AmyLizzie
11-01-2007, 01:06 PM
Hi all,
This was recently posted on a forum at Oxford University as a matter of interest by one of the students on my local history course. I found it interesting and thought you might like to have a look, so I've included it here, its basically on the origins of Halloween....
there seems to be no doubt that the opening of November was the time of a major pagan festival which was celebrated, at the very least, in all those parts of the British Isles which had a pastoral economy. At most, it may have been general among the ‘Celtic’ peoples. There is no evidence that it was connected with the dead, and no proof that it opened the year, but it was certainly a time when supernatural forces were especially to be guarded against or propitiated; activities which took different forms in different regions. Its importance was only reinforced by the imposition upon it of a Christian festival which became primarily one of the dead …
By the end of the Middle Ages, the Christian festival of the dead, known as Hallowtide, Hollontide, or Allantide, had developed into a spectacular affair, for which there are ample records in England …For that evensong, as the parish accounts indicate, many churches laid in extra supplies of candles and torches, to be carried in procession and to illuminate the building. Some in London arranged unusually elaborate entertainments as part of the service on that night …Each mayor of Bristol in the 1470s was expected to entertain the whole council and other prominent citizens and gentry, to ‘fires and their drinkings with spiced cakebread and sundry wines’, before they dispersed to their respective parish churches for evensong. There they presumably prepared for the most famous ritual of the night, the ringing of church bells to comfort the souls in purgatory after the congregation had offered prayers for them … In this way the opening of the season of darkness and cold had been made into an opportunity to confront the greatest fear known to humans, that of death, and the greatest known to Christians, that of damnation.
The concept of purgatory … was bound to run into trouble as soon as the [Protestants] took control … ringing was absent in 1548 from virtually all the parishes in which it was recorded until then. The exceptions are Halesowen … North Elmham … and Thame. At Thame, a very conservative community, the ringers went to work again in 1549, but after that all payment to them ceased.
Once people were thwarted in their attempts to bring comfort to the dead within churches, they developed different strategies to provide prayers in a ritual framework outside them. In the Lancashire parish of Whalley … Catholic families still assembled at the midnight before All Saints’ Day in the early nineteenth century. Each did so on a hill near its homestead, one person holding a large bunch of burning straw on the end of a fork. The rest knelt in a circle around and prayed for the souls of relatives and friends until the flames burned out. The author who recorded this custom added that it gradually died out in the latter part of the century, but that before that it had been very common and at Hallowe’en. He went on to say that the name ‘Purgatory Field’, found across northern Lancashire, testified to an even wider distribution, and that the rite itself was called ‘Teen ‘lay’1…
Finally, a possible reference to the custom … occurs in a note made at the end of an almanac in 1658 by the antiquary Sir William Dugdale that at Hallowe’en the master of a family ‘used to’ carry a bunch of straw around a field saying
“Fire and Red low
Light on my teen low.” ‘
This was recently posted on a forum at Oxford University as a matter of interest by one of the students on my local history course. I found it interesting and thought you might like to have a look, so I've included it here, its basically on the origins of Halloween....
there seems to be no doubt that the opening of November was the time of a major pagan festival which was celebrated, at the very least, in all those parts of the British Isles which had a pastoral economy. At most, it may have been general among the ‘Celtic’ peoples. There is no evidence that it was connected with the dead, and no proof that it opened the year, but it was certainly a time when supernatural forces were especially to be guarded against or propitiated; activities which took different forms in different regions. Its importance was only reinforced by the imposition upon it of a Christian festival which became primarily one of the dead …
By the end of the Middle Ages, the Christian festival of the dead, known as Hallowtide, Hollontide, or Allantide, had developed into a spectacular affair, for which there are ample records in England …For that evensong, as the parish accounts indicate, many churches laid in extra supplies of candles and torches, to be carried in procession and to illuminate the building. Some in London arranged unusually elaborate entertainments as part of the service on that night …Each mayor of Bristol in the 1470s was expected to entertain the whole council and other prominent citizens and gentry, to ‘fires and their drinkings with spiced cakebread and sundry wines’, before they dispersed to their respective parish churches for evensong. There they presumably prepared for the most famous ritual of the night, the ringing of church bells to comfort the souls in purgatory after the congregation had offered prayers for them … In this way the opening of the season of darkness and cold had been made into an opportunity to confront the greatest fear known to humans, that of death, and the greatest known to Christians, that of damnation.
The concept of purgatory … was bound to run into trouble as soon as the [Protestants] took control … ringing was absent in 1548 from virtually all the parishes in which it was recorded until then. The exceptions are Halesowen … North Elmham … and Thame. At Thame, a very conservative community, the ringers went to work again in 1549, but after that all payment to them ceased.
Once people were thwarted in their attempts to bring comfort to the dead within churches, they developed different strategies to provide prayers in a ritual framework outside them. In the Lancashire parish of Whalley … Catholic families still assembled at the midnight before All Saints’ Day in the early nineteenth century. Each did so on a hill near its homestead, one person holding a large bunch of burning straw on the end of a fork. The rest knelt in a circle around and prayed for the souls of relatives and friends until the flames burned out. The author who recorded this custom added that it gradually died out in the latter part of the century, but that before that it had been very common and at Hallowe’en. He went on to say that the name ‘Purgatory Field’, found across northern Lancashire, testified to an even wider distribution, and that the rite itself was called ‘Teen ‘lay’1…
Finally, a possible reference to the custom … occurs in a note made at the end of an almanac in 1658 by the antiquary Sir William Dugdale that at Hallowe’en the master of a family ‘used to’ carry a bunch of straw around a field saying
“Fire and Red low
Light on my teen low.” ‘