Category: Lacemakers’ holidays

Saint Nicholas, patron of lacemakers

In our series on lacemakers’ holidays we have yet to fully cover the ‘Broquelet’, the ‘Feast of the Bobbin’ held in Lille on and around 9 May.  This date marks the ‘translation of Saint Nicholas’, that is the transfer of his relics from Myra in what is now Turkey to Bari in Italy, and it is known as ‘Summer Saint Nicholas’ to distinguish it from the saint’s other feastday on 6 December.  The Broquelet, which could last a week or more, was the major holiday for the city’s working women at the end of the eighteenth century, when Lille was home to 15,000 lacemakers.  Their pleasures are celebrated in a painting by François Watteau, dating from around 1800.[1]

François Louis Joseph Watteau’s ‘La Fête du Broquelet’, c. 1803. This image from Wikipedia Commons, the original in the Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse, Lille.

We’ll return to the Broquelet in a future post: today we’re just considering how Nicholas became the lacemakers’ patron saint.  Nicholas is, of course, Santa Claus, and so is a patron of children generally.  Children, and specifically the girls who attended Lille’s lace schools, were participants in the Broquelet – they can be seen in the foreground of Watteau’s painting, presenting a branch of hawthorn to their teacher.  However, in Catholic culture in general Nicholas is more associated with boys than with girls.  Across north-eastern France, and in the Low Countries, parishes organized their youth into single-sex companies dedicated to Saint Nicholas for boys, and Saint Catherine the girls.  These associations were carried over into schools in the nineteenth century, which continued to mark their respective feastdays of 6 December and 25 November.  And as we know Saint Catherine was a patron of lacemakers, and her feast was a lacemakers’ holiday in parts of the English Midlands and Antwerp province.

So how did Nicholas come to take on this role in the case of Lille’s lacemakers?  There is almost no official documentation concerning the Broquelet, and none of the chroniclers who attended the festival offer a clear answer.  By and large it was only incorporated trades – that is occupations which were represented by a guild — that held masses, paraded through the city and celebrated holidays; but lacemaking was a ‘free trade’ (as were most female-dominated occupations), and so it possessed no guild structure.  One possibility, then, is that the lacemakers simply joined in, and then took over, a feast originally celebrated by one of Lille’s male guilds.  Watteau’s painting offers some corroboration of this theory, because in front of the float carrying the lacemakers’ giant bobbin is a carriage on top of which sit two male workers – ‘filtiers’ [linen spinners] – carrying the flag of their confraternity which features Saint Nicholas performing one of his more famous miracles, the resurrection of three murdered children whose bodies had been left in a butcher’s brine tub.

However, there is another possible connection, and it relates to another of Saint Nicholas’s miracles.  According to the most widely read hagiography of the medieval period, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, as a young man (and not yet a cleric) Nicholas had a neighbour, a man of noble birth who had fallen into poverty.  This nobleman had three daughters whom he intended to prostitute in order that he might survive from the money they earned.  To avert this fate, Nicholas threw a lump of gold through the family’s window at night on three separate occasions.  Each lump was sufficient to provide one of the daughters with a dowry.

In early modern Catholic Europe, the skills of lacemaking were taught in the institutions of the ‘great confinement’ of the poor, such as orphanages and workhouses, precisely because it would provide young women with a livelihood and thus save them from becoming prostitutes.  The same logic was invoked well into the nineteenth century.  When in 1841 the Mayor of Valenciennes appealed to Maria Amalia, Queen of the French, to support the re-establishment of a lace school in his town, he claimed that the project ‘would be of the highest moral value by teaching lacemaking to young girls whose poverty, in most cases, dooms to prostitution, the first of the vices that misery brings in its train.’[2]

However, are there stronger connections between Saint Nicholas and lacemaking than a general desire to keep young women off the streets?  In Valenciennes Museum of Fine Arts (currently closed) there is a painting that originally hung in the town’s Saint Nicholas church.  It depicts Saint Nicholas in the act of throwing the gold through his neighbour’s window.  Inside we see the father and his three despairing daughters, one of whom is sitting a lace pillow.  The painting is by Henri de Vermay (active 1612-1642), the second artist of that name, and the last in dynasty of painters from the nearby city of Cambrai.  The Vermays of Cambrai were possibly descendants of the Dutch painter Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (c. 1504-1559).[3]

Henri II de Vermay (active Cambrai 1612-42), ‘The Charity of Saint Nicholas’, Musée des Beaux Arts de Valenciennes, photo © Claude Thériez. Image from POP, la plateforme ouverte du patrimoine.

This is not the only painting from the period that depicts the beneficiaries of Saint Nicholas’s charity as lacemakers.  The Amsterdam Museum of Our Lord in the Attic has another representation of the charity of Saint Nicholas by Vermay’s better-known Antwerp contemporary Cornelis de Vos (1584-1651), in which two of the daughters can be seen working at lace pillows, while the third is busy with embroidery.

Cornelis de Vos, ‘The Charity of Saint Nicholas’, Ons’ Lieve Heere op Solder Museum, Amsterdam. http://www.stnicholascenter.org/media/images/d/de-voss.jpg

Paintings are only indirect evidence, but it seems that, in the Flemish-French borderlands, an association had become established in the seventeenth century between Saint Nicholas, his patronage of marriageable women, and lacemaking as a recourse of the poor.   This was the same period in which lace schools were being established in towns like Valenciennes and, possibly, Lille.  Although the history lacemaking in Lille is very obscure, it seems plausible that this same association of ideas explains why Lille’s lacemakers took Saint Nicholas to be their patron saint.

 

[1] The painting now hangs in Lille’s Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZLwgRe1_n8

[2] Archives Départementales du Nord, M 581-13: Commerce et Industries: Spécialités, Dentelles, letter dated 14 September 1841.

[3] The only source of information on the Vermay dynasty I have been able to discover is a pamphlet by Achille Durieux, Les peintres Vermay (Cambrai: J.  Renaut, 1880).

26 July in Flanders: ‘I wish every day could be Saint Anne’s Day’

‘Saint Anne and the Virgin Mary’, copy of work by Giovanni Antonio Galli, known as ‘lo Spadarino’. Sold at Christies in 2010.

Saint Anne’s day falls on 26 July.  As we know, lace has many patron saints but, in West Flanders, Saint Anne was particularly fêted.  According to the apocryphal gospels Anne was the mother of Mary.  It was she who dedicated Mary to the service of the Temple where the future Mother of God wove the veil which, as we have seen, is a textile of some importance in the legendary history of lace.  In Catholic iconography Anne is usually depicted teaching Mary to read the scriptures, but sometimes she is shown training her daughter in needlework, weaving and embroidery; Mary was exercising these domestic skills at the very moment she was visited by the angel Gabriel, hence the basket of linen beside her in depictions of the Annunciation.  Anne was, therefore, a suitable patron for seamstresses and everyone involved in the needle trades, whose skills and heritage were passed on from mother to daughter.  Flemish lacemakers were more likely to be trained in lace schools than at home, but these too provided a female-led pedagogical environment.  In Bruges, Poperinge and Bailleul, lace schools celebrated Saint Anne’s Day.

Jan-Frans Willems (1793-1846), ‘Father of the Flemish Movement’. Unknown C19 painter. From Wikipedia Commons.

We know of this tradition indirectly, from the attempts to record lacemakers’ songs.  The first person to draw attention to the lacemakers’ musical cult of Saint Anne was the philologist Jan-Frans Willems (1793-1846), known as ‘the Father of the Flemish Movement’.[1]  Willems sought to defend the imperilled position of Dutch within the new Belgian state by demonstrating that it too was a literary language with a noble history, but he also emphasised the moral qualities of one’s ‘mother-tongue’.  Knowledge and traditions – culture in other words – were passed on from mother to her nursing child.  One of the primary vehicles for both literary and popular traditions were songs.  Songs had taken on a huge significance as expressions of national thought and feeling in the romantic period.  Willems’ final – indeed posthumous – publication was Oude Vlaemsche Liederen ten deele met de melodieën (Old Flemish Songs, some with melodies), which was completed in 1848 by his friend Ferdinand Snellaert (1809-1872).  At the very end of this volume Snellaert included two lacemakers’ songs in honour of Saint Anne.[2]

‘Het vlaamsche lied’ (Flemish song). Relief adorning Isidoor de Rudder’s monument to Jan-Frans Willems in Ghent.

 

‘t Is van dage Sint Anna-dag,
Wy kijken al near den klaren dag,
En wy kleên ons metter spoed,
Om te gaen ter kerke toe.
Als de misse wierd gedaen
Wy zijn al blijde van deure te gaen.
Josephus is gekomen al hier
Met zijnen wagen en zijn bastier:
Today is Saint Anna’s day,
We look out for sunrise,
And we dress ourselves with haste,
To go to church.
As soon as the mass is over
We are glad to get outside.
Josephus is already there
With his wagon and its cover:
De provianden,
Koeken in manden,
De provianden
Dragen wy meê.
The provisions,
Cakes in baskets,
The provisions
We’ll take with us.
Die willen met onzen wagen meêgaen
Moeten ‘t geheel jaer hen mestdag doen;
En die ‘t niet en hebben gedaen,
Moeten ‘t huis blijven en niet meêgaen.
Those that want to go in our wagon
Must have completed their daily tasks
through the whole year;
And those who haven’t,
Must stay at home and not come along.

 

Sint Anna-dag is deure,
‘k Ben mijn geldetje kwijt;
Nu zit ik hier en treure
Met kleinen appetijt.
‘K En heb geen zin van werken,
Het werken doet my pijn;
‘k Wilde dat ‘t heele dagen
Sint Anna mogte zijn.
Saint Anna’s Day is done
I’ve spent all my money;
Now I sit here and lament
With little appetite.
I’m not in the mood for work,
Work makes me miserable;
I wish that every day
Could be Saint Anna’s.
De schoolvrouw komt te vragen :
Wel duiv’l hebt gy geen zin ?
Een perkment in acht dagen
Is dat geen schoon gewin?
Mijn kussen aen de galge,
Mijn boutjes aen ‘t perlorin.
‘k Wilde dat ‘t heele dagen
Sint Anna mogte zijn.
The school mistress comes and asks:
Hell’s bells, you’re not in the mood?
A pattern in eight days
Is that not a decent wage?
My cushion to the gallows,
My bobbins to the pillory.
I wish that every day
Could be Saint Anna’s.

