Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/404

 374 "He speaks puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas," says Shakspeare (Two Gent.), from which we should infer that in his time this was also a Warwickshire custom. But in some districts of South Staffordshire the eve of St. Clement's Day (November 23rd) is the date for this observance.

Are we to refer these differences also to racial causes? I doubt it. Mr. G. T. Lawley quotes extracts from diocesan and parochial registers showing that Mothering Sunday was observed down to the end of the seventeenth century by parochial processions to the mother-church of the diocese; and I am inclined to think that nearness to, or distance from, the cathedral church of Lichfield determined the observance or non-observance of the day. As to Clementing versus Souling, I believe we shall eventually find that the area of dementing coincides with the ancient area of the South Staffordshire iron trade, St. Clement being the blacksmiths' patron. His day was at any rate honoured in the county in very early times. In the Clog Almanacks preserved in the William Salt Library at Stafford, it is marked with a pot, evidently in allusion to the cakes and ale of the season. At Walsall, one of the principal towns in the Black Country, the municipal accounts were anciently made up on St. Clement's Day; and down to the year 1860 apples and nuts were provided on that day by the corporation, to be scrambled for by the population from the windows of the Town Hall. As much as "ten pots" of apples (that is, more than eight hundredweight) was consumed in this way. This is not, I believe, a solitary instance of the local use of St. Clement's Day as a settling day; and if an annual November settlement may be taken as an indication of race in the Potteries, why not, it may be asked, in the Black Country also? But I have not in this case met with any corroborative evidence, however slight; and if a November settlement, taken alone, is to