Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/450

 426 called sambat jalána, "the burning of the Old Year." From this date the New Year begins, says Mr, Crooke.

At the meeting of the Anthropological Institute on March 5th last, Mr. N. W. Thomas showed a photograph of one of the groves in which the women in some of the tribes of Southern Nigeria throw all their old brooms and pots at the end of the Old Year. They do not burn them, but store them as it were in these groves, where they are never touched, for it would bring back all the bad luck of last year to disturb them.

To sum up:—I take it that the celebration of Guy Fawkes' Day may be considered as an ecclesiastico-political festival instituted in the early seventeenth century. It was, and is, confined to England, where it took root sporadically, more in the South than the North, more in towns than in the country, and its observance was a good deal affected by local theological leanings. It superseded the older festival of Hallowmas, taking over the bonfires, the bell-ringing, and the general liberty which characterized the older festival, and in some cases also the festival cakes. But it did not adopt the divinations, nor the charitable old custom of remembrance of the departed, which was out of harmony with the theology of the time; and Hallowmas lingered on beside it with "maimed rites" as an ecclesiastical festival and an agricultural date. The First of November and the First of May are still, in country places, the dates for beginning and leaving off fires, housing the cattle for the winter and turning them out to pasture in the summer. May and November, or Whitsuntide and Martinmas, are the times for entering into yearly or half-yearly tenancies or service contracts in many parts of England as well as in Scotland; and, most curious of all, the chief magistrate of every municipality in England still observes the ancient pre-Roman calendar, and enters on his year of office in November.

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