 

These two songs had been sent to Willems in October 1841 by Edmond de Coussemaker, a lawyer, musician and a fellow enthusiast for all things medieval, who wrote to him from the Flemish-speaking corner of France known as the Westhoek.[3]  Although then living in Douai, Coussemaker had collected the Saint-Anne songs from the lace schools of his native Bailleul (or Belle to give the town its Flemish name).  In 1852, Coussemaker was moved to start collecting songs again, prompted by the new French government’s sudden enthusiasm for folk music, and its simultaneous desire to eradicate regional languages such as Flemish, which was banned from French schools in January 1853.  Shortly afterwards Coussemaker would help found, and then lead, the Comité flamand de France (The Flemish Committee of France) whose motto was Moedertael en Vaderland (Mother-tongue and Fatherland).  Coussemaker was not a Flemish nationalist, but he wanted to celebrate the Flemish contribution to French history and culture, and to demonstrate that Flemings too had a literature and a language worth preserving.[4]  His most important contribution in this undertaking was his 1856 volume of Chants populaires des Flamands de France (Folksongs of French Flanders).  This contains a whole section dedicated to ‘Sinte-Anna-liedjes’, including both the two given above and five more, together with a short description of the festivities arranged in the lace schools that day.

Edmond de Coussemaker (1805-76), lawyer, musician, folksong collector. Engraving by Isnard Desjardins, from the British Museum.

According to Coussemaker, Saint Anne’s Day was,

for the young women who attend the lace schools, just as it was for women of every age who shared this occupation, a feast that was celebrated with every sign of joy.  It was a veritable holiday in which the popular muse takes a large part.  The evening before Saint Anne’s Day, the schools and workrooms are decorated with flowers and garlands.  Early the next morning, all the young women, dressed in their best clothes, come to wish a happy holiday to their lace mistress; then they take themselves to the church, singing all the while.  After having heard the mass in honour of their holy patron, they return to the school where a breakfast of cakes is served.  The meal over, they get ready for a trip by wagon or coach to a nearby town or village.  Sometimes the pleasure-trip goes as far as Dunkirk.  Every July one sees, in the streets of Dunkirk or at the seaside, groups of young women from Bailleul, who are recognizeable from the equal simplicity of their dress and their manners.  If the weather proves inclement, they pass the day at the school, dancing and singing.[5]

Edmond de Coussemaker, Chants populaires des Flamands de France (1856). Illustration depicting Saint Anne’s Day in the lace schools.

Some of the songs associated with this holiday directly honour Saint Anne, but most concentrate on the associated festivities.  From these songs we learn that the lacemakers got up early, drank coffee, went two by two from the laceschool to the church to offer candles to their patron.  When in the country they played ‘tir du roy’ (a verticle archery game) and danced with the villagers.  But the songs also acknowledge the fleeting nature of lacemakers’ pleasures.[6]

Jonge dochter, en wilt niet treuren,
‘t Is Sint’ Anna die komt aen;
En ‘t zal nog wel eens gebeuren,
En den dag die zal vergaen.
Laet ons dansen, laet ons springen,
Laet ons maken groot plaisier.
En dat met contentement,
Zoo een leven, zoo een eind’.
Young woman, don’t be sad,
Saint Anna’s Day is coming.
She’ll soon be here
And then the day will be gone.
Let us dance, let us jump,
Let us enjoy ourselves
As much as we can;
Such a life, such an end.
En Sint’ Anna die gaet deure,
Zy ga naer een ander land:
Eu wy zitten hier en treuren
Met ons geldjen heel van kant.
En wy zitten in de kamer
Met ons kussen op de knien.
Is dat niet een groot verdriet?
Geerne werken en doen ik niet.
Saint Anne has departed;
She’s gone to another country.
We sit here and lament
All our money is gone.
Here we sit in the workroom
With our cushions on our knees.
Isn’t it a great pity?
I don’t want to work anymore.

 

Despite Coussemaker’s reference to the ‘simplicity’ of Saint Anne’s celebrations, there is evidence that things could get out of hand.  In 1858, when Bailleul contained ten or more lace schools and almost the entire female population of the town was engaged in lacemaking, the mayor complained about disorders in the street and stipulated that from then on

dances and public merrymaking in the street cannot take place except on the days specially reserved for the celebration of this holiday, and should only include women and children, and no men.  These entertainments should not begin before 7 in the morning, nor continue after 8:30 at night.[7]

Such official restrictions may have restrained the celebrations, but a more important factor was the decline of domestic lacemaking; by the first decade of the twentieth century there was only one lace school still functioning, which had just 30 apprentices.[8]  Yet they continued to honour Saint Anne’s day.  The girls who attended the school run by Euphrasie Roelandt went to mass on that day, and then returned to the school for cakes and hot chocolate.  Then the teacher was crowned by her pupils: an enormous floral crown was slowly lowered onto her head while they sang a hymn to ‘Moeder Anna’ [a song present in Coussemaker’s collection].  The identification between the mother of the mother of God and the educator could not be more obvious.  Madame Roelandt rewarded each pupil with a five-centime piece.  In the afternoon the party walked up to a local beauty spot, the Mont Noir, to hold a picnic.[9]  (Mont Noir, or Zwarteberg, was the family demesne of the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, who has something to say about lacemakers in her memoirs.)  In previous years the girls from the lace-schools had also honoured the lace merchants on this day, by dancing round-dances outside their houses (probably in hope of a financial reward).[10]

 

The children from the Babelaarstraat lace school, Poperinge, run by Zoete Mène (Philomène) Matton (seen on the left), 1906.

Sometimes lacemakers from Bailleul and the surrounding villages met up with their fellows from Poperinge, a few miles away over the border in Belgium.  Again, our knowledge of events there largely depends on folksong collectors.  We have already consulted Albert Blyau’s collection of songs for information on Kleinsacramentsdag, the Ypres lacemakers’ holiday, but he also attended the lace school run by ‘zoete Mène’ (Philomène Delporte, b. 1845) in the Babbelaarstraat in nearby Poperinge, where they celebrated Saint Anne’s instead.[11]  Blyau’s ‘Sint-Annaliedjes’ have relatively little to say about lacemakers’ religious life, but rather concentrate on the fun they intend to have.  The repertoire contains a large number of soldiers’ songs because, for working women mired in poverty and domestic responsibilities, the soldier’s life represented an ideal of minimum labour with maximum personal autonomy.  In popular culture generally soldiers were compounded with the nobility as a leisured, feckless class, which is what lacemakers aspired to be on their holiday.  Some songs also poked fun at ‘kwezels’, a nickname for ostentatiously devout older women, precisely the kind of person who might run a lace-school.  In some ways Saint Anne’s celebrations were, like Saint Gregory’s Day in Geraardsbergen or Our-Lady-of-the-Snows in Turnhout, directed at the lace mistresses who might receive floral tributes or other acknowledgements of gratitude from their pupils, but these songs suggest an undertow of resentment.[12]

In Poperinge the festivities lasted two days: the first consisted of an outing to a nearby park but the highlight was the second day, when they went to the seaside.  The programme is laid out in one of their songs.

Courage, kinders al te saam,
En Sint-Anna die komt aan !
Wij zullen vroolijk spelen,
En wat dan!
‘t En zal ons niet vervelen :
En wat dink je daarvan ?
Come on children all together,
And Saint Anna is coming!
We will play merrily
And how!
And we won’t be bored:
And what do you think of that?
Onze sneuklaar is verkocht
En ons geld is thuis gebrocht.
Wij zullen taarten bakken,…
Van peren en van appels :…
Our snacks have been bought
And we’ve brought our money home.
We will bake tarts,
From pears and apples.
Alles is zeer wel bereid
Tegen dezen blijden tijd.
De koeken en de hespe, …
‘t Is alles van het beste : …
Everything is very well prepared
For this happy time.
The cakes and the ham,
It’s all the best quality
Eer wij van den tafel gaan,
Wij zijn van alles wel voldaan,
Van éten en van drink en,…
Van tappen en van schinken, …
Before we leave the table
We’ll be absolutely full
Of eating and drinking,
Drinks from the tap and the jug.
Maar als den eersten dag komt aan,
‘t Is om naar ‘t Koethof toe te gaan.
Wij zullen vroolijk wandelen, …
Van ‘t eene naar het ·andere: …
And when the first day comes,
It’s off we go to the Koethof [Castle Couthof, near Poperinge].
We will wander merrily,
From one thing to another.
Maar als den tweeden dag komt aan,
‘t Is om naar Duinkerk toe te gaan.
Wij zeggen ‘t zonder liegen, …
De scherrebank zal vliegen : …
But when the second day comes,
It’s off we go to Dunkirk.
We say it without lying,
The charabanc will fly.
Maar als wij in Duinkerk zijn,
Wij zullen stil. en zedig zijn;
Wij zull’n met goede manieren, …
Onze feestdag wel vieren : …
But when we get to Dunkirk,
We will be quiet and modest;
We will be well mannered
Celebrating our holiday:

Couthof Castle, near Poperinge, destination of local lacemakers on Saint Anne’s Day.

The last claim to quiet and modesty may be ironic, given the other song they sang boasted of their ability to make noise.  This song, which has been recorded by the Belgian folk groups Sidus and Kotjesvolk, is a powerful expression of local and craft pride, as lacemakers collectively took over the streets of Dunkirk for the day.  However, the boast that they made lots of money should be taken with a pinch of salt.

