Stir-up Sunday

Four generations of the Royal Family together in 2019 for @PoppyLegion’s ‘Together at Christmas’ initiative🎄[Photo 📷 by @ChrisJack_Getty]

Excita, quǽsumus, Dómine, tuórum fidélium voluntátes: ut, divíni óperis fructum propénsius exsequéntes; pietátis tuæ remédia majóra percípiant. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum, Fílium tuum: qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen. 

STIR up, we beſeech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteouſly bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteouſly rewarded, through Jeſus Chriſt our Lord. Amen.

Presentation

Titian, The Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple (1534–1538) [Detail]

For today's feast, the translation by the Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey of Dom Prosper Guéranger's masterpiece The Liturgical Year has the following footnote:

From sources that do not come within the learned author's scope, it appears that in England the feast is of a much more ancient institution [than 1372], though the evidence gathered so far confines its observance to the monasteries. As Oblatio S. Mariae in templo Domini cum esset trium annorum, it occurs in several monastic calendars of Saxon times, and, still under the title of Oblatio, in some of later date. This is only one of many interesting facts illustrating the English movement of the tenth and early eleventh centuries in its devotional aspect : a side of the question which still awaits special study.

'Edmund, King of East Anglia, Killed by the Danes', from James E Doyle, A Chronicle of England, B.C. 55-A.D. 1485

Ave rex gentis Anglorum

miles Regis angelorum

O Edmunde flos martyrum

velut rosa vel lilium

funde preces ad Dominum

pro salute fidelium.

🐺

Photo by Dr Joseph Shaw

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Weird Walsingham

• Pilgrimages to Walsingham have been going on since before the Romans left.* They were originally to a shrine of Mercury. Of the European Celts in his own time, Julius Caesar writes

Deum maxime Mercurium colunt. Huius sunt plurima simulacra: hunc omnium inventorem artium ferunt, hunc viarum atque itinerum [i.e. "pilgrimages"?] ducem, hunc ad quaestus pecuniae mercaturasque habere vim maximam arbitrantur.

[De Bello Gallico, VI, xvii] 

The Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Mercury was Woden. The Norse version of Woden was Odin.  According to Norse mythology, Odin hung for nine days and nights on the world-tree, the great ash tree Yggdrasill. According to Neil Price, there is a modern theory that the tree Yggdrasill was in fact the Milky Way. It's possible that an old name for the Milky Way was "the Walsingham Way". 

 

Deeply surely I need to deplore it,

Wondering why my master bore it,

The riving off that race

So at home, time was, to his truth and grace

That a starlight-wender of ours would say

The marvellous Milk was Walsingham Way

And one–but let be, let be:

More, more than was will yet be.–

O well wept, mother have lost son;

Wept, wife; wept, sweetheart would be one:

Though grief yield them no good

Yet shed what tears sad truelove should.

But to Christ lord of thunder

Crouch; lay knee by earth low under:

‘Holiest, loveliest, bravest,

Save my hero, O Hero savest.

And the prayer thou hearst me making

Have, at the awful overtaking,

Heard; have heard and granted

Grace that day grace was wanted.’

Not that hell knows redeeming,

But for souls sunk in seeming

Fresh, till doomfire burn all,

Prayer shall fetch pity eternal.

[Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'The Loss of the Eurydice'] 

• There is a stretch of Roman road that runs between Castle Acre and Great Massingham along which pilgrims to Walsingham still walk. The road is known as Peddars Way.

• Some versions of the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham depict her with her foot not on a serpent but on a frog. The frog may well be one of the frogs that appear in Scripture.

Et vidi de ore draconis et de ore bestiae et de ore pseudoprophetae spiritus tres inmundos in modum ranarum. Sunt enim spiritus daemoniorum facientes signa et procedunt ad reges totius terrae congregare illos in proelium ad diem magnum Dei omnipotentis. 

 

[Revelation XVI, xiii-xiv] 

• A spindle-whorl has been discovered in a house in Nazareth, of the sort in which Our Lady would have lived. It is quite possible that Our Lady was herself spinning when the angel Gabriel appeared to her. What we do know is that spindle whorls in Iceland, essential for use in seiðr rituals, went from having old Norse protection spells written on them ('Óðinn and Heimdallr and Þjálfa, they will help you', etc.) to having cheery little Latin good luck charms ('Pax Portanti, Salus habenti!') to having finally just one word of protection - 'Maria', followed by the whole of the runic alphabet. (This last is from a spindle whorl made from Icelandic sandstone, found at Stóramörk in Rangárvallasýsla during the summer of 1926 and delivered to the National Museum the following year.) The haunting impression is left that as our northern cousins finally gave up on the Æsir and turned to Christ and His saints, they tended to invoke the aid of their new supernatural allies in much the same way as they always had the old.

