Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/444

420 or parish, as well as for individual farmers' families, similar divinations were resorted to, and sometimes a burning faggot was carried round the fields. In Ireland, owing perhaps to climatic causes, in place of bonfires, candles are distributed and burnt, and the boys think themselves privileged to loot their neighbours' cabbage-gardens. In the Isle of Man, Hallowmas is observed by Old Style, and the bonfires there therefore coincide with Martinmas.

To turn to other details of the Hallowmas festival:—Burns's "Hallow E'en," with its long list of love-divinations practised that night in Ayrshire, is familiar to us all. Even recently "bobbing for apples" was a favourite sport of the season in Wales, and Pennant mentions the distribution of "soul-cakes" to the poor. Aubrey tells of the dole of "soulcakes" on the English side of the Marches, and Tusser speaks of the provision of seed-cakes for the ploughmen's Hallowmas supper. Now several of these customs,—divinations, and begging for apples, cakes, and ale for the festival,—still linger in England, but divorced from the firecustoms. It would be strange if the latter had never existed. And, in fact, a few cases of them have been recorded. Sir William Dugdale noted in 1658 that "anciently" the master of the family used to carry a bundle of lighted straw about his corn on All-hallow Even, and a correspondent of the Gentleman's Magazine, 1788, noted "a custom observed in some parts of the kingdom among the Papists" of carrying blazing straw called a Tinley round their grounds on the Eve of All Souls. In the same periodical, in November, 1784, it is stated that "at the village of Findern in Derbyshire the boys and girls