De kinders van de Babbelaarsstrate
Zoûn zoo geern naar Duinkerke gaan,
Om da’ n-hunder dust te laven
En naar Duinkerk toe te gaan.
Zoete merronton, merronton, merronteine !
Zoete merronton, de postiljon !
The children from Babbelaarstrate
Really want to go to Dunkirk
And there to quench their thirst
And to go to Dunkirk.
En wij zull’n de koetsen pareeren
Met de bloemptjes zoet en schoon,
En ons ook wel defendeeren,
G’lijk den keizer op zijn troon.
Zoete merronton, etc.
And we will decorate the coaches
With sweet, beautiful flowers
And we’ll stand up for ourselves,
Like the emperor on his throne.
En wij zull’n al omdermeest schreeuwen :
“Vivan van Sint-Annadag !”
En ons ook wel defendeeren :
‘t Is de spellewerkige’s feestdag !
And we will loudly cry
Long Live Saint Anna’s Day.
And we’ll stand up for ourselves:
It is the lacemakers’ holiday.
Maar als wij in Duinkerke komen,
En wij rijen al door de stad;
Iedereen zal buiten komen
En zal zeggen : “Wat is dat ?”
But as we come into Dunkirk
And we ride right through the town
Everyone will rush outside
And they’ll say: ‘What’s going on?’
“ ‘t Zijn de Poperingschenaren,
Die daar komen met geweld;
En ze werken heele jaren,
En ze winnen vele geld !”
It’s the girls from Poperinge,
And their coming out in force;
And they work the whole year,
And they earn lots of money!

 

Adeletje Deklerck making lace in the Bruges almshouse, August 1968. From Biekorf (1968)

The strongest concentration of lacemakers in Bruges lived in the parish of Saint Anne, but we have less information about Saint Anne’s Day celebrations there, suggesting that they may have been a fairly modern innovation.  Most of what we know depends on the oral history interviews undertaken in the 1960s by the folklorist Magda Cafmeyer with old lacemakers resident in the city’s almshouses.[13]  For instance Adeletje Deklerk explained that the young women in the lace school saved one or two centimes a week which they put together to pay for the wagon and cakes, but that for three weeks before they worked solidly on earning some drinking money.  As at Poperinge it was a two-day holiday.  On the second day there was a prize-giving ceremony in the school itself.  But the main event was on the first day, when the the lacemakers took a horse-drawn charabanc trip to Gistel and the shrine of Saint Godelieve (the pious wife of an abusive and, finally, murderous husband – a story familiar in many forms to lacemakers).  While on the way, they sang:

Wij zijn bijeen en we trekken naar Sint Annetje,
wij gaan op zoek al achter een ander mannetje,
wij zijn bijeen
en we zullen niet meer scheen,
wij zijn gezworen kameraden
en ze zien’ aan onze trein (bis)
dat we van Sint Anne zijn (bis)
We’re all together and we’re off to Saint Anne’s
We’re looking out for another man,
We’re all together
And we’ll never part no more,
We’re sworn comrades
And they can see from our verve
That we’re from [the parish of] Saint Anne.

The camaraderie of the lacemakers, their sense of collective identity, both local and occupational (which sometimes included, and sometimes excluded, the nuns who accompanied them on the trip) comes across strongly in these songs.

After the First World War there was a concerted attempt to revive lacemaking and its associated customs in Bailleul and the surrounding region.  The town was almost totally destroyed during the Ludendorff Offensive in the spring of 1918 but when a visiting American philanthropist, Richard Nelson Cromwell, toured the region in 1919, he was moved by the sight of lacemakers working among the ruins.  His support for the French charity ‘Retour au foyer’ (Back to the hearth) underwrote the establishment of lace schools in Bailleul and nearby Méteren and Saint-Jans-Cappel.  The underlying philosophy was that the traditions and values interrupted by the war should be renewed, including a proper gender order.  Lacemaking would enable women to contribute to the household budget without leaving their homes.  The charity not only funded the schools but also undertook the sale of their produce in Lille and Paris.

Le Petit Journal, supplement illustré, no. 1539, 20 June 1920 : ‘La Résurrection de la Dentelle des Flandres’. From Gallica.

Part of this ‘return’ involved reviving Saint Anne’s Day celebrations.  In 1921 the local organiser in Méteren, Marguerite de Swarte (1874-1948), wrote to the charity’s president Paul Dislère to explain how the children had passed the day.

On the day before, our young workers and brought in armlods of flowers with which they made garlands to decorate both the front and the interior of the school.  A [lace-maker’s] chair, a pillow, a support and an aune [used to measure lace] were festooned with flowers, you would think it was a flower festival.  In the evening, after work, the local lacemakers came to admire the charming school which reminded them of the holidays of yesteryear, they enjoyed themselves with the children and brought to mind the old Flemish songs…  The following morning our children, and all the lacemakers of Méteren, went to mass in honour of Saint Anne, then they returned to the school, singing their old songs.  There a meal of Flemish cakes and chocolate awaited them, which they enjoyed very much.  Then a bus came to take them to Ypres…  There they had a cold lunch of ham sandwiches, Flemish cake, pears and beer, and they walked among the ruins.  At 3:00pm they went on to Poperinge, to visit the lace school, and with the fifty young lacemakers they shared more local specialities, bars of chocolate and beer.  Then there were songs and round-dances in the school playground, until at 7:00pm the happy band climbed back aboard the bus to return to Méteren via Saint-Jans-Cappel.[14]

Marguerite de Swarte (1874-1948), patron of the lace revival in Méteren

Saint Anne celebrations continued throughout the interwar period, and there is even a picture of the crowning of the Méteren lace mistress, Hélène Loozen, in 1936, surrounded by the garlanded tools of the lacemaker’s trade.

Hélène Loozen, crowned lace mistress at Méteren, Saint Anne’s Day 1937. The lady with the pillow is Marie Delie, lace mistress of the school before the war and a well-known lacemaker.

 

 

[1] Ludo Steyn, Jan Frans Willems: Vader der Vlaamsche Beweging (Antwerp: De Bezige Bij, 2012).

[2] Jan-Frans Willems and Ferdinand Snellaert, Oude Vlaemsche Liederen ten deele met de melodieën (Ghent: F. and E. Gyselynck, 1848), nos. 256-7.

[3] Jan Bols (ed.) Brieven aan Jan-Frans Willems (Ghent: A. Siffer, 1909), p. 452.

[4] Stefaan Top, ‘Chants populaires des flamands de France (1856): A Contribution to Comparative Folksong Research, France/Belgium : Flanders’ in James Porter (ed.) Ballads and Boundaries: Narrative Singing in an Intercultural Context (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1995), pp. 315-24.

[5] Edmond de Coussemaker, Chants populaires des flamands de France (Ghent: F. and E. Gyselynck, 1856), xii-xiii.

[6] Coussemaker, Chants populaires, pp. 307-19.

[7] Arreté, Maire de la ville de Bailleul, 2 juillet 1858

[8] Stéphane Lembré, ‘Les écoles de dentellières en France et Belgique des années 1850 aux années 1930’, Histoire de l’éducation 123 (2009): 55.

[9] Michel Le Calvé, Souvenir de Bailleul (Dunkerque: Westhoek, 1983), pp. 40-1.

[10] Eugène Cortyl, ‘La dentelle à Bailleul’, Bulletin du Comité flamand de France (1903) : 231.

[11] For information on ‘zoete Mène’ see https://westhoekverbeeldt.be/ontdek/detail/8d838922-bbc5-11e3-a56d-875083d05b38

[12] Albert Blyau and Marcellus Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek (Brussels: Commission royale du folklore, 1962), pp. 237-318 : ‘Het boek der Klein-Sacramentdagliedjes en Sint-Annaliedjes’.  See, especially, no. 124 ‘Sint-Annadag’ and no. 125 ‘De Kinders van de Babbelaarsstrate’.

[13] Magda Cafmeyer, ‘Oude Brugse spellewerksters vertellen: Adeletje in ‘t Godshuis’, Biekorf 69 (1968): 364-5.

[14] The story of the lace revival in Méteren and Bailleul is well told on the Méteren village website: https://meteren.pagesperso-orange.fr/IV.1%20Dentelles-%20Accueil%20et%20presentation.htm as well as in the catalogue of the exhibition Bailleul en dentelles: Exposition, 27 juin-15 octobre 1992 (Bailleul: Musée Benoît de Puydt, 1992).  Both quote the letter from Marguerite de Swarte.

Praying for White Lace: The Feast of Our Lady of the Snows in Turnhout

‘The Miracle of the Snows’. Late C15, probably Flemish painting.

A very belated post for the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows, which fell on 5 August.  One of the Virgin Mary’s many titles, her legend is set in 4th century Rome, where a couple wanted to leave their fortune to the Virgin but had not decided how it should be spent.  At the height of summer, snow fell on the Esquiline Hill, and this miracle was taken as a sign that a church should be built there – what is now the Basilica of St Mary Major.  Until the fifteenth century Our Lady of the Snows was a largely Roman cult, but during the Counter-Reformation it spread across the Catholic world.

Our Lady of the Snows was much celebrated by lacemakers.  Some Bruges lacemakers said a daily prayer to her to keep their lace snow-white, as money would be deducted from their earnings if their lace was tarnished.[1]  (Historically lacemakers had several ways of making their lace as white as snow; some, such as the use of white lead, were incredibly damaging to their health.)  Lacemakers in the same city carried a gift of lace to the statue of Our Lady of the Snows in Bruges cathedral on her feast day.[2]  Brussels lacemakers had done the same until her chapel was pulled down during the French occupation of the city.[3]  However, we only know of two places where she was the patron of lacemakers: Almagro in central Spain – to which we hope to return – and Turnhout on the Belgian border with the Netherlands, which is our focus today.

The model lace school in the Klinkstraat, Turnhout, founded in 1910. Old Postcard.

