June 29.]

ST. PETER’S DAY.

On this day many of the rites peculiar to the festival of St. John the Baptist were repeated.

Buckinghamshire.

It appears from the Status ScholÆ Etonensis (A.D. 1560) that the Eton boys had a great bonfire annually on the east side of the church on St. Peter’s Day, as well as on that of St. John Baptist.

Kent.

The stranger who chances to attend Divine service in Farnborough parish church on the Sunday next after the feast of St. Peter, has his attention arrested by the floor of the porch being strewed with reeds. By an abstract of the will of George Dalton, Gent., of Farnborough, dated December 3rd, 1556, set forth on a mural tablet in the interior of the church, he learns that this gentleman settled a perpetual annuity of 13s. 4d. chargeable upon his lands at Tuppendence: 10s. to the preacher of a sermon on the Sunday next after the feast of St. Peter, and 3s. 4d. to the poor. Local traditional lore affirms that Mr. Dalton was saved from drowning by reeds, and that the annual sermon and odd manner of decorating the porch are commemorative of the event. This day is called by the inhabitants of the village, Reed Day or Flag Day.—Maidstone Gazette, 1859.

Northamptonshire.

Cole, in his History of Weston Favell (1829, p. 58), says:—The feast follows St. Peter’s Day. The amusements and sports of the week consist of dinner and tea parties formed from the adjacent towns, which meetings are frequently concluded with a ball, indeed a dance at the inns on the few first days of the feast is indispensable. Games at bowls and quoits are pursued with great dexterity and interest by the more athletic visitants, and in the evening the place presents a motley, fair-like appearance; but this continues for no longer period than the second or third day in the feast week.

Northumberland.

Formerly, says Brand (Pop. Antiq. 1849, vol. i. p. 337), on the evening of St. Peter’s Day, the inhabitants of this county carried firebrands about the fields of their respective parishes. They made encroachments on these occasions upon the bonfires of the neighbouring towns, of which they took away some of the ashes by force; this they called “carrying off the flower (probably the flour) of the wake.”

Yorkshire.

In an old account of Gisborough, in Cleveland, and the adjoining coast, printed in the Antiquarian Repertory (1808, vol. iii. p. 304) from an ancient MS. in the Cotton Library (marked Julius F. C., fol. 455), speaking of the fishermen, it is stated that “Upon St. Peter’s Daye they invite their friends and kinsfolk to a festyvall kept after their fashion with a free hearte, and noe shew of niggardnesse; that daye their boates are dressed curiously for the shewe, their mastes are painted, and certain rytes observed amongst them, with sprinkling their prowes with good liquor, sold with them at a groate the quarte, which custom or superstition, suckt from their auncestors, even contynueth down unto this present tyme.”

The feast day of Nun-Monkton is kept on St. Peter’s Day, and is followed by the “Little Feast Day,” and a merry time extending over a week. On the Saturday evening preceding the 29th a company of the villagers, headed by all the fiddlers and players on other instruments that could be mustered at one time went in procession across the great common to “May-pole Hill,” where there is an old sycamore (the pole being near it) for the purpose of “rising Peter,” who had been buried under the tree. This effigy of St. Peter, a rude one of wood, carved—no one professed to know when—and in these later times clothed in a ridiculous fashion, was removed in its box-coffin to the neighbourhood of the public-house, there to be exposed to view, and, with as little delay as possible, conveyed to some out-building, where it was stowed away and thought no more about till the first Saturday after the feast day (or the second if the 29th had occurred at the back end of a week), when it was taken back in procession again, and re-interred with all honour which concluding ceremony was called “Buryin’ Peter.” In this way did St. Peter preside over his own feast. On the evening of the first day of the feast, two young men went round the village with large baskets for the purpose of collecting tarts, cheese-cakes, and eggs for mulled ale—all being consumed after the two ceremonies above indicated. This last good custom is not done away with yet, suppers and, afterwards, dancing in a barn being the order while the feast lasts.—N. & Q. 4th S. vol. i. p. 361.

SCOTLAND.

In Sinclair’s Stat. Acc. of Scotland (1792, vol. iii. p. 105) we are told that at Loudoun, in Ayrshire, the custom still retains among the herds and young people to kindle fires in the high grounds, in honour of Beltan. Beltan was anciently the time of this solemnity. It is kept on St. Peter’s day.