Just as dissatisfaction with the laws of debt fostered this remarkable pseudo-legal procedure, so the difficulty of obtaining divorce until the twentieth century gave rise to the formal ‘selling’ of wives, well-known to readers of Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge. For the rich, of course, divorce had long been available; but for the working classes the slow, expensive legalities were a daunting obstacle. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, many of them firmly believed that a woman was her husband’s legal property, and that he could get rid of her by selling her, provided this was publicly done and certain formalities were observed; usually she would be handed over to her new owner with a halter round her neck, always before witnesses, and sometimes with a ‘legal’ document to confirm the transaction.
That invaluable repository of scandal, the Sussex Weekly Advertiser, describes several cases: at Ninfield in November 1790 a man sold his wife one evening for half a pint of gin, duly handed her over next morning in a halter, but later changed his mind and bought her back ‘at an advanced price’; at Lewes in July 1797 a blacksmith sold his wife to one of his journeymen ‘agreeably to an engagement drawn up by an attorney for that purpose’; while at Brighton in February 1799 a man named Staines ‘sold his wife by private contract, for 5s and eight pots of beer, to one James Marten of the same place’, with two married couples witnessing ‘the articles of separation and sale’.
The custom persisted into the nineteenth century. Harry Burstow mentions three cases in his Reminiscences of Horsham:
I have been told of a woman named Smart who, about 1820, was sold at Horsham for 3s and 6d. She was bought by a man named Steere, and lived with him at Billingshurst. She had two children by each of these husbands. Steere afterwards discovered that Smart had parted with her because she had qualities which he could endure no longer, and Steere, discovering the same qualities himself, sold her to a man named Greenfield, who endured, or never discovered, or differently valued the said qualities till he died.
Again, at the November Fair, 1825, a journeyman blacksmith, whose name I never learned, with the greatest effrontery exhibited for sale his wife, with a halter round her neck. She was a good-looking woman with three children, and was actually sold for £2 5s, the purchaser agreeing to take one of the children. This ‘deal’ gave offence to some who were present, and they reported the case to the magistrate, but the contracting parties, presumably satisfied, quickly disappeared, and I never heard any more about them.
The last case happened about 1844, when Ann Holland, known as ‘pin-toe Nanny’ or ‘Nanny pin-toe’, was sold for £1 10s. Nanny was led into the market place with a halter round her neck. Many people hissed and booed, but the majority took the matter good-humouredly. She was ‘knocked down’ to a man named Johnson, at Shipley, who sold his watch to buy her for the above sum. This bargain was celebrated on the spot by the consumption of a lot of beer by Nanny, her new husband, and friends. She lived with Johnson for one year, during which she had one child, then ran away – finally marrying a man named Jim Smith, with whom she apparently lived happy for many years.
Nanny may have been the last woman sold at Horsham, but an editorial note in the Sussex County Magazine for 1926 asserts that the practice survived elsewhere to the very end of the nineteenth century:
As late as 1898 the old belief that it was quite legal for a man to sell his wife had not quite died out, for the newspapers of that day reported that at the end of the harvest at Yapton, near Littlehampton, a man ‘sold his wife to a stranger for 3s’.
The darker aspects of life, sickness and the approach of death, naturally figure largely in any account of everyday superstitions. Magical ‘cures’ for illness have been discussed already, but there remains the extensive lore of death omens, once commonly observed, and very likely still not forgotten entirely. Some are drawn from funerals and other circumstances surrounding a death, and were held to mean that a second death would follow shortly: a corpse that fails to stiffen normally, a heavy note in the passing bell, a rattling church door, an unexpected encounter with a funeral procession – all these forebode death. Moreover, ‘deaths go in threes’. Or the link with death may be symbolical, as with dull fires which will not burn up, coffin-shaped creases in sheets or dreams of fallen trees.
