British Popular Customs, Present and Past / Illustrating the Social and Domestic Manners of the People. Arranged According to the Calendar of the Year.

Jan. 7. ] ST. DISTAFF'S DAY. ROCK DAY.

Jan. 7.]

ST. DISTAFF’S DAY.—ROCK DAY.

The day after Twelfth Day was called Rock Day[8] and St. Distaff’s Day, because on that day women resumed their spinning, which had been interrupted by the sports of Christmas; for our ancestors, it seems, returned to their work in a very leisurely manner. From Herrick’s Hesperides (p. 374) we learn that the men, in boisterous merriment, burned the women’s flax, and that they in retaliation dashed pails of water upon the men:

“Partly work, and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaff’s Day:
From the plough soone free your teame,
Then home and fother them;
If the maides a spinning goe,
Burn the flax and fire the tow.

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Bring in pails of water, then
Let the maides bewash the men;
Give St. Distaff all the night,
Then bid Christmas sport good night;
Then next morning, every one
To his own vocation.”

Med. Ævi Kalend. vol. i. p. 138.

[8] See ‘Things not generally known,’ by John Timbs, 1859, pp. 1-6.

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