Folklore of Sussex

by Jacqueline Simpson

  But before the actual feast came the ceremonial of carrying in the last load, which has been described by several Sussex writers; it is often referred to as the ‘Hollerin’ Pot’, in allusion to the cheering or ‘hollering’ of the workers, and the pot of ale with which they were rewarded. A simple form of the ceremony, as performed at Nuthurst in 1812 and 1813, is described by an eyewitness, H.P. Clark:

  When the last load of corn was to be brought to the stack, the bells were put on the horses, and when the last sheaf had been pitched, out came the bottle and glass, and each drank towards the health of the ‘Maister’ and ‘Dame’.

  A hundred years later the men of Challoners Farm, Rottingdean, were bringing in the harvest in much the same way, with a triumphant procession through the village, and cheers for the farmer and his family, as described by Bob Copper:

  On the last day of harvest, when all the barns were full and the rest of the corn was safely stacked, they used to celebrate by having the ‘Hollerin’ Pot’ or ‘Last Load’. The very last waggon would carry only a token load of just two layers of sheaves on the floor, and it would be decorated with flags and bunting slung between the corner poles. Jim [the author’s father] used to sit up ‘forard’, as grand-dad had done in the old days when he had been bailiff, and the waggon would be drawn by a team harnessed up in tandem fashion, with the best horse from each of the four gangs, with each carter leading his own horse, and a boy riding on each of the three trace horses. All the rest of the company, sometimes as many as forty or more, would clamber into the waggon, ready to make the last triumphant and ceremonial journey down to the village, with the remainder of the waggons, carts and horses following on behind.

  When they reached the crossroads at the lower end of the High Street, they would turn down towards the sea, right on to the cliff edge, and pull up in front of the old White Horse. Jim would holler:

  ‘We’ve ploughed, we’ve sowed,

  We’ve ripped, we’ve mowed,

  We’ve carr’d our last load,

  And aren’t overthrowed.

  Hip, hip, hip —’

  and then a great Sussex cheer from fifty thirsty throats would rattle round the valley, proclaiming the completion of a job well and truly done. The landlord would come out with members of his staff, carrying enough beer to go all round and lubricate the cheering. His health would be drunk, and various toasts would follow, such as ‘God speed the plough’ and ‘may the ploughshare never rust’, and almost invariably someone would break into song with ‘The Brisk and Bonny Lad’, or another favourite that made reference to the harvest.

  When the villagers in the street heard the singing, they knew at once what it signified, and would stand at their open doors and await the procession, falling in behind as it passed and swelling the cheering, which grew progressively louder the further up the village street they went. Halts were called outside each of the public houses, the Royal Oak, the Black Horse and the Plough, where the rhyme and the mighty cheering brought out the landlords with the same show of hospitality with which they had been met at their first call.

  After perambulating the village round by the Pond and into the High Street again, they would finish up in the yard at Challoners, where the farmer lived. He would come out to greet them with his wife and daughters, and everyone would give them ‘a good old holler’. Then, after the horses had been stabled, the whole company would adjourn to Challoners Court Lodge, where there was an eighteen-gallon barrel of beer stogelled up for the men, and crates of lemonade and ginger-beer for the boys. Jim would tap the barrel, clear the tap, and taste the first pot out, and if it met with his approval, which can be taken for granted, he would raise the pot aloft and cry, ‘Cocks and hens upon the midden, and by cripes she’s a good ’un!’ Then the drinks went round and the harvest would be rounded off with robust celebrations which would not end until the very last tawny drop had dribbled from the tap of that rotund eighteen-gallon cask or ‘kilderkin’.

  On most farms, the owner would offer a festive supper to his men, often in the gaily decorated barn, within a day or two of the end of the harvest. The meal sometimes included such traditional fare as pumpkin pie and the large apple turnovers called ‘brown georges’. According to Miss Candlin, seedcake was often served, and had indeed been readily available throughout the harvest season. This was because caraway seeds were believed to give strength very necessary to every worker at this time; they were also thought to provide protection against stealing, so that perhaps the eating of seedcake baked by the farmer’s wife was a way of binding the loyalty of the farm workers to their master.

