Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/317

 Souling^ C/euientmg, and Cat te ruing. 287

under Elizabeth. The Hallow E'en games and rites of divination with which Burns has made us familiar are still carried on in Scotland, and Irish boys still loot their neigh- bours' cabbage-gardens, making use of the lawless liberty so often permitted on the day or hour that marks the passage from one year to another, or from the old regime to the new. The position of Hallowmas as originally a pre-Christian New- Year festival, at once religious, social, and economic, may, I think, be taken to be established.

In the district shown on the map the solstitial quarters of the Julian and Gregorian Calendar have long superseded the ancient seasonal half-years as the dates for entering on or terminating service or tenancy. These latter still regu- late the lighting of fires and the pasturage of cattle, but the only surviving rite observed at Hallowmas is that which we are now to discuss.

On either the 1st or 2nd of November — All Saints' and All Souls' Days — in Cheshire, North Shropshire, and North Staffordshire, children go from house to house singing, or rather droning out, a rhyming ditty, and begging for cakes, ale, and apples : —

" Soul, soul, for a soul cake ! Pray, good missis, a soul cake ! "

" Peter stands at yonder gate Waiting for a soul cake ! "

Aubrey in 1686 speaks of seeing "the board" piled with flat round cakes — like the illustrations of the table of the shewbread in the old Bibles — which in his time Shropshire housewives were wont to set ready for all comers. Blount's Glossograpliia (1674) mentions the custom of doling sotil- mass-cakes as extending from Lancashire to Herefordshire. This would include the area shown on the map, outside ■which I have not met with it,- except in isolated instances

- Evidence lately to hand shows that it extended into the Welsh districts adjoining Oswestry.