"Apple-tree, apple-tree, Apple-tree, apple-tree, Bear apples for me."] This seems to have been done in some places upon Christmas Eve; for in Herrick's Hesperides, p. 311, I find the following among the Christmas Eve ceremonies : "Wassaile the trees, that they may heare The same is done in Herefordshire, under the name of Wassailing, as follows: At the approach of the evening on the vigil of the Twelfth Day, the farmers, with their friends and servants, meet together, and about six o'clock walk out to a field where wheat is growing. In the highest part of the ground, twelve small fires, and one large one, are lighted up. The attendants, headed by the master of the family, pledge the company in old cider, which circulates freely on these occasions. A circle is formed round the large fire, when a general shout and hallooing takes place, which you hear answered from all the adjacent villages and fields. Sometimes fifty or sixty of these fires may be all seen at once. This being finished, the company return home, where the good housewife and her maids are preparing a good supper. A large cake is always provided, with a hole in the middle. After supper, the company all attend the bailiff (or head of the oxen) to the wain-house, where the following particulars are observed: The master, at the head of his friends, fills the cup (generally of strong ale), and stands opposite the first or finest of the oxen. He then pledges him in a curious toast the company follow his example, with all the other oxen, and addressing each by his name. This being finished, the large cake is produced, and, with much ceremony, put on the horn of the first ox, through the hole above-mentioned. The ox is then tickled, to make him toss his head: if he throw the cake behind, then it is the mistress's perquisite; if before (in what is termed the boosy), the bailiff himself claims the prize. The company then return to the house, the doors of which they find locked, nor will they be opened till some joyous songs are sung. On their gaining admittance, a scene of mirth and jollity ensues, which lasts the greatest part of the night.-Gent. Mag. Feb. 1791. Pennant, in his Tour in Scotland, giving an account of this custom, says, "that after they have drank a chearful glass to their master's health, success to the future harvest, &c., then returning home, they feast on cakes made of carraways, &c., soaked in cyder, which they claim as a reward for their past labours in sowing the grain. This," he observes, seems to resemble a custom of the ancient Danes, who, in their addresses to their rural deities, emptied on every invocation a cup in honour of them." 66 In the Gentleman's Magazine for February, 1784, p. 98, Mr. Beckwith tells us that "near Leeds, in Yorkshire, when he was a boy, it was customary for many families, on the Twelfth Eve of Christmas, to invite their relations, friends, and neighbours to their houses, to play at cards, and to partake of a supper, of which minced pies were an indispensable ingredient: and after supper was brought in, the Wassail Cup or Wassail Bowl, of which every one partook, by taking with a spoon, out of the ale, a roasted apple, and eating it, and then drinking the healths of the company out of the bowl, wishing them a merry Christmas and a happy new year. (The festival of Christmas used in this part of the country to hold for twenty days, and some persons extended it to Candlemas.) The ingredients put into the bowl, viz., ale, sugar, nutmeg, and roasted apples, were usually called Lambs' Wool, and the night on which it used to be drunk (generally on the Twelfth Eve) was commonly called Wassail Eve." This custom is now disused. A Nottinghamshire correspondent (ibid.) says, "that when he was a schoolboy, the practice on Christmas Eve was to roast apples on a string till they dropt into a large bowl of spiced ale, which is the whole composition of Lambs' Wool." It is probable that from the softness of this popular beverage it has gotten the above name. See Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, "Sometimes lurk I in a gossip's bowl, In very likeness of a roasted crab; In Vox Graculi, 4to. 1623, p. 52, speaking of the sixth of January, the writer tells us, "This day, about the houres of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10; yea, in some places till midnight well nigh, will be such a massacre of spice-bread, that, ere the next day at noone, a two-penny browne loafe will set twenty poore folkes teeth on edge. Which hungry humour will hold so violent, that a number of good fellowes will not refuse to give a statute marchant of all the lands and goods they enjoy, for halfe-a-crowne's worth of two-penny pasties. On this night much masking in the Strand, Cheapside, Holburne, or Fleet-street." Waldron, in his Description of the Isle of Man (Works, p. 155), says, "There is not a barn unoccupied the whole twelve days, every parish