  Whatever was served at the supper, it invariably culminated in toasts to the farmer and his wife, whether spoken or sung. One popular one noted down by H.P. Clark as having been used at Nuthurst in 1812 and 1813, and frequently quoted by later writers too, ran:

  Here’s a health unto our Maister,

  The founder of this feast;

  I wish him well with all my heart,

  His soul in Heaven may rest,

  And all his works may prosper

  That e’er he takes in hand,

  For we are all his servants,

  And all at his command.

  So drink, my boys, come drink,

  And see you do not spill,

  For if you do you shall drink two,

  It is our Maister’s will.

  The toast to the farmer’s wife, according to Clark, ran:

  Now we’ve drunk our Maister’s health,

  We will drink our Dame’s;

  We’ll drink and be merry, boys,

  In drinking of the same.

  For him we have drunk one glass,

  For her we will drink two,

  We’ll drink and be merry, boys,

  Before we all do go.

  Soon after these toasts, the farmer and his family would withdraw, and the men would settle down to the really merry part of the evening – drinking, singing favourite songs, and keeping up traditional customs. The most popular of these, not only at Harvest Suppers but at sheep- shearing suppers and indeed every type of rural festivity, was ‘Turn the Cup Over’. This has been described time and again by Sussex writers from the early nineteenth century onwards, and has remained a favourite almost to our own days.

  It was supervised by a chairman, who had before him a large pail of beer, and was armed with a tall tumbler made of horn. The competitors would present themselves in turn, holding an inverted bowl or, in times when very stiff and hard felt hats were common, a hat held crown upwards by its brim. The chairman filled the horn cup and handed it to the competitor, who received it on the bowl or the crown of the hat, without touching it himself; he then lifted the cup to his lips by raising the hat, and began to drink. As he did so, the onlookers, who up to now had remained solemnly silent, began to sing:

  I’ve bin to Plymouth and I’ve bin to Dover,

  I have bin rambling, boys, all the world over,

  Over and over and over and over,

  Drink up your liquor and turn your cup over,

  Over and over and over and over.

  The liquor’s drink’d up and the cup is turned over.

  The competitor had to time his drinking in such a way as to finish the beer just on the end of the fourth line; on the fifth line he had to jerk the empty cup into the air, still holding the hat only, then briskly reverse the hat and catch the cup in it as it fell. If he failed, the singers changed the last line to ‘The liquor’s drink’d up, but the cup ain’t turned over.’ The competitor then had to try again; naturally, the more often he tried, the less likely he was to succeed, but he had to keep it up, to the amusement of the company, till the chairman had mercy and let him off with a forfeit, and called for the next man. The game was kept up till everyone had had a go; sometimes, apparently, the chairman was expected to have a drink himself every time someone else did, a spectacle which must have added considerably to the amusement.

  Later in September, the nutting
season began; St Matthew’s Day, the 21st, was called ‘the Devil’s Nutting Day’, and indeed the whole subject of nutting was entangled with semi-humorous beliefs about the Devil (see above, pp. 28, 62–3), which probably reflect the opportunities for flirting which an afternoon in the woods offered to young people.

  OCTOBER

  The Devil had a small share in October beliefs too, being supposed to spoil all blackberries by spitting on them on the tenth of this month, as has been described already (see p. 62); the chief features of the month, however, were St Crispin’s Day and, to a lesser extent, Hallowe’en.

  Some Sussex villages in the nineteenth century were as vigorous in their celebrations of St Crispin’s Day, 25 October, as of Guy Fawkes Day, though the custom has now died out. This was the particular feast day of cobblers, not in Sussex only but in many parts of England, for Crispin was the patron saint of the Shoemakers’ Guild; hence, it was a custom at Cuckfield for master shoemakers to give a dinner to their employees on this day. But there were many others besides the cobblers who celebrated this feast, chiefly by bonfire customs of the sort that are so appropriate to late autumn festivals. Thus, a correspondent writes in Notes and Queries in 1852:

  In the parishes of Cuckfield and Hurstpierpoint in Sussex, it is still the custom to observe St Crispin’s Day, which is kept with much rejoicing. The boys go round asking for money in the name of St Crispin, bonfires are lighted, and the day passes off in very much the same way as the Fifth of November.

