Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/110

88 arrives at the stackyard gate, the driver leaves it standing there while he carries his whip to the mistress of the house, who must either drive in the load herself or give the man a glass of whisky to do it for her.

The mell-supper takes its name from the Norse “mele,” corn. In Icelandic, “melr” is the Psamma-arenario, the wild corn of the sand-flats: melr also signifies sandy land. Both are derived from the same root, which means to grind to dust. It has come to be applied to corn because it can be made into meal—to sand, because it is pounded stone. As kept up till lately in my own county, the mell-supper is closely akin to the Northumbrian kern-feast. I am not too old to have taken part in more than one of them, and most thoroughly did I enjoy them. My recollection of a mell-doll is of a corn-sheaf stuck with flowers, and wrapped in such of the reapers’ garments as could be spared. This, too, was carried to the scene of the harvest-supper amid music and dancing, and then master and servants sat down together to feast, on terms of perfect equality.

This feature of harvest festivities is common to all the northern districts, and springs from a grateful sense of the reapers’ services at a peculiarly anxious time. As far south as Hertfordshire some of these observances have held their ground, and the last cart of wheat leaves the field decorated with oak boughs; but one part of the entertainment I connect especially with my own county. I well remember, not far from its cathedral town, helping to dress some young men who were to play the part of “guisers,” and force their entrance into a mell-supper. Disguised they most effectually were—covered with masks, or blackened with burned cork past all recognition, and their dress the gayest motley imaginable. In apprehension of such invaders, the doors and windows of the barn or dancing-room were barricaded, and the whole building placed in a state of defence; but, whether through treachery within-doors or their own unassisted valour, the guisers did at last effect an entrance and claimed the privilege of conquerors.

Such scenes I often witnessed in my young days, and such I believe still to be enacted in many north-country farmhouses;