Unlike other Flemish centres, the lace industry in Turnhout seems to have thrived into the first decades of the twentieth century.  According to the American visitor Charlotte Kellogg, half the female population of the city were involved in the trade, including 1,800 girls and young women enrolled in the numerous lace schools.[4]  The largest of these were the religious institutions run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart and the Sisters of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as the model school established in 1910 by Father Berraly, but there were also many smaller, private institutions with 30 to 50 lace apprentices.  Turnhout lacemakers graduated from the supposedly easier ‘Engelsche grond’ (point de Paris) to ‘halve slag’ (point de Lille) to the extremely fine and very expensive ‘Ijsgrond’ (point de Malines).  Perhaps it was this specialism in difficult laces that kept the handmade lace business buoyant in the region.  A Dutch socialist newspaper in 1910 complained that the women workers earned only 9-10 francs a week for 70-80 hours work, but compared with salaries in other centres in the west of Belgium this was comparatively high.[5]  The trainees in the lace schools earned much less, of course.  None the less, lacemakers in Turnhout had a strong sense of their own skill and worth, which found expression in their songs and in their patronal feastday celebrations.[6]

A lace school working in the open air. Turnhout postcard

As we’ve seen in previous posts about Saint Gregory’s in Geraardsbergen and Klein-Sacramentsdag in Ypres, the feastday celebrations were led by the lace schools rather than lacemakers more generally – indeed in Turnhout the day was named ‘domineeren’, that is the teachers’ holiday (akin to ‘dominie’ in Scots).  On the morning of the Saturday nearest to 5 August, the lace apprentices, in costumes covered with ribbons and paper streamers, formed rows behind a ceremonial arch likewise decorated with paper flowers and coloured, blown eggshells, from which was suspended a life-size effigy of a lacemaker at her pillow.  Each school, led by its mistress, then marched through the city, ‘singing, skipping, laughing and chattering’ as they went according to one witness, towards one of the numerous chapels and wayside shrines nearby.  The most popular was the chapel of Our Lady of the Snows (Onze Lieve Vrouw ter Sneeuw) in Oosthoven.

The chapel of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw ter Sneeuw in Oosthoven, near Turnhout

Here is one of the songs the lacemakers sang on their way:

Den dag is nu al aangekomen,
Den dag van O.L.V. Ter Sneeuw,
Hoe zullen wij dezen dag nu vieren,
Den dag dat wij nu feest genieten.
The day has now arrived,
The day of Our Lady of the Snows,
How shall we celebrate this day,
This day on which we enjoy a party.
Refrein: Het is maar voor de jonge jeugd,
De feest die wij nu vieren,
Dan roepen wij met een blij gemoed,
Dan gaan wij naar den doolhof toe.
Chorus: It’s only for the young,
The feast that we’re now celebrating,
Then we’ll shout with an eager heart,
Then we’ll go to ‘the Maze’ (a wilderness area near Oosthoven)
Als wij in den doolhof zijn gekomen,
Wat zullen wij dan eens gaan doen,
Wij zullen ons eigen goed gedragen,
En ons Meesteressen geerne zien.
As we come to the Maze,
What shall we do there,
We shall do ourselves some good,
And our mistresses see with pleasure.

Some schools visited the chapel of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Troost in Lokeren instead

After a brief ceremony at the chapel, where the lacemakers prayed to Our Lady of the Snows that their lace should always remain white, the group travelled on to one of the nearby country inns, such as ‘De Vrat’ which features in one song.  Here the mistress stood the workers a drink – beer for the older girls, sage milk for the younger – and many ‘mastellen’, a local type of cinnamon bun (which also is named in a song).

Mastellen in the oven. Eaten ‘without number’ by lacemakers on the feastday of Our Lady of the Snows

In return the lacemakers toasted their mistresses:

Vivat onze Meesteressen,
Zij hebben voor ons zooveel gedaan,
Zij hebben ons slagjes leeren maken,
En onze handjes laten gaan.
Long live our mistresses,
They have done so much for us,
They have taught us how to make stitches,
And let loose our hands.
Refrein: En zullen wij dan eens schoon palleeren,
En onze geldekens daaraan geven,
Als wij den druk der scholen zien,
Hoe wij de feest van de werksters zien.
Chorus: And then we shall doll ourselves up,
And spend our money,
As we see the schools busy,
That’s how we see the workers’ feastday.
Engelsche grond willen wij niet werken,
Dat is voor ons veel te gemijn,
Dat is maar voor de kleine kinderen,
Die eerst op ‘t werken gekomen zijn.
We don’t want to make ‘Point de Paris’,
That’s too base for us,
That’s more for the small children,
That’s the first work they do.
Wij kunnen allerhande kanten werken,
Zoowel ijsgrond als halve slag,
En daar een bloemeke in zetten,
Zoowel een rooske als eenen tak.
We can make all kinds of lace,
‘Point de Malines’ as much as ‘Point de Lille’
And set a flower in it,
A rose as easily as a sprig.
Wij hebben den naaam dat wij zijn lui werksters,
Wel lieve vrienden het is niet waar,
En komt dan Zaterdag’s eens kijken,
Of dat er een zonder cent zal gaan.
People say we’re lazy workers,
But friends that’s just not true,
Just come and have a look on Saturday,
Whether any of us is penniless.

But while the lacemakers celebrated their skill, as we have seen on other Flemish holidays they could also express frustrations with the demands the work placed upon them:

Een en dertig, twee en dertig,
drij, vier, vijf, zes, zeven en dertig!
Toujours,toujours
En mijnen boutenbak, mijnen boutenbak!
Toujours, toujours,
En mijnen boutenbak viel op den vloer!
One and thirty, two and thirty,
Three, four, five, six, seven and thirty!
Still, still
And my bobbin-case, my bobbin-case!
Still, still,
My bobbin-case lies on the floor!
Ongeneerd zoo zullen wij wezen,
ongeneerd zoo zullen wij zijn!
Laat ons, laat ons
vreugde rapen, vreugde rapen;
Laat ons, laat ons
vreugde rapen al onder ons!
Unabashed we shall become,
Unabashed we shall be,
Let us, let us
Gather pleasure, gather pleasure:
Let us, let us
Gather pleasure among us!

On the journey back to the city, the various schools taunted each other:

Al de scholen gaan te niet,
uitgenomen, uitgenomen,
al de scholen gaan te niet,
uitgenomen Lis Verwilt’es niet!
All the schools are rubbish,
Except, except,
All the schools are rubbish,
Except Lis Verwilt’s, that’s not!

But before they went home, there was one last symbolic act: the lacemakers’ burnt their festive arch and their lacemaker guy – a reprensentation of their teacher? – in a field, while singing:

En wij hebben onzen boog verspeld
in Oosthoven, in Oosthoven!
En wij hebben onzen boog verspeld
in Oosthoven, op het veld!
And we’ve thrown away our arch
In Oosthoven, in Oosthoven!
And we’ve thrown away our arch
In Oosthoven, on the field!
En wij hebben onzen boog verbrand
in Oosthoven, in Oosthoven!
En wij hebben onzen boog verbrand
in Oosthoven, op het veld!
And we’ve burnt our arch
In Oosthoven, in Oosthoven!
And we’ve burnt our arch
In Oosthoven, on the field!

Most of these songs were first collected by Canon Jozef Jansen, a priest and also later Turnhout’s archivist.  He noted that the custom was already moribund in 1910.  However, when another priest-cum-local historian Jozef Nuyts wrote an account of the feastday in 1939, he could still find living witnesses to tell him about it, while the radio producer Pol Heyns was able to record schoolchilden in Turnhout singing several of the songs.  Links to these recordings are provided here:

Een-en-dertig, twee-en-dertig

Al de scholen gaan teniet

En we hebben een boog besteld

Pol Heyns (top right) on his radio car, from which he recorded songs all over Flanders. From the website https://schrijversgewijs.be/schrijvers/heyns-pol/

[1] M[agda] C[afmeyer], ‘Leerschool en spellewerkschool te St.-Kruis’, ‘t Beertje (1969): 20-48, 34.

[2] Rond den Heerd 5, no. 36 (July 1870): p. 282 ‘Dagwijzer’.  This cult is mentioned in Guido Gezelle’s poem ‘Spellewerkend zie ‘k u geerne’, to which we dedicated a previous post.

[3] Baron Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Traditions et légendes de la Belgique: Descriptions des fêtes religieuses et civiles, usages, croyances et pratiques populaires des Belges anciens et modernes (Brussels, 1870), vol. 2, p. 74.

[4] Charlotte Kellogg, Bobbins of Belgium (New York, 1920), chap. 1.

[5] ‘Iets over huisarbeid’, De Proletarische Vrouw, 1 October 1910, p. 2.

[6] Most of the information in this post comes from two articles in the local historical journal: Jozef Jansen, ‘De kantvervaardiging in Turnhout: Haar geschiedenis en bewerking’, Taxandria 8 (1911), p. 117- 82; Jozef Nuyts, ‘Het Domineeren der Turnhoutsche Kantwerksters’, Annuaire de la Commission de la vieille chanson populaire (1939): 119-33.  A special issue of the journal Taxandria was dedicated to the Turnhout lace industry in 2003.

‘I won’t describe it because I wouldn’t be believed’: Lacemakers’ celebrations on Kleinsacramentsdag in Ypres

Lancelot Théodore Turpin de Crissé, ‘Corpus Christi Procession leaving the Church of Saint-Germain, Paris’ (detail), 1830. From the website Schola Sainte Cécile.  We have not found any paintings of Corpus Christi from nineteenth-century Ypres, but this gives an impression of the occasion.

Continuing in our series on lacemakers holidays we arrive at Corpus Christi, the celebration of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, which is a moveable feast.  This year (2020) it fell on Thursday 11 June, which means that this Thursday (18 June 2020) is the ‘octave’ of Corpus Christi, known as ‘lesser Corpus Christi’ or, in Flemish, ‘Kleinsacramentsdag’.  The period between was, in the Catholic sense, a week of indulgence, but for Ypres lacemakers it was a week of indulgences.  Kleinsacramentsdag was the lacemakers’ mass and feastday in this city, and in the mid nineteenth century they celebrated it enthusiastically.  ‘I won’t describe it because I wouldn’t be believed’, wrote one local journalist.[1]

Pinot & Sagaire, imagists of Epinal, ‘Corpus Christi Procession’, mid nineteenth century.  Note the array of lace on display.

