other parts of western Europe, and often the popular imagination finds in their successful performance an omen for the fertility of the year. On _a priori_ grounds one might have expected two agricultural festivals during the summer; one in the earlier part of it, when moisture was all-important, accompanied with rain-charms; the other later on, when the crops were well grown and heat was required to ripen them, accompanied with sun-charms. But the evidence is rather in favour of a single original festival determined, in the dislocation caused by a calendar, to different dates in different localities[408]. The Midsummer or St. John’s fires are perhaps the most widely spread and best known of surviving heat-charms. But they can be paralleled by others distributed all over the summer cycle of festivals, at Easter[409] and on May-day, and in connexion with the ploughing celebrations on Epiphany, Candlemas, Shrovetide, Quadragesima, and St. Blaize’s day. It is indeed at Easter and Candlemas that the _Benedictiones_, which are the ecclesiastical versions of the ceremony, appear in the ritual-books[410]. On the other hand, although, perhaps owing to the later notion of the solstice, the fires are greatly prominent on St. John’s day, and are explained with considerable ingenuity by the monkish writers[411], yet this day was never a fire-festival and nothing else. Garland customs are common upon it, and there is even evidence, though slight evidence, for rain-charms[412]. It is perhaps justifiable to infer that the crystallization of the rain-and heat-charms, which doubtless were originally used only when the actual condition of the weather made them necessary, into annual festivals, took place after the exact rationale of them had been lost, and they had both come to be looked upon, rather vaguely, as weather-charms.