  Local tradition in these two villages sometimes asserts that the feast is kept up because one of the Burrel family of Cuckfield fought at Agincourt, ‘upon St Crispin’s Day’, and this attractive and picturesque explanation was also offered at Slaugham, with reference to the local Covert family. At Slaugham in the 1890s, not only were there bonfires, but boys set tar-barrels alight, let off fireworks, and ran round the village green waving blazing brooms which they had begged for the occasion or even stolen, for it seems that on this night, as on Guy Fawkes Night, any combustibles left lying about were regarded as fair game.

  To neglect the festival of the cobblers’ saint would be punished by a form of ill-luck to fit the crime – or so we may infer from a rhyme current in Brighton in 1822, which was said to have been originally ‘composed and vociferated… at an early hour of the morning through the streets and lanes’, one Crispin’s Day some forty years before that date, by a bell-man who was also a shoemaker:

  If ever I St Crispin’s Day forget,

  O, may my feet be never free from wet,

  But every dirty street and lane pass through

  Without one bit of sole to either shoe!

  At Horsham, as we learn from Henry Burstow’s Reminiscences, the ceremonies had developed an extra and unusual feature – one of those semi-jocular, semi-cruel rituals by which rural communities punished those who offended against their code:

  St Crispin’s Day, the 25th October, used also to be well celebrated at Horsham, but it was regarded as an affair of the shoemakers, whose patron St Crispin was, and every one of them on that day could be depended upon to get thoroughly drunk in his honour. The townspeople generally were interested in the day because it was made the occasion for holding up to ridicule or execration anyone who had misconducted himself or herself, or had become particularly notorious during the year. An effigy of each offending person – frequently there were two together – was on Crispin’s Day hung on the signpost of one or other of the public houses, usually in the district where he or she resided, until the Fifth of November, when it was taken down and burnt. For several weeks before the day, people would be asking, ‘Who is to be the Crispin?’

  The first ‘Crispin’ I ever saw was hanging outside the Black Jug in North Street when I was quite a tiny little shaver [i.e. in the 1830s]; I never heard whom it represented or what the man had done to get himself disliked. Another year the effigies of a man and his wife named Fawn, who lived in the Bishopric, were hanged up on the signpost of the Green Dragon. Together they had cruelly ill-used a boy, son of the man and stepson of the woman; they had also whipped him with sting-nettles. There they hung, each with a bunch of sting-nettles in the hand, till November 5, when a hostile crowd collected, some of whom went down to Fawn’s house, assaulted him, and smashed his hand-cart. For this they were summoned and fined £2 each, an amount quickly covered by public subscriptions.

  Another year old Skiver Tulley, the bootmaker, offended his brother stitchers. I never knew what he had done, but they suspended his effigy to old Whiting’s signpost, up at the beggars’ lodging-house, on St Crispin’s Day. Skiver came to Horsham from London, and being a particularly active and knowing member of the bootmakers’ party, he was paid special honour: every evening from Crispin Day till the Fifth of November, the gentlemen of the wax [i.e. the cobblers] went up to the beerhouse, took the effigy in, and sat it down in the taproom, and then in its company all got drunk together.

  The month of October ends with Hallowe’en, which, like Midsummer Eve, is an appropriate time for divinations of various sorts, for it too is an eerie time at which the worlds of seen and unseen might be expected to mingle. However, until recent years, it did not occupy anything like the same place in Sussex lore as in that of the Northern counties; only a few simple divinatory games were played by young people, in order to learn their marriage fate. One was with nuts; two nuts were laid in a bright fire, one supposedly representing the girl, the other the boy, and the player repeated:

  If he loves me, pop and fly;

  If he hates me, lie and die.