Other omens were drawn from animal behaviour and cries: persistently howling dogs, croaking ravens or carrion-crows, the screech-owl’s shriek, the knocking of the death-watch beetle, bees swarming on a dead branch. Birds were particularly feared; even in the 1930s a bird flying into a room might still be thought a death omen, or if (as happened at Amberley at this period) unusual numbers of robins were seen around a cottage, the phenomenon was later interpreted as having foretold the deaths of the owner and his wife. A bird and a specified person may be linked; the death of a Bishop of Chichester is always foretold, they say, by the arrival of a heron which perches on the cathedral spire.
Flowers might be ill-omened too. It would be ‘bringing death into the house’ to bring in hawthorn blossoms, white lilac, or the flower of the broom, at any rate in May. There used also to be a fear of snowdrops and primroses if it was only a single blossom, not a whole bunch, that was picked. Both were probably associated with death because they were formerly often strewn on coffins and planted in graveyards; also, as one woman told Mrs Latham, a snowdrop ‘looks like a corpse in its shroud, and grows so near the ground’.
Mrs Latham also came upon a widespread belief in the appearance of ‘corpse-lights’, small faint lights flitting near the houses of people fated soon to die; in her view, they were simply glow-worms. One of her informants believed that deaths were heralded by the sight of some mysterious animal of supernatural whiteness; her own argument that the creature was merely a white cat did not at all convince the speaker.
When a sick man was at the point of death, certain rituals could ease his passing. Doors and windows should be opened, to let the soul leave freely; if he still lingered, some would open drawers and cupboards too. It was often held that if there were game-birds’ or pigeons’ feathers in the pillows or bed, the dying man would remain in agony. A nurse once told Mrs Latham how she was alone in a house with an old man who was ‘dying hard’; he was too heavy for her to lift him and pull the feather bed from under him, so she tied a rope round his waist and hauled him bodily onto the floor, where ‘he went off in a minute quite comfortable, just like a lamb’.
The funeral customs of Sussex present few unusual features. There are some slight traces of an old belief that to put salt on coffins afforded them protection against evil forces; one writer mentions an old woman’s recollection that a High Church priest, some time in the late nineteenth century, offended people in her village by forbidding them to sprinkle coffins with salt ‘to stop the Devil flying off with the body’. More frequently mentioned is a charming custom at the burial of shepherds; a lock of wool was laid in their hands in the coffin, so that at the Last Day they could prove what their work had been, and so be forgiven for the many times they had had to miss Sunday church. The custom was sometimes kept up in this century, for instance at Alfriston and Falmer in the 1930s; in the latter village, a shepherd was buried with crook, shears and sheep-bell at his side.
Alfriston also once had a picturesque way of honouring any woman who died unmarried; a white wreath, called the Virgin Garland, would be laid on her coffin during the service, and then hung in the church as her memorial. It is not clear how long ago this was done; Lower speaks of it as an eighteenth-century custom, abandoned when he writes (1861), but Augustus Hare, writing in 1896, says that many Virgin Garlands were still to be seen ‘only a few years’ before that date.
The custom of ‘telling the bees’ is well attested in Sussex. Bees, it was said, must always be treated as members of the family and kept informed of important news, particularly deaths and births. Someone ought to go out to the hives, tap each gently with the front-door key, and tell the news; some say one ought also to put black crap
e on them after a death, and white ribbon for a joyful event. If the bees were not told of a death, another death would soon follow in the household; while if they were not told of a birth, the child might die, or might grow up unable to digest honey. Other people said it was the bees themselves which might pine and die after such neglect, as they also might if one quarrelled about them or even spoke roughly in their presence, for ‘they can’t bear angry voices’. Others said they would never thrive if they knew they had been bought, and therefore it would be better to exchange them for a bushel of wheat. If money did change hands it must be paid over out of sight of the hives; such money ought also to be a gold coin.
Related ideas are by no means forgotten even now. A man living at East Dean came upon the belief in the 1950s when his father died, for a neighbour then asked him if his father’s bees had been told of the death. He said no. ‘Oh,’ said the neighbour, ‘I was going to offer to buy them, but I shan’t now, as they won’t be no good.’ And in fact, all the bees did die.
