” 

He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects. 

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion,” said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. “It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

'Journey of the Magi'

The Three Tuns, Marylebone

'A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

From the heart of Merrie England*! Happy Twelfth Night!

*Actually they make one think of a group of Dunlendings who've stopped off at the Ivy Bush for a couple of pints and found themselves in the middle of the Hobbiton-Bywater Afteryule football match.

What has Wayland to do with Christ?

In his masterfully entertaining book The Third Reich: A New History, Michael Burleigh in his chapter on National Socialism and Christianity, apropos specifically of the Third Reich government's attempts to "Nazify" Christmas, mentions almost en passant one particularly unsuccessful endeavour which was to try and identify the Magi with Slagfid, Eigil and Wieland.

It is, of course, easy to scoff. To paraphrase Alcuin of York, what has Wayland to do with Christ? But what is even stranger than identifying England's most famous arms manufacturer and his two brothers with the Three Kings who went to Bethlehem is that the bright spark who came up with the idea probably got it from one of the finest treasures of Old England currently held in the British Museum - to wit, the Franks Casket*.

No one really knows what it was for, and part of the mystery is down to not just the deliberately cryptic inscriptions in the runes around its edges but also the extraordinary variety of the scenes on its different sides - historical, legendary, mythical, devotional, and, indeed, just plain unidentifiable.

On the front panel, as it happens, we have two scenes. On the left-hand side we have Wayland, who is busy turning the skull of the young son of his captor, King Niðhad, into a dinky drinking goblet, which he will then use to drug and "date rape" the King's daughter. (He's a northern European demigod. It's what they do,) At the same time, Wayland's brother Egil can be seen putting their escape plan into action, gathering swans' feathers with which they will make wings so that they can fly back to the realm of the gods where they belong.

By way of a bit of background, just as Loki is the north European Prometheus (the fire-god, bound in the Underworld for treachery), Wayland is almost certainly both the north European Vulcan (his name, and that he is a crippled smith - though it's possible that blacksmiths were often crippled deliberately in order to stop them from either fighting and getting killed or running away and/or joining the enemy) and the north European Daedalus (the builder of a labyrinth prison), and Egil is quite possibly the north European Icarus (the Wayland-Daedalus connexion, the island escape strategy, and of course the name, again).

But Wayland is also the son of Wade, who is the north European St Christopher. And on the other side of the same panel on the Franks Casket we have the Three Kings themselves, visiting the Baby Jesus.

Is it really so improbable that that long-forgotten master carver may have imagined some relationship between the two stories after all?

*It's Anglo-Saxon, and hence the runes are Old English. Contrary to what one might think, it's called the Franks Casket not because it used to belong to the Franks but because it was discovered by a man called Franks - albeit in a French antique-shop.

For Christ's circumcision this day we keep,

Who for our sins did often weep;

His hands and feet were wounded deep,

And his blessed side, with a spear.

His head they crowned then with thorn,

And at him they did laugh and scorn,

Who for to save our souls was born;

God send us a happy New Year!

And now with New-Year's gifts each friend

Unto each other they do send;

God grant we may our lives amend,

And that truth may now appear.

Now like the snake cast off your skin

Of evil thoughts and wicked sin,

And to amend this new year begin:

God send us a merry new year!