When and why Kleinsacramentsdag became the lacemakers’ holiday we don’t know.  The custom was limited to the city of Ypres (and perhaps Veurne[2]).  In the early modern period Ypres was the seat of its own small bishopric (suppressed in 1801), and ecclesiastical authorities often shaped local festive calendars, but lacemakers in other towns within the diocese, such as Poperinge and Bailleul, followed the general West Flemish pattern of celebrating on Saint Anne’s day.  Perhaps it was because Corpus Christi processions – when the clergy, accompanied by congregations, confraternities, the military and others, paraded the Holy Sacrament through the streets – were major occasions for the display and purchase of lace as vestments and church ornaments.  But we know that the lacemakers’ celebration was already established in the eighteenth-century, because a local comic poet, Karel-Lodewijk Fournier, wrote to his niece, when she became a nun, to wish her a long life and that when she died she would be carried to heaven like the prophet Elijah in a ‘klein sacramentdagwagen’, the waggons lacemakers hired and decorated to carry them out to country inns to continue their partying.[3]

Louise De Hem, ‘After the Procession, Ypres’, 1892. Yper Museum

Despite this long history, it’s rather hard to find out much definitive information about the event itself.  Ypres newspapers began to mention Kleinsacramentsdag in the 1860s but usually to document its decline.  In 1867 the local paper De Toekomst reported that, while fifteen years earlier the ‘lacemakers’ mass day’ was generally celebrated, now only the children from the laceschools marked it: Kleinsacramentsdag was ‘dead… and buried’.[4]  And yet local papers were still complaining about lacemakers’ excesses on the day well into the twentieth century.

Lacemakers of Ypres, postcard c. 1912

We do know that preparations might start some weeks before the day itself, as lace-schools, of which there were about forty in the city in the mid nineteenth century, began to learn the songs they wanted to perform.  Local printers and streetsingers brought out new songs for the occasion.[5]  There was a special repertoire of Kleinsacramentsdag songs which we will discuss below, but lacemakers also sang topical songs, commenting on local politics and personalities.  Very few of these survive but we have already encountered one: the 1848 attack on French lace dealers and the Ypres prud’hommes.  Another lamented the introduction of machine-made lace net in 1830, a major threat to the handmade lace industry.[6]  It was still popular more than sixty years later:

‘t die wilt hooren in een lied,
wat dat ‘t jaar dertig is ‘geschied:
De kanten geen voor nieten,
Hoe dan!
Dat zoud’ een mensch verdrieten!
En wuk dink je daarvan?
Who wants to hear a song,
About what happened in 1830:
Lace goes for so little,
How then!
That would make a person grieve!
And what do you think about that?
Wuk dink je van den Ingelschman?
Hij brengt de tule al in ons land!
En dat bij g’heele hoopen!
Hoe dan!
Ondamme ze zoûn koopen!
En wuk dink je daarvan?
What do you think of the Englishman?
Who brings ‘tulle’ into our country!
And that by whole shedloads!
How then!
So that they can be damn well bought!
And what do you think about that?
Het is al tule lijk papier:
‘t deugt voorwaar ook niet een zier!
‘t Is goed voor twee, drij waschten,
Hoe dan!
Zijn dat geen mooie kosten!
En wuk dink je daarvan?
This tulle is like paper:
It’s not worth anything!
It’s good for just two or three washes,
How then!
That’s no bargain!
And what do you think about that?

 

The festivities really began on the Wednesday, which was termed ‘Mooimakersdag’.  To make something ‘mooi’ means to clean and decorate it, and in theory the afternoon before any feast could be a ‘mooimakersdag’, but the term is strongly associated with Ypres and lacemakers.[7]  Lacemakers’ homes were thoroughly scrubbed and the lace schools adorned with bouquets of flowers, ribbons and necklaces of blown egg-shells (this detail reappears frequently and so we assume it had some importance, though quite what we don’t know).  In the evening parties of lacemakers could be seen wandering through the streets, some in male attire, others in disguise, singing and dancing together.  Mocked up mannekins of lacemakers sitting at their pillows appeared at street corners, to which passersby would tip a penny.

Jozef Quisthoudt, Ypres ramparts by the Lille Gate, and the Sint-Pieterskerk beyond, 1949. Yper Museum

The following day, the apprentice lacemakers were led through the streets singing to mass in the church of St Peter.  Thereafter the festivities spread out again into the streets.  The children played Flemish bowls, with the winners being named ‘queens’ for the day.  Lace schools and other groups mounted their decorated waggons with picnics for trips to country inns.  Some, presumably the more religiously minded, went to the Church of Voormezele to see the Holy Blood of Christ.  In the evening lacemakers continued to sing and dance in pubs such as Den Hert, Het Smisken and Den Zoeten Inval, and the streets resonated with bawdy songs, and lewd behaviour, outraging local newspapers who pointed officials to a new 1905 law (‘loi Woeste’) which imposed major fines and imprisonment for offences against public morality.[8]  All these scenes were repeated the following Monday which was likewise termed ‘Mooimakersdag’.[9]

Paula Blyau, Portrait of Albert Blyau, her father, Yper Museum

The spirit of the celebrations are well encapsulated in the ‘kleinsacramentsdagliedjes’ that Ypres lacemakers sang.  Nearly forty of these were noted by the local teacher Albert Blyau, with the help of the musician Marcel Tasseel, in lace schools and from lacemakers in the 1890s.  We’ve translated a few items in this repertoire below.  Some of these were general festive or drinking songs, others were part of a specific repertoire of lacemakers’ feastday songs.  Many proclaimed the medicinal virtues of a ‘fresh young lad’, while a few took aim at clerical figures and ‘kwezels’ (religious bigots, or specifically beguines).  A substantial proportion were soldiers’ songs – in folklore soldiers were ‘devil-may-care’ types who enjoyed a life of little work and many liberties; hence on the few days lacemakers’ had leisure to enjoy they took on the character of soldiers.  Not many of these songs were so blatantly obscene that one could foresee them falling foul of the loi Woeste, but according to Blyau some were accompanied by gestures which made their meaning very plain.

This first song, which has been recorded by the Belgian folk group Sidus, sets the tone:

Wij hebben ons kusje in ‘t kasjen gesteken,
Boutjes en spellen en g’heel de boetiek.
We’n zullen dees’ week van geen werken meer spreken:
Boeravezeeve is onze muziek!
Tralala, lafaderalier’! Tralalalia, lafad’rala!
We’ve thrown our pillow into the shed,
Bobbins and pins and the whole caboodle.
This week we shan’t talk about work any more:
The tambourine is our music!
Wij hebben ons mutsje doen optooien,
Ons kapje naar de mode gezet;
Wij dragen ons kleedje van voren in plooitjes,
Wij zullen dansen proper en net!
Tralala, etc.
We’ve decked out our bonnets,
Our hats are the height of fashion;
We wear our dresses with pleats at the front,
We shall dance neat and proper!
En als mijn moeder zal komen vragen:
Dochter, en doen je voetjes geen zeer?
Wel, moeder, zou ik durven klagen?
Morgen dans ik nog vele meer !
Tralala, etc.
And if my mother comes and asks:
Daughter, don’t your feet hurt?
Well mother, can I complain?
Tomorrow I’ll dance a whole lot more!

This was a popular song among Ypres lacemakers, though was also associated with other lacemakers’ feastdays.[10]  In another song the tools of the lace trade were not just put away, the ‘boutjes’ or bobbins were deliberately broken.[11]  Kleinsacramentsdag was really a revolt against work, and those who imposed work discipline.  Hence in another a magistrate asks a lacemaker if she’ll take a young man to be her husband, on condition he punches the lace mistress.[12]

As well as dancing lacemakers embraced food, drink and love.  Some of these songs were variants of widely sung tunes, such as ‘Zoete lieve Gerritje’:

‘’t Is Spellewerkersmesdag,
Zoete lieve Gerritje!’
‘t Is Spellewerkersmesdag,
Zoete lieve Mei !

The song continues that ‘these are the days of pleasure’, which the lacemakers will celebrate fully.  They will eat sausages and potatoes, drink sugared brandy, and make the first peasant who comes along pay for it all.[13]

Cross-dressing, one element in lacemakers’ celebrations (and which is mentioned in accounts of Catterns and Tanders in the English Midlands), was also a theme in their songs.  In one a young woman dresses as a sailor to follow her lover, the ship’s captain.  Her sex in revealed when she falls from the rigging in a storm.  By the time the ship returns to port, she is nursing a little baby sailor.[14]

Although freely spending money was essential to the spirit of this feast, the lacemakers did not forget that they were numbered among the poor.  This reworking of a French dance tune is one of the very few lacemakers’ songs for which we have an audio record, thanks to the Belgian radio presenter Pol Heyns, who recorded from Ypres schoolgirls in January 1939.

Klein-Sakermentdag die komt aan,
Vivo lajon !
En me gaan al met den char-à-bancs.
Van vivolee en marionnee !
Siliadono ! vivo lajon !
Berlabono ! Vivo lajon !
Kleinsacramentsdag is here,
Vivo lajon!
And I’m ready to go on the waggons.
Van etc
De rijken gaan naar buiten,
En den arme gaat om stuiten.
Van vivolee, etc.
The rich go out [enjoying themselves] And the poor bounce along.
Van etc!
De rijken dragen krullen,
En den arme draagt palullen.
The rich wear curls
And the poor wear rags
Den rijke draagt gelapte schoên,
En den arme-n en zou ‘t niet durven doen.
The rich wear fixed up shoes
Which the poor wouldn’t dare to do.
Den rijke zit up ‘t hooge lood,
En den arme met z’n billen bloot.
The rich are in the top positions
And the poor with their bare buttocks.
Moeder, den rijke-n en kies ik niet,
En den arme-n is m’n zoetelief!
Mother, I don’t choose the rich man,
The poor man is my sweetheart!