It is just as important that bees should be told if they change hands. During the Second World War, a couple living at High Hurstwood decided to keep bees. Not knowing much about them, they asked advice from an experienced man in the village, who came and told them the best place in which to stand the hives; having placed them, he stood back and addressed the bees: ‘Now you’ve got a new master and mistress, and they are good folk, so see you work hard for them.’ And turning to the owners, he added, ‘They’ll be all right now.’
Untoward behaviour by the bees might be put down to neglect of this ritual. At Twineham in 1952, a woman who had just moved into a farm was plagued by the incessant swarming of her bees, bought from the previous farmer. She asked one of the men about it, and he asked whether the bees had been told that they had a new master and mistress. When she in surprise said no, he said ‘I’ll do it’. She watched him as he walked up and down in front of the hives talking to them, and when he had finished, the bees settled down.
Beekeeping is less common nowadays, and so no doubt these curious customs, the last survival of an ancient reverence for bees as intelligent and even holy creatures (p. 102 below), will soon be quite forgotten. But it is pleasant to think that when bees were still a common feature of country orchards and gardens they were treated as honorary members of the family, taking their place in the human life-cycle from the cradle to the grave.
10
The Turning Year
JANUARY
‘Well begun is half done’, they say, so it is not surprising that there should be traditional rites to bring good luck to the beginnings of periods of time. One which was common in many parts of Sussex in the 1930s, and is still extant, concerns the first day of each month: if the first word you speak on waking up is ‘Rabbits!’, you will get a present before the month is out, while if you can add ‘white ones with pink eyes’ before anyone else has spoken to you, the present will be even better. Others say you should cry ‘Rabbits!’ three times, for good luck all through the month; and others too that, in addition, your last word the previous night should have been ‘Hares!’ Some families played a game of forfeits; if the children could say ‘Hares and Rabbits!’ to their parents before the latter said it to them, they claimed sixpence.
For similar reasons, the first glimpse of the new moon in January was once thought significant, either for good or ill; it must of course be greeted with the honours due to every new moon, such as bowing, curtseying, and turning one’s money, and should never be first seen through glass, but in addition it could be used for divination. Writing in 1878, Mrs Latham records:
Should a girl wish to know what will be the personal appearance of her future husband, she must sit across a gate or stile and look steadfastly at the first new moon that rises after New Year’s Day. She must go alone, and must not have confided her intention to anyone, and when the moon appears, it is thus apostrophised:
All hail to thee, Moon, all hail to thee!
I pray thee, good Moon, reveal to me
This night who my husband must be.
I know of no recent instance of this charm being tried, but I do hear that the new January moon is still watched by our Sussex maidens.
Rather less poetic is the belief recorded by Parish in 1875 that in January it is lucky to bring mud into the house (presumably on one’s shoes), and that mud is called ‘January butter’. Judging by parallels concerning sand or dust elsewhere in England, the underlying idea would be that to bring something into the house, especially on New Year’s Day, means bringing luck and wealth into the house all the year; sweeping or throwing things out, in contrast, would be unlucky.
A few special customs formerly marked New Year’s Day itself. At Hastings in the 1870s apples, nuts, oranges and coins were thrown from windows for fishermen and boys to scramble for them. At the Red Lion Inn at Old Shoreham it was customary, throughout most of the nineteenth century, that a bushel measure should be filled with ale and decorated, and served free to all comers, at the brewers’ expense. The Sussex Daily News of 5 January 1883 describes how it was done that year: the measure was decorated with green paper and flowers, and so full of ale that the head of froth loomed up among the greenery like a huge cauliflower; the ale was ladled out into pint glasses by a ‘baler’, and a chairman presided over the proceedings. The custom was clearly a form of wassailing, displaced from its more usual date of New Year’s Eve or Christmas Eve (see below, pp. 151, 154), since wassail bowls were often adorned with ribbons or greenery, and the ale ceremonially served out.
