Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/324

 294 So2ili7io; Clc7ncntino\ and Catterning.

meet with the dole again, and even with the familiar refrain : —

" Cattern and Clemen' be here, here, here ! Give us your apples and give us your beer ! " '"'

The cult of St. Clement in the industrial district of Soutii Staffordshire needs no further explanation. It is more difficult to account for that of St. Katharine of Alexandria. She was unknown in England before the twelfth century, when her legend seems to have been imported by the Crusaders. She was one of the chief of the virgin saints, in fact, only second in honour to St. Mary herself. The vision in which, according to her legend, she saw herself united to a Heavenly Bridegroom, caused her to be re- garded as a kind of personification of the Church, and, together with her martyrdom by being torn to pieces by armed wheels revolving different ways, led also to her becoming a sort of "sex-patron" of unmarried women {spinsters). Dorsetshire girls are reported still to visit an ancient chapel of St. Katharine to pray for husbands, and St. Katharine's Day was kept as a festival by Buckingham- shire lacemakers within living memory. In the days of the old Poor Law the tallest girl in the Peterborough work- house was chosen queen on St. Katharine's Day, and the whole party, gaily dressed, were taken round the town, singing a song with the burden, " A-spinning we will go !" And the ropemakers of Chatham and Rochester kept the day by carrying a girl decked as " Queen " Katharine round the town (Dyer's British Popular Customs, s.v.).

I can only suggest that it was the employment of women in the nail and chain-making trades on the northern borders of Worcestershire (which is even yet not entirely discon- tinued) that led to the Catterning form of the doles. But as these trades are carried on in the extreme south of elementing Staffordshire (only in the extreme south) as

"' Folk- Lore Joiiinaly vol. ii., p. 321.