 

But all good things must come to an end: the celebrations closed and the lacemakers had to return to the lace school, not without one final complaint.[15]

Klein-Sacramentdag is deure:
Uus geldetje ben ik kwijt:
Nu zit ik hier en treuren
Met kleinen appetijt
Kleinsacramentsdag is expensive:
I’ve spent all my money:
Now I sit here and cry
With little appetite.
De boutjes aan de galge!
Het kusje aan ‘t perlorijn!
‘k Wenschte dat het alle dage
Klein-Sacramentdag mochte zijn!
The bobbins to the gallows!
The pillow to the pillory!
I wish that every day
Could be Kleinsacramentsdag!
De schoolvrouw kwam vragen
‘Wat, duivel ! heije in je zin?
E perkamentje in acht dagen,
Is dat geen groot gewin?’
The lace mistress came and asked
‘What, Devil ! Are you in your senses?
A pattern in eight days,
Is that not rich reward?

 

Ypres, lacemakers in the rue de Lille

 

[1] De Toekomst, 25 June 1870 ‘Stads Nieuws’.

[2] We have found a single mention that it was also the ‘spellewerkersmesdag’ in Veurne: Rond den Heerd, 4:26 (1869): 206.

[3] Karel-Lodewyk Fournier, Naergelaetene tooneelstukken en rymwerken (Ypres: Annoy-Vandevyver, 1821), Vol. 5, p. 354.

[4] De Toekomst, 30 June 1867 ‘Stads Nieuws’.

[5] Apparently the local printer Dedeyne produced a specific collection of ‘spellewerkliedjes’, but we have not been able to track down a copy.

[6] Albert Blyau and Marcellus Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek (Brussels: Commission royale du folklore, 1962), no. 120, ‘Kantwerksters Leed’.

[7] Leonard Lodewijk De Bo, Westvlaamsch Idioticon (Bruges: Edw. Gailliard, 1873), vol. 1, p. 711.

[8] ‘t Nieuwsblad van Yper en Ommelands, ‘Oneerbaarheden’, 15 June 1907, p. 1; Journal d’Ypres, ‘Une publicité efficace’,24 June 1911, p. 2.

[9] The two main sources for this summary are: De Toekomst, ‘Het speldewerk en Klein Sacramentdag te Ijperen’, 26 June 1871; and C.M. and L.D.W. [Maurits Cocle and Lodwijk De Wolf], ‘Ypersche Blijdagwijzer’, Biekorf 35 (1929): 273-8.

[10] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 87; M.C. [Magda Cafmeyer], ‘Spellewerk te Ieper’, Biekorf 56 (1955): 332.

[11] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 92.

[12] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 95.

[13] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 88; De Wolf and Cocle, ‘Ypersche Blijdagwijzer’: 278.

[14] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 111.  This song was very popular in nineteenth and twentieth century Holland and Belgium.

[15] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 123.  Variants of this song was also sung after other lacemakers’ feastdays.  The line ‘my pillow to the gallows and my bobbins to the pillory!’ featured on a Ypres postcard in the early twentieth century: Johan Ballegeer and Jean-Pierre Braems, Vlas, Kant en Spellewerksters in oude prentkaarten (Zaltbommel: Europese Bibliotheek, 1981), no. 34.

‘The Hunters of Pleasure’: The Lacemakers’ Feastday in Geraardsbergen, East Flanders

 

A view of Geraardsbergen, from the 1649 Atlas Van Loon, available on Wikipedia Commons. The chapel of Our Lady of Oudenberg can be seen atop the hill.

Saint Gregory’s (9 May) is a slightly belated entry in our calendar of lacemakers’ feastdays.

Saint Gregory the Great, the Pope who sent Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons, is the patron saint of teachers, schoolchildren and choristers.  Thus, by an association of ideas, he also became the patron of apprentice lacemakers in the lace schools of East Flanders.  His feast is held on 12 March.  According to Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, the German enthusiast for all things Belgian, on the evening before ‘the lace schools are decorated with garlands of flowers and greenery, and a crown is suspended from the ceiling.  Annual prizes are awarded to the most assiduous workers and best behaved girls.’[1]

However, in the far south of the province, in the towns of Ninove and Geraardsbergen, the lacemakers celebrated ‘Sint Gregoreken’ not on 12 March but on 9 May.  Why this shift of dates?  9 May is the feastday of another Saint Gregory, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, but there is no obvious reason why this Anatolian theologian should be preferred to the Pope of Rome.  A further clue is that 9 May commemorates the translation of the relics of Saint Nicholas, another Anatolian bishop, but more importantly an occasion honoured by the lacemakers of Lille in the great ‘Feast of the Bobbin’ (fête du broquelet).  However, the more simple explanation offered by a Ninove lace merchant to the puzzled folklorist Herman Baccaert was that the weather was usually too bad on 12 March, and if events were postponed then they ran into Easter celebrations.  Hence the new date was instated.[2]

Augusta De Clercq (1887-1944), daughter of a lacemaker and folklorist of Geraardsbergen.  From the local history journal Gerardimontium.

In the 1930s the librarian Augusta de Clercq (1887-1944) wrote three overlapping accounts of how the lacemakers of Geraardsbergen celebrated Saint Gregory’s sixty or more years before.[3]  There were still a few dozen lacemakers in the town during the interwar years but nowhere near the two thousand (roughly half the female population) at work during the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the industry.  Geraardsbergen specialized in black Chantilly lace which was much in demand when crinolines were in fashion, but the arrival of first a match factory and then cigarette factories created a better-payed alternative for female labour, just as the market for black lace crumpled with the fall of the Second Empire.  De Clercq’s most important informant for this history was her mother, Rachel Anna Maquestiau (1850-1945), a lacemaker turned innkeeper: both occupations were relevant for the information she provided.[4]

Chantilly lace from Geraardsbergen, picured in Charlotte Kellogg’s ‘Bobbins of Belgium’, 1919.

Postcard of lacemakers on the Steenstraat in Geraardsbergen

It was the lace schools, attended by girls from aged five and six to eighteen, rather than lacemakers in general, who celebrated Saint Gregory’s.   There were many such establishments in nineteenth-century Geraardsbergen: two were run by nuns, the Augustinian Black Sisters and the Benedictines of the Priory of Hunnegem, but the majority were private.  In both types the day started at six (or seven in winter) and continued until seven in the evening, and in both songs were used to regulate work and enliven the passing hours, but the religious schools also included an hour’s lesson per day in reading, writing and arithmetic.  They also kept back more of the money earned by the apprentices, one reason for the continuing popularity of the private schools.  Most of that money went straight into the family budget, but the girls were allowed to keep a few centimes for themselves which they saved up for Saint Gregory’s.

Saint Bartholemew’s, Geraardsbergen, where lacemakers celebrated mass on St Gregory’s Day. Photo by Tim Bekaert, on Wikipedia Commons.

Preparations for the feast started the day before when the lacemakers covered their pillows with paper, washed and cleaned the entire school, bedecked the workroom with paper streamers and garlands.  They had the afternoon off to prepare their own clothes, but on the way home they might take an offering of pins to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the chapel of the Beguinage, to pray that the weather be good.   On the day itself the girls first went to school, all dressed in their Sunday best, and from there the mistress led them to the town’s main church of Saint Bartholemew for mass:

En als ‘t dan Sint Gregoreken was
Met blijdschap in ons herte,
Dan gingen wij naar de schole
En van daar naar de kerke,
En wij gingen paar aan paar
Met eene kaarse ten offeren dààr.
And as it’s Saint Gregory’s
With happiness in our hearts,
We went to school
And from there to church,
And we went two by two
With a candle to offer there.

A very similar song was sung in West Flanders during lacemakers’ celebrations of Saint Anne’s Day.[5]  Clearly the repertoire of festival songs was adapted according to local traditions.

The Chapel of Our Lady of Oudenberg. This building replaced the chapel visited by lacemakers in the nineteenth century. Picture by Jean-Pol Grandmont, available on Wikipedia Commons.

After the convent school girls had offered their candles they returned to their schoolrooms for a sedate party.  The others in groups climbed the hill that dominated the town to visit the chapel of Our Lady of Oudenberg (not the building now familiar to fans of cycle racing but an earlier seventeenth century construction).  Lacemakers had donated a mantel to the chapel’s statue of Mary in 1866, during a cholera epidemic.  After prayers each group would go out into the park surrounding the chapel to dance round dances and sing:

Sint Gregoreken van plezance
Serni bleu wat zullen wij dansen;
Wij en vieren maar éénen dag
Vivan Sint Gregorekensdag!
Saint Gregory of pleasure
Good heavens won’t we dance;
We only have one day to enjoy
Long live Saint Gregory!

The girls then went slightly down the hill to the Hemelrijk tavern (which still exists), where with fifty centimes donated by their lace mistress, they bought themselves each two ‘mattetaarten’ (milk curd cakes) or apple tarts called ‘schietspoelen’ and two glasses of beer.  And while they ate and drank they sang:

De negende van Mei
Dan zullen wij mogen drinken
De negende van Mei
Dan mogen wij mogen schinken
Goed bier, goed bier
Wij zijn de jagers, wij zijn de jagers,
Goed bier, goed bier,
Wij zijn de jagers van het plezier.
The ninth of May
Then we’ll be allowed to drink
The ninth of May
Then may we, may we serve
Good beer, good beer
We are the hunters, we are the hunters
Good beer, good beer,
We are the hunters of pleasure.

Mattentaarten, still a local speciality.