‘Wassailing’ has another meaning too; it is one of the names for the ritual of singing to apple trees, beating them, and pouring ale on their roots, formerly very popular as a way of ensuring a good crop in the following season. In Sussex, this ritual was also called ‘howling’, for reasons which will soon become clear. The most popular date for it was 5 January, Twelfth Night, but it could also be done on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, or Twelfth Day – indeed, any day between Christmas Eve and Old Twelfth Day (18 January) was a possibility.
The earliest reference to this ritual in Sussex is in 1656, when Giles More, Rector of Horsted Keynes, wrote in his diary on 5 January, ‘Gave to the howling boys sixpence’. The custom was kept up in many villages during the nineteenth century, one of the best examples of its continued popularity being at Duncton. In 1906 a correspondent in the West Sussex Gazette wrote of Duncton:
The chief wassailer there is Mr Richard Knight, who has discharged the duties for fifty-four years. Dressed in what some would describe as a grotesque costume, principally composed of patches rivalling the rainbow in multitudinous tints, the whole surmounted by an indescribable hat, bearing, displayed in front, a huge rosy-cheeked apple, he heads a procession of villagers carrying horns and such lowly musical types as bits of gas piping. Surrounding the largest apple tree, they chant:
Here stands a jolly good old apple tree.
Stand fast, root; bear well, top.
Every little bough,
Bear an apple now;
Every little twig,
Bear an apple big;
Hats full, caps full,
Three-quarter-sacks full!
Whoop, whoop, holloa!
Blow, blow the horns!
The custom was carried on until the 1920s by Richard Knight’s son, ‘Spratty’ Knight, who in his turn acted as ‘Captain of the Wassailers’. His daughter described to Miss L.N. Candlin how the gang used to assemble at the inn and then go to each farm in turn, asking ‘Do you want your trees wassailed?’
The gang, followed by numerous small children, then went to the orchard. Spratty blew through a cow’s horn, which made a terrible sound. This was to frighten away any evil spirits that might be lurking around. Next, one of the trees, generally the finest one, would be hit with sticks and sprinkled with ale. This was a gift to the gods who looked after the fruit trees. Lastly all the company joined in the wassailing song, the words of which were as follows:
Stand fast, root, bear well, top,
Pray, good God, send us a howling crop.
Every twig, apples big; every bough, apples now;
Hats full, caps full, five bushel sacks full,
And a little heap under the stairs.
Holloa, boys, holloa, and blow the horn!
And holloa they all did, to the accompaniment of the horn. This completed the wassailing, and everyone trooped out of the orchard up to the farm-house door, where they were greeted by the farmer’s wife with drinks and goodies. Sometimes money was given instead of good cheer… The next house visited was Lavington House, and then on around the village, visiting every house that had an orchard, till they arrived at the Cricketers’ Inn, which was their last port of call.
Publication of this description in the West Sussex Gazette on 29 December 1966 stimulated further correspondence from people who remembered the Duncton wassailers, notably from Mr E.F. Turner, who grew up on one of the farms regularly visited, and who gave a vivid child’s eye view of the proceedings. He remembered the wassailers approaching the farm in two different groups, chanting the lines of their song antiphonally, and sometimes specifying the species of the tree they were honouring (‘Here stands a good Green Pippin tree’, for instance). He remembered how ‘they would come into the big kitchen… to sing songs and drink cider. One would be carrying the enormous cow-horn, and the Captain would have on a robe made of something like flowered cretonne, and a straw hat with big apples all round the wide brim, and a bow of wide ribbon.’ The sing-song in the kitchen was a lengthy affair – ‘people said they could remember enough songs to last for two hours or so’ – and when at last the wassailers took themselves off to their next stopping-place, the farm children stood outside to hear their voices fading into the distance.
Folklore of Sussex Page 12