*The "baptizing" of places of pagan cults by Christian missionaries is hardly unique to England, after all. A good example on the continent, in Głogówko in Poland, is that of the Holy Mountain (Świętej Górze in Polish) Basilica of the Mystic Rose (Róży Duchownej) - better known to the rest of the world perhaps as the Gostyń Oratory.

Dancers carrying sets of antlers perform the Horn Dance, which dates back to 1226, in the village of Abbots Bromley, England, on September 8, 2025. (Phil Noble / Reuters)

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]

First Fruits

According to what I think of as "the Celtic* reckoning", August is not so much the last month of summer as the first month of autumn. Either way though, it's a harvest month. It began with Lammas, and today in the Sarum Missal we have a special blessing for grapes. 

Benedic, Dómine, et hos fructus novos uvæ, quos tu, Dómine, rore cœli, et inundatione pluviárum et temporum serenitate atque tranquillitate ad maturitatem perducere dignatus es, et dedisti eos ad usus nostros, cum gratiarum actione percipere. In nomine Domini nostri + Jesu Christi per quem omnia, Domine, semper bona creas. Qui tecum.

Two thoughts occur. Firstly, the blessing itself is significantly older than today's feast of the Transfiguration, which as Duffy points out is one of several modern feasts that were only introduced into the western liturgy in the fifteenth century - the others being the Visitation (2nd July) and tomorrow's great feast of the Holy Name of Jesus.

And secondly, of course, mediaeval England was a warmer, naturally more prosperous country than she has become. Before the age of machines and the mini ice ages of more modern times, England was indeed a land of sunshine and wine.

In Merry England, "first fruits" festivities are already well underway.

*More abstract and logical than the Anglo-Saxon, naturally!

Lammas and English Magic

In her excellent little book Winters in the World, Eleanor Parker gives two recognisable examples of Anglo-Saxon magic.

One is the Æcerbot:

The ritual is not tied to any specific time of year, but it begins at a particular time of day: the first step is to go out before the dawn and cut four pieces of turf from the four sides of the land that needs to be cured. On these, you're told to drip a mixture of oil, honey, yeast, holy water, milk from every cow that grazes on the land and portion of every tree and plant that grows there. As you drip this on the turf, you're to say 'Grow and multiply and fill this earth, in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit', as well as the Pater Noster. The pieces of turf are then taken to church, where a priest sings four masses over them, and before sunset they are replaced in the field, with a cross, made of rowan-wood and inscribed with the names of the four evangelists, buried under each one.

The ceremony then continues, with a mixture of Latin prayers taken from the liturgy and pagan prayers in Old English addressed to Mother Earth (Erce), and with various rituals of the sort of almost impossible complexity that has characterised traditional English magic down to modern times.

Kipling of course makes use of something similar to this in the first chapter of Puck of Pook's Hill:

‘Have you a knife on you?’ [Puck] said at last.

Dan handed over his big one-bladed outdoor knife, and Puck began to carve out a piece of turf from the centre of the Ring.

‘What’s that for—Magic?’ said Una, as he pressed up the square of chocolate loam that cut like so much cheese.

‘One of my little magics,’ he answered, and cut another. ‘You see, I can’t let you into the Hills because the People of the Hills have gone; but if you care to take seizin from me, I may be able to show you something out of the common here on Human Earth. You certainly deserve it.’

‘What’s taking seizin?’ said Dan, cautiously.

‘It’s an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren’t lawfully seized of your land—it didn’t really belong to you—till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it—like this.’ He held out the turves.

‘But it’s our own meadow,’ said Dan, drawing back. ‘Are you going to magic it away?’

Puck laughed. ‘Iknow it’s your meadow, but there’s a great deal more in it than you or your father ever guessed. Try!’

He turned his eyes on Una.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said. Dan followed her example at once.

‘Now are you two lawfully seized and possessed of all Old England,’ began Puck, in a sing-song voice. ‘By Right of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are you free to come and go and look and know where I shall show or best you please. You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year; and you shall know neither Doubt nor Fear. Fast! Hold fast all I give you.’

Although the Æcerbot is not "tied" to any particular time of the year, Parker associates it with Plough Monday - the ceremonial recommencement of the farming year after Christmas. A comparable blessing that is very much connected to be a particular date of the year though is the Lammas blessing (translated from Old English, italics translated from Latin):

[Take two] long pieces of four-edged wood, and on each piece write a Pater Noster, on each side down to the end. Lay [one] on the floor of the barn, and lady the other [across] it, so they form the sign of the cross. And take four pipeces of the consecrated bread which is consecrated on Lammas Day, and crumble them at the four corners of the barn. This is the blessing for that. So that mice do not harm these sheaves, say prayers over the sheaves and [then] hang them up without speaking. City of Jerusalem, where mice do not live and cannot have power, and cannot gather the grain nor rejoice with the wheat. This is the second blessing. Lord God Almighty, who made heaven and earth, bless these fruits in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spririt. Amen. And Pater Noster.