And:

In het Hemelrijk, daar is het zóó goed,
De bazinne draagt er een pluim op haren hoed
En de baas tapt zóó een Leuvensch bier,
En daarmêe roept hij al zijn kalanten alhier.
Hoerah! gedronken; Hoerah! geklonken,
Liever dan te komen in de slavernij.
Wie kent er ons, wie kent er ons?
Die ons niet en ziet, en kent ons niet.
At the Hemelrijk, it’s so good there,
The landlady wears a feather in her hat
And the landlord taps Louvain beer,
With which he summons all his customers here.
Hurrah! Drunk; Hurrah! Toasted,
Better than to fall into slavery.
Who knows us, who knows us?
Who doesn’t see us, doesn’t know us.

In the evening bands of lacemakers came down the hill arm-in-arm, and treated themselves to nuts or caramels from streetstalls. The large inns such as the Plezanten Hof and the Glazen Wieg, which was run by De Clercq’s parents, arranged for bands to play in their dance halls, where the lacemakers continued to drink, dance and sing:

Wilde van de mode zijn
Krinoline, krinoline,
Wilde van de mode zijn
Krinoline dat is fijn.’
Crazy about fashion
Crinoline, crinoline
Crazy about fashion
Crinoline that is so fine.

This song seems to have started life as a satire on the new look before ending its career as a playground skipping rhyme, but in this intervening period it seems appropriate that lacemakers celebrated the fashion that kept them employed.[6]

Another favourite went as follows:

Streep, streep, streep, streep!
Al de meiskens van de Reep
Streep, streep, streep, streep!
Al de meiskens van de Reep
Die dansen geren streep.
Stripe, stripe, stripe, stripe!
All the girls from the Reep [a working-class district of Geraardsbergen] They love to dance the line dance.

This is a local adaption of a contredanse more generally known as the ‘L’Ostendaise’, in which the girls usually formed ‘a line’ [riep] rather than came from ‘The Reep’.[7]

And:

De hemel is den onzen,
Vivan het goed bier!
En als de hemel en onzen is,
Dan hebben wij plezier.
Heaven is ours,
Long live good beer!
And as heaven is ours,
Then we have some fun!

This round dance, adapted from a religious song, was a favourite in other lacemaking districts, including Bruges and Bailleul.[8]

Finally the lace mistresses would give the signal for the party to disperse, and the lacemakers went off into the night, still singing:

Sint Gregoreken is vertrokken
Op zijn kousen en op zijn zokken;
Wij en vieren maar eenen dag
Vivan Sint Gregorekensdag.
Saint Gregory is gone
With his stockings and his socks;
We only celebrate one day
Long live Saint Gregory’s Day.

The excitement of Saint Gregory’s Day was in inverse proportion to the monotony of the lace apprentices’ working lives.  None the less, they wanted to be seen and heard as a collective — ‘Who doesn’t see us doesn’t know us’.  For one day, and night, these young women took over the streets and public places of the town, and celebrated their own status as young and unmarried, but also as lacemakers.  Lacemakers in Geraardsbergen, like those in other centres, had a strong collective work culture which is one reason why, despite the competition and despite poor wages, the profession still survived into the interwar period.

 

[1] Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Calendrier belge.  Fêtes religieuses et civiles (Brussels: Ferdinand Claassen, 1861), vol 1, p. 166.

[2] Herman Baccaert, ‘Bijdrage tot de Folklore van het kantwerk’, Volkskunde: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Folklore 21 (1910): 170.

[3] Augusta de Clercq, Kantwerksters en Kantnijverheid te Geeraardsbergen. Folklore en Geschiedenis (Geeraardsbergen: Victor van Niewenhove, 1931); ‘Sint Gregoreken, of het feest der kantwerksters, te Geeraardsbergen, in vroegere jaren’, Oostvlaamsche Zanten 11:4 (1936): 61-7; ‘Het Sint Gregorekensfeest der Geeraardsbergsche Kantwerksters’, Annuaire de la Commission de la vieille chanson populaire 1 (1939): 137-50.

[4] Dirck Surdiacourt, ‘“Hoe wonder is soms toch een menschenhart!”  Fragmenten uit het leven van Augusta De Clercq’, Gerardimontium 254 (2014): 19-27, and 255 (2014): 34-38.

[5] Edmond de Coussemaker, Chants populaires des flamands de France (Ghent: F. and E. Gyselynck, 1856), pp. 310-12.

[6] Laura Hiel, Kinderspelen en liedjes uit het land van Dendermonde (Ghent: Vyncke, 1931), p. 36.

[7] Laura Hiel, Kinderspelen en liedjes uit het land van Dendermonde (Ghent: Vyncke, 1931), p. 85.  The music for this dance can be heard here: www.liederenbank.nl/sound.php?recordid=76232&lan=nl

[8] Adolphe Lootens and J.M.E. Feys, Chants populaires flamands (Bruges: Desclee, De Brouwer, 1879), pp. 246-7.

The Revolution that Never Was: Ypres Lacemakers in 1848

18 August 1848, and all seems quiet on the main square of Ypres. This watercolour of Ypres Town Hall (the Cloth Hall) by Justin Ouvrié (1806-1879) can now be found in Ypres Museum.

In the spring of 1848, as revolution spread from Palermo and Paris across large swathes of the continent, one country remained conspicuously quiet: Belgium.  The reasons for this are not immediately clear.  Belgium had come into being through revolution only a few years before in 1830.  The country clearly possessed a revolutionary history and tradition.  It was close to the epicentre of events in France, and Belgian exiles in Paris were busy organizing propaganda and recruiting among the large number of Belgian migrant workers in France to form a Belgian Legion which might carry armed revolution back over the border.  The economic conditions in Belgium were, if anything, even worse than in France, and so ostensibly more propitious for civil conflict.  This was especially true in the provinces of East and West Flanders.  British competition had effectively wiped out the most important in the region, the linen industry, during the 1840s.  The potato blight had ruined three harvests in a row, undermining the peasant farmers’ and smallholders’ ability to feed themselves.  Even before 1848 local and national government recognized that the labouring populations of Flanders were suffering a crisis of hunger, poverty and unemployment.  As we have seen in previous posts, one of the answers to this crisis was to invest in lace schools.  However, the revolution of February 1848 in Paris would deal a blow to this industry too.  Flemish lace was made for export, mostly to France.  But luxury trades were always the first to suffer during political turmoil.  The French fashion houses weren’t buying, which meant the Belgian merchants were left with stock on their hands, which meant that they stopped putting out work to their domestic female workforce.[1]

This crisis affected the countryside but also towns like Courtrai, Bruges and Ypres where lace remained the most important employer of female labour.  The local authorities were particularly worried because, as much male employment was seasonal, over winter whole families depended on the wages that lacemakers brought in.  On 13 March, little more than a fortnight since news of the Paris revolution arrived in the city, the lace merchants of Ypres got together to lobby the government in Brussels on behalf of their industry.[2]  They sent a deputation to the Minister of the Interior, telling him that in the borough of Ypres alone there were more than 20,000 lacemakers, that lace was the sole industry of any importance to survive the crisis years of the 1840s, but that now this population too was threatened with misery.  They warned of ‘grave disorders’ if something was not done.[3]  And something was done, as the Government provided 60,000 francs of credit to the lace merchants, so that they could keep putting out orders to their workers.  Or at least that was the idea, there is some dispute about what actually happened to the money.[4]

‘Lacemakers don’t protest’ wrote one of their foremost Belgian chroniclers, explaining their invisibility in history.[5]  And so it proved in 1848, despite the fears of the authorities in Ypres and elsewhere.  West Flanders in general remained remarkably calm, despite occasional incursions by radicals and armed groups from France.  The border, only fourteen kilometres away from Ypres, was reinforced, adding an extra layer of difficulty for lace exporters (and smugglers).

However, there were some attempts to provoke lacemakers to action.  Thursday 26 June 1848 was ‘Kleinsacramentsdag’, the Thursday following Corpus Christi (a moveable feast).  This was the holy day of Ypres lacemakers, and the Wednesday preceding was ‘Mooimakersdag’, the lacemakers’ holiday which in previous years had been celebrated in some style.  The lace schools were festooned with garlands of flowers, while troops of lacemakers in fancy dress, and led by their ‘queen’, were carried off on great waggons to picnics in the surrounding countryside, much like those pictured in Watteau’s painting of ‘The Feast of the Bobbin’ in nearby Lille.  In preparation for this holiday, printers would produce new songbooks which were sold in the market-squares and other public places by street-singers.[6]  On 25 June 1848 one such broadside song drew the attention of the authorities, and it is reproduced below, followed by a rough translation.

An 1864 etching of the Antwerp streetsinger Belmont by Hendrik Frans Schaefels (1827-1904). Many nineteenth-century streetsingers became quite famous characters but we have found no portraits of Ypres singers from the period.

 

Stemme van den Boterpot no 1 of den Brabanson

A la vrienden wilt hier aenhooren,
En blyft een weinig staen,
Ik zalt u in korte gaen verklaeren,
Hoe het in dese stad zal vergaen,
Kantwerkster, gy mag het wel weten,
t’ Is van onze kante marchands,
Zy hebben lang genoeg ons herte uitgefreten, Bis
Deeze verkens moeten nu van kant. Bis, Bis.

De kleermaekers zynder espres gekomen,
Uyt de groote stad Parys,
Zy hebben het nieuws nu al vernomen,
Zy kreygen daer van den eersten prys,
Al voor de kazakken te keeren,
Van plaidons en kanten marchands,
Zy zullen haest de fransch tael gaen leeren, Bis.
Dees verraeders moeten uyt ons land. Bis, Bis.

Dat zullen deze capoenen gaen vaeren,
De plaidons zyn nu afgeschaft,
Want wy beginnen daer op te dinken,
Dees verraeders hebben te veel gemaekt,
Zy maeken met ons geld veele plaisieren,
Om te marcheren met trommels en muzik,
Wy zullen klouk op hun kazakke vieren, Bis.
Tot een exempel voor ons Belzyk. Bis, Bis.