  One would then watch the nuts, to see whether they burst noisily or merely smouldered away, the latter being a very unfavourable result. The divination by apples was equally simple; every person present fastened an apple to a string, hung up and twisted round before a hot fire. He whose apple fell first would marry first, and so in order; he whose apple fell last would never marry. It was sometimes said that all living creatures, human or animal, must turn over in their sleep at midnight, otherwise they would be dead by morning.

  In recent decades, Hallowe’en has become much better known in Southern England than of yore; fancy-dress dances and children’s parties are now common, usually with stress on the association of the date with ghosts, witches and devils, and children may be seen roaming the streets with turnip lanterns and eerie masks. They call at people’s homes (usually those of neighbours and friendly adults), asking for sweets or money, and playfully threatening to take revenge if none are given. This is called ‘trick-or-treat’, an American phrase, for the modern popularity of the custom is largely due to American influence; in origin, however, it came from Scotland, where it is called ‘guising’. Many of our old British customs involve house-to-house visits by groups in masks and costumes, as in the Plough Monday visit mentioned above (see p. 103). It is foolish and regrettable that some newspapers run campaigns against Hallowe’en guising, on the plea that ‘old folk’ may be alarmed; rather, they should help to publicise the custom until it is as familiar and well loved as Guy Fawkes’ Night.

  NOVEMBER

  This month formerly had many dates for traditional customs, though only one, Guy Fawkes’ Night, is still kept up. It opens with the feasts of All Saints and All Souls (1 and 2 November), and Lilian Candlin, writing in 1944, declared that the old custom of ‘going souling’ used to be observed in Sussex on 1 November, though without specifying precisely where or when. Souling originated in Catholic times, when beggars received alms on this date if they would pray for the dead relatives of the giver; in its later form, it involved children going from house to house and asking for ‘soul-cakes’, a particular type of spiced bun, and singing a seasonal verse. But it is essentially a custom of the North of England, and I have been unable to find any confirmation that it was carried out as far south as Sussex.

  In Chichester a different tradition was observed, and one of which the symbolism was more appropriate to the actual feast day of All Saints. The shops were full of
small iced cakes, and it was explained that the whiteness of the icing represented the white robes of the saints in Heaven, in whose honour these cakes were to be eaten.

  Better known than any of these, and far more popular, were the Guy Fawkes bonfires and firework displays. There can hardly be a town or village in the county that did not have its communal bonfire, its processions of young men with flaring torches and blazing tar-barrels, and the continuous deafening uproar of the loudest possible crackers, bangers and jumping squibs – for it was the violence rather than the beauty of the fireworks which was appreciated.

  The bonfire might be built on the market-place, the green, a crossroads, or any other more-or-less open space, with materials that had been gathered for days in advance and carefully guarded from rival gangs who might try to steal them. In some places, boys begged bits of wood from the householders –

  A stick and a stake,

  For King George’s sake!

  Those who would not give willingly might very well find their brooms missing later, or a few palings pulled from their fences. Indeed, on the night itself, one would be wise to keep everything burnable under lock and key, for as the fire sank lower, boys and men would rush about looking for something, anything, to keep it going. A night of such semilicensed hooliganism was a splendid opportunity for paying off old scores; many an unpopular man would find his gates or shop shutters missing by morning. At Rye in the 1860s and ’70s, things went further still; it was quite common for people to catch those they had a grudge against and tar and feather them, to the great amusement of the crowds.

  Relations between the authorities and the revellers were, understandably, sometimes rather strained. The history of the Lewes Bonfires, the most famous and best attended in Sussex, has been marked in the past by several attempts to suppress it, leading to violent clashes between the police and the organisers, who were known there, and elsewhere, as the ‘Bonfire Boys’. How heated tempers could become on this issue can be seen from a notice containing blood-curdling threats which was pasted up on Horsham Town Hall in 1779, clearly in response to some attempt to ban bonfires in the Square: