Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/170

 festival of the saint to whom their church was dedicated, and this was doubtless originally the case in Eccles; the festival of St Mary the Virgin being on the 22d August, and the wake on the first Sunday after the 25th August, it has been asserted that the correspondence is tolerably well preserved. There is some error here; no festival of St Mary the Virgin falling on the 22d August. The Assumption (or death) was on August 15, and the 22d would be the octave of the Assumption. But the first Sunday after the 25th of August would be nearer to the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8) than to the Assumption. A Roman Catholic custom of making a kind of oatcakes, called "soul-mass cakes," on All Souls' Day (November 2), and giving them on that day amongst the poor, no longer exists in Eccles; and the couplet which the people were expected to repeat in return for this benevolence is almost forgotten—

The following is a copy of a bill which sets forth a programme of the sports of Eccles Wake:—

".—On Monday morning, at eleven o'clock, the sports will commence with that most ancient, loyal, rational, constitutional, and lawful diversion,

BULL-BAITING,

in all its primitive excellence; for which this place has long been noted. At one o'clock there will be a foot-race; at two o'clock a bull-baiting for a horse-collar; at four, donkey-races for a pair of panniers; at five, a race for a stuff-hat; the day's sport to conclude with baiting the bull 'Fury,' for a superior dog-chain.