British Popular Customs, Present and Past: Illustrating the Social and Domestic Manners of the People. Arranged According to the Calendar of the Year.Thiselton-Dyer, T. F. (Thomas Firminger)
History
British Popular Customs, Present and Past: Illustrating the Social and Domestic Manners of the People. Arranged According to the Calendar of the Year.
Thiselton-Dyer, T. F. (Thomas Firminger)
Folklore -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Social life and customs
“Let the fields be stripped of eye-diseasing cockle.”
--Fosbroke, _Ariconensia or Archæological Sketches of Ross and
Archenfield_, 1822.
KENT.
At this season young people go out holiday-making in public-houses, to
eat _pudding-pies_, and this practice is called going a
_pudding-pieing_. The pudding-pies are from the size of a teacup to that
of a small tea-saucer. They are flat, like pastrycooks’ cheesecakes,
made with a raised crust to hold a small quantity of custard, with
currants lightly sprinkled on the surface. Pudding-pies and cherry-beer
usually go together at these feasts.--Hone’s _Year Book_, 1838, p. 361.
LANCASHIRE.
In Lancashire, and in Cheshire, Staffordshire, and Warwickshire, and
perhaps in other counties, the ridiculous custom of ‘lifting’ or
‘heaving’ is practised. On Easter Monday the men lift the women, and on
Easter Tuesday the women lift or heave the men. The process is performed
by two lusty men or women joining their hands across each other’s
wrists, then, making the person to be heaved sit down on their arms,
they lift him up aloft two or three times, and often carry him several
yards along a street. A grave clergyman who happened to be passing
through a town in Lancashire on an Easter Tuesday, and having to stay an
hour or two at an inn, was astonished by three or four lusty women
rushing into his room, exclaiming they had “come to lift him!” “To lift
him!” repeated the amazed divine; “what can you mean?” “Why, your
reverence, we’ve come to lift you, ’cause it’s Easter Tuesday.” “Lift me
because it’s Easter Tuesday! I don’t understand you--is there any such
custom here?” “Yes to be sure; why, don’t you know? All us women was
lifted yesterday, and us lifts the men to-day in turn. And, in course,
it’s our reights and duties to lift ’em.” After a little further parley
the reverend traveller compromised with his fair visitors for
half-a-crown, and thus escaped the dreaded compliment.--_Book of Days_,
vol. i., p. 425.
Agnes Strickland in her _Lives of the Queens of England_ (1864, vol. i.
p. 303), narrates how on the Easter Monday of 1290 seven of Queen
Eleanora’s ladies unceremoniously invaded the chamber of King Edward
(I.), and seizing their majestic master, proceeded to “heave him” in his
chair, till he was glad to pay a fine of fourteen pounds to enjoy his
own peace and be set at liberty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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