I think we can take it for granted that the "consecrated bread" mentioned here was not supposed to be the hūsl itself but rather some early version of the bread that was blessed at the end of Mass during the Last Gospel. As Eamon Duffy describes it in his classic work The Stripping of the Altars,

A loaf of bread presented by one of the householders of the parish was solemnly blessed, cut up in a skip or basket, and distributed to the congregation. The offering of this loaf, which was regulated by a rota, was attended with considerable solemnity, the provider processing to the high altar before matins, reciting a special prayer, and offering a candel to the priest at the same time. It was usual for the curate to pray explicitly "for the good man or woman that this day geveth bread to make the holy lofe" when he bid the bedes. This holy loaf was meant to be the first food one tasted on a Sunday; eaten or simply carried in one's pocket, it was believed to have apotropaic powers. If one died without a priest, reception of the holy bread was accounted a sufficient substitute for housel.

Is Wade the northern St Christopher?

Mediaeval mural of St Christopher in the Saxon church of St Peter and Paul in Albury

There can hardly be two more tantalisingly enigmatic figures in mediaeval folklore than Wade and St Christopher. One was a saint. The other was the father of the Anglo-Saxon god of smithying. But both were giants. And both were ferrymen, who would carry folk from one side of a river to the other. And apart from that we know very little about either.

In the case of Wade, I think we have to face up to the most obvious likelihoods when they stare us in the face and acknowledge that although nothing about him is certain there are some strong probabilities that should not be ignored.

Firstly, his name probably means exactly what he sounds like. He waded across his river carrying his charges. So although he is supposed to have had a boat it was presumably not always used - unless of course he pushed it across his river from outside. And of course, being a giant, it is quite possible that he would not have been able to travel in it himself anyway.

If Chaucer's reference to "Wade's bote" really was a common mediaeval double entendre, one might speculate why. Was it because it was so magical and tricksy that it might travel anywhere, including into fairyland or even under water? If the latter, then the possibility of a lewd double meaning (and "playing on Wade's boat") becomes obvious even to the least vulgar of minds. (As Wade crosses his river, with the water coming up to his waist, who knows what might be going on beneath the surface?)

And of course the likelihood that he was if anything a folksy anti-saint, like St Uncumber or St Guinefort, or even Santa Muerte today, makes this all the more possible.

Reconstructing an actual narrative is of course nigh on impossible, but we can imagine Wade as being a ferryman with a tricksy, possibly magical, possibly unreliable "bote". And if it was indeed liable to cart passengers off to perilous realms beyond or below the waves it might often not be there at all for its master's use - meaning of course that Wade would have had to resort to carrying his passengers across the river on his great shoulders.

Why, one wonders? How did Wade come to lose his magical boat? One suspects a supernatural, pre-Christian (or just "extra-Christian") intervention. And one suspects a punishment or a curse. And of course above and before ferrymen of the mediaeval Christian North one is tempted to imagine the involvement of the northern Charon himself - that all-wise one-eyed psychopathic psychopomp of Viking and Anglo-Saxon paganism alike. Indeed, could there have been some early version of the legend when "Wade" and "Woden" were one and the same?

Here perhaps we can follow the fairy-tale logic of the legend of St Christopher that we all know from school. Just as St Christopher's punishment, for serving the Devil, was to be almost crushed under the weight of the world's sins when he carried the Christ Child across his river, so perhaps Wade's punishment was handed down to him by Woden, to be a ferryman without a boat, presumably for some unspecified time until some sin is paid for.

And what could Wade's sin have been? Here we cannot know, and we can imagine him losing his boat to Woden in any number of ways, including in the usual contest of riddles or flyting. More likely though, following the logic of St Christopher's story, it would have been an act of hubris against Woden himself, repayable by the humiliation of having his boat enchanted and confiscated.

Finally, if Wade really was an anti-St Christopher, what would the mediaeval Christian mind have made of his story? Was the loss of his boat, by Chaucer's time, a punishment - like that of the Wandering Jew - for not aiding Christ? Could he be a pagan figure, albeit a virtuous one, sentenced to help travellers to cross rivers even until doomsday, when his boat will be restored to him, when Christ will come again?

Of course, nobody knows. But what does any of this tell us of St Christopher? Not much, it has to be said, other than that he's a very ancient and important saint whose influence in the early Middle Ages may just possibly have extended even beyond the boundaries of Christendom and into the pagan North.

And he is without a doubt well worth praying to for travellers, even to this very day.