hiring fiddlers at the public charge. On Twelfth Day the fiddler lays his head in some one of the wenches' laps, and a third person asks who such a maid or such a maid shall marry, naming the girls then present one after another; to which he answers according to his own whim, or agreeable to the intimacies he has taken notice of during this time of merriment. But whatever he says is as absolutely depended on as an oracle; and if he happen to couple two people who have an aversion to each other, tears and vexation succeed the mirth. This they call cutting off the fiddler's head; for after this he is dead for the whole year." In a curious collection, entitled Wit a sporting in a pleasant Grove of New Fancies, by H. B. 8vo. Lond. 1657, p. 80, I find the following description of the pleasantries of what is there called St. Distaff's Day, or the Morrow after Twelfth-Day. "Partly worke and partly play, You must on St. Distaff's Day: From the plough soon free your teame; If the maides a spinning goe, Give St. Distaff all the right: Then give Christmas-sport good night. To his owne vocation."i [In the parish of Pauntley, a village on the borders of the county of Gloucester, next Worcestershire, and in the neighbourhood, a custom prevails, which is intended to prevent the smut in wheat. On the eve of Twelfth-day, all the servants of every farmer assemble together in one of the fields that has been sown with wheat. At the end of twelve lands, they make twelve fires in a row with straw, around one of which, made larger than the rest, they drink a cheerful glass of cider to their master's health, and success to the future harvest; then, returning home, they feast on cakes soaked in cider, which they claim as a reward for their past labours in sowing the grain.] It may rather seem to belong to religious than popular customs to mention, on the authority of the Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1731, p. 25, that at the Chapel-Royal at St. James's, on Twelfth Day that year, "the king and the prince made the offerings at the altar of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, according to custom. At night their majesties, &c., played at hazard for the benefit of the groom-porter." Feb. 18, 1839, Edward Hawkins, Esq., of the British Museum, showed to the editor (Sir Henry Ellis) a silver token or substitute for money, marked to the amount of ten pounds, which appears to have passed among the players for the groom-porter's benefit at Basset. It is within the size of a half-crown, one inch and a half in diameter. In the centre of the obverse within an inner circle is : Legend round, L X AT. THE. GROOM. PORTERS. BASSETT. Mint-mark, a fleur-delis. On the reverse, a wreath issuing from the sides of, and surmounting, a gold coronet: the coronet being of gold let in. Legend, NOTHING. VENTURD. NOTHING. WINNS. Mint-mark, again, a fleur-de-lis. Brand Hollis had one of these pieces. They are of very rare occurrence. The groom-porter was formerly a distinct officer in the lord-steward's department of the royal household. His 1 This is also in Herrick's Hesperides, p. 374. business was to see the king's lodgings furnished with tables, chairs, stools, and firing; as also to provide cards, dice, &c., and to decide disputes arising at cards, dice, bowling, &c. From allusions in some of Ben Jonson's and of Chapman's plays, it appears that he was allowed to keep an open gambling table at Christmas; and it is mentioned as still existing in one of Lady Mary Montague's eclogues : "At the groom-porters batter'd bullies play." Thursday. Ecl. iv. Dodsley's Collect. i. 107. This abuse was removed in the reign of George III.; but Bray, in his Account of the Lord of Misrule, in Archæologia, xviii. 317, says, George I. and II. played hazard in public on certain days, attended by the groom-porter. The appellation, however, is still kept up: the names of three groom-porters occurring among the inferior servants in the present enumeration of her Majesty's household. ST. AGNES'S DAY, OR EVE. ST. AGNES was a Roman virgin and martyr, who suffered in the tenth persecution under the Emperor Dioclesian, A.D. 306. She was condemned to be debauched in the public stews before her execution, but her virginity was miraculously preserved by lightning and thunder from heaven. About eight days after her execution, her parents, going to lament and pray at her tomb, saw a vision of angels, among whom was their daughter, and a lamb standing by her as white as snow, on which account it is that in every graphic representation of her there is a lamb pictured by her side. On the eve of her day many kinds of divination were practised by virgins to discover their future husbands. [Dreams were the most ordinary media for making the desired discovery, and many allusions to the belief may be traced even in late works. The following notice of it occurs in Poor Robin's Almanack for 1734: |