Wy zullen onze mode doen floreeren,
Door het maeken van een nieuw kazak,
En wy ambagsheden zonder mankeren,
Hebben ook deeze mode aengevat,
Wy zullen drinken en glaezen doen klinken,
Tot floreeren voor weird en weirdin,
En de marchands van kanten te doen springen, Bis
Dat hebben wy al lang in onzen zin. Bis, Bis.

Spellewerkster laet het u niet verdrieten,
Om tegen dees barbaeren op te staen,
Zy zullen ons bloed niet meer doen vergieten,
Wy zullen stryden voor ons vaen,
Al voor het geld dat zy ons hebben genomen,
Van onze kanten en gaeren-bak,
Die schoone francs moeten weder keeren, Bis.
Dat zy van ons hebben afgepakt. Bis, Bis.

Kantwerkster al voor het letste,
En laet deeze zaeke niet meer staen,
Want ik raent u voor het alderbeste,
Eer dat zy bancroute zouden slaen,
En laet ons nu defenderen,
t’Is voor ons eygen vleesch en bloed,
Dan zullen wy ons plaisieren doen ernemen. Bis.
Al met het geld van onze kanten zoet. Bis, Bis.

Eynde.

To the tune of ‘The Butterpot’ no 1 or The Brabançonne

To friends who want to listen
And stay a while here,
I shall explain to you directly
How things fare in this city.
Lacemaker, you know it already,
It’s about our lace merchants
They have been feasting on our hearts long enough,
These pigs need to get out the way.

The tailors [buyers] have come on purpose
From the great city of Paris
They have heard the news,
They expect to get the best price,
Ready to turn the coats
Of prud’hommes and lace merchants
They’ll quickly learn French,
These traitors must be expelled.

To send these capons packing
The prud’hommes are now abolished,
Because we’re beginning to think
That these traitors have made too much,
They have had too much fun with our money,
Marching around with drums and music,
We should boldly celebrate on their jackets
As an example for our Belgium [?]

We should make our fashion flourish,
By making a new jacket,
And then we’ll celebrate without stint,
If we get a hold on this fashion,
We should drink and clink glasses
And so let innkeeper and his wife flourish,
And the lace merchants can go take a leap
We’ve wanted that for a long time.

Lacemaker, don’t let it grieve you
To face up to these barbarians,
We won’t let them shed our blood anymore,
We will fight for our standard,
And for the money that they took from us,
For our lace and thread casket,
The beautiful coins must return,
That they snatched from us.

Lacemakers, finally,
Don’t let this situation continue,
Because I urge you for your own good,
Before you go bankrupt,
And let us defend ourselves,
It’s for our own flesh and blood,
Then we can enjoy ourselves,
With the money from our sweet lace.

 

We must admit that some elements of this song, which was discovered by the archivist Joseph De Smet, remain opaque to us.[7]  We don’t really understand the author’s interest in ‘kazakken’ or jackets (perhaps it had some dialect meaning).  We don’t know the tune ‘The Butterpot’, though we assume den Brabanson refers to the revolutionary anthem of 1830 which is now the Belgian national anthem.

However, we can explain who were the ‘plaidons’ or ‘prud’hommes’ mentioned in the text.  The conseil des prud’hommes was an early form of industrial tribunal whose members were elected from both the employers and, in theory, workers.  The Ypres tribunal, set up in 1842, consisted of seven members, of which at least two had to be lace-merchants and one a male foreman or senior employee in the industry.  In practice almost all the elected members represented the employers, no employee representatives could be found for the simple reason that there were no male employees or tax-paying artisans of the kind designated by the legislation.  No female lace merchant (of which there were several) nor any female lacemaker (of which there were thousands) could participate either as electors or as members of the tribunal.  Yet almost the entire business of the tribunal was taken up by the lace industry: in 1846, of the sixty-two cases it judged, sixty-one involved lacemakers; in 1847 out of forty-three cases, forty-one involved lacemakers.[8]  And the lacemakers of Ypres were not happy with its rulings.  As the local papers observed, whatever the merits of such a system in an industrial town with clearly defined employees and employers, it was ‘clearly not fit for the lace industry’.[9]  If merchants cut lacemakers’ remuneration, claiming the work was shoddy or dirty, the lacemakers could only seek justice from the conseil des prud’hommes, where they found the same merchants sitting in judgement.[10]  In particular lacemakers complained that lace merchants were attempting to force on them the dreaded ‘livret’, or workbook which would effectively end their limited ability to negotiate wages by tying them to a single employer.[11]  In June the agitation had grown so great that the Mayor of Ypres placed public notices in the newspapers (unusually in Flemish) stating that he had written to parliament and to the ministry of Justice to make them aware of the lacemakers’ concerns.  In October 1847 a tailor, Pierre Maerten, organized a petition on behalf of the lacemakers against the prud’hommes.[12]  Neither action seems to have brought a positive result: of the seven members of the tribunal elected in January 1848, five were lace merchants.[13]  This is why the song links lace merchants and prud’hommes together as enemies of lacemakers.

The authorities soon got wind of this would-be rebel anthem.  The state prosecutor sent a copy to the Governor of West-Flanders on 1 July.  The author was identified and arrested: his name was Auguste Plancque, a former NCO in the Belgian army, but by then a day-labourer.  We do not know what punishment Plancque suffered but it was probably not too serious because when he died, in 1885, he was described as a retired postman, the kind of job that was often thought suitable for military veterans.[14]  The Ypres register of births, deaths and marriages also provides an explanation for Planque’s particular interest in the lace industry: in February 1843 he had married Marie de Graeve, a lacemaker.[15]

It seems Ypres lacemakers did not take up this song on Mooimakersdag in 1848.  However, they did have a whole repertoire of other songs to mark that day, and we have included the first verse of one such song below, so that readers can get a feel for lacemakers’ celebrations.[16]  And you can hear the whole song performed by the Belgian folk group Sidus on Youtube.

Wij hebben ons kusje in ‘t kasjen gesteken,
Boutjes en spellen en g’heel de boetiek.
We’n zullen dees’ week van geen werken meer spreken:
Boeravezeeve is onze muziek!
Tralala, lafaderalier’! tralalala, lafad’rala!

We’ve thrown our pillow into the shed,
Bobbins and pins and the whole caboodle.
This week we shan’t talk about work any more:
The tambourine is our music!

 

A streetsinger hawks his wares in Wervik, a town close to Ypres. This illustration by Emile Puttaert (1829-1901) appeared in Eugène Van Bemmel’s ‘La Belgique illustrée’ (1879).

 

[1] Brison D. Gooch, Belgium and the February Revolution (Amsterdam, 1963); For West Flanders in particular see Joseph De Smet, ‘De weerslag van de Franse Omwenteling van 1848 in West Vlaanderen’, Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis 89 (1952): 24-38.

[2] Le Propagateur, 15 March 1848, p. 1.

[3] Le Propagateur, 18 March 1848, p. 1.

[4] Le Propagateur, 4 August 1849, p. 1.

[5] Guillaume De Greef, L’ouvrière dentellière en Belgique (Brussels, 1886), p. 5.

[6] Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Traditions et légendes de la Belgique, vol. I (Brussels, 1870), p. 298.

[7] Joseph De Smet, ‘De crisis in de westvlaamse kantnijverheid in 1848’, Biekorf 53 (1952): 174-8.

[8] Le Propagateur 24 February 1847, p. 1; Le Progrès, 3 February 1848, p. 1.

[9] Le Propagateur, 10 February 1847, p. 2.

[10] Le Propagateur, 10 March 1847, p. 2.

[11] Le Propagateur, 28 April, 1847, p. 1.

[12] Le Progrès, 23 December 1847, p. 2.

[13] Le Progrès, 6 February 1848, p. 4.

[14] Le Progrès, 11 January 1885, p. 2.

[15] Le Progrès, 26 February 1843, p. 4.

[16] Albert Blyau and Marcellus Tasseel, Iepersch oud liedboek.  Teksten en melodieen uit de volksmond opgetekend (Brussels, 1962), pp. 237-318, here 238-9.

Celebrating Catterns at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Saturday 25 November 2017

As readers of this blog will know, lacemakers claim several saints as their patron, but the one most favoured in the English Midlands is Saint Catherine.  The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford celebrated the Feast of Saint Catherine on 25 November 2017 with a ‘lace day’.   ISIS lacemakers demonstrated their skills and gave visitors a chance to make some lace themselves, while David Hopkin gave visitors talks about the lace tools on display and their connection to lacemakers’ work, feasts and folklore.  There were Cattern cakes to try (though we’re probably not quite ready to submit our cakemaking talents to the Great British Bake Off).  And we’re probably going to do the whole thing again next year.

Visitors to the Pitt Rivers met with local lacemakers and some had a go themselves

The lace display in the Pitt Rivers is small but there’s lots to say about it.

Keeping ‘Cattern’ in Flanders

In our last post about lacemakers ‘keeping cattern’ on 25 November, we said that Saint Catherine ‘was not usually the named patron of European lacemakers’.  However, we have learnt that there was one exception: the lacemakers of Antwerp province in Belgium, and specifically Mechelen (Malines), celebrated Saint Catherine’s Eve.

We owe this information to the Flemish writer Herman Baccaert (1883-1921) who, together with Antoine Carlier de Lantsheere, compiled an Encyclopaedia of lace-related information.  Sadly this manuscript was lost during the First World War, but Baccaert did publish a few articles on lacemakers’ traditions, including their feast-days.  He also wrote a novel set among lacemakers, which we’ll return to in a future blog.

 

Herman Baccaert of Mechelin (1883-1921)

 

According to Baccaert, in most of Belgian and French Flanders, and in Brabant, the lacemakers’ patron was Saint Anne, mother of Mary, whose feast fell on 26 July.  There were some exceptions and additions.  In Ieper (Ypres) the lacemakers’ holiday was ‘mooimakersdag’, the Wednesday preceding ‘Klein Sacramentdag’, which fell on the Thursday following Corpus Christi.  (As the date of Corpus Christi depended on Easter, this was a moveable feast.)  In Geraardsbergen (Grammont) in southern Flanders, the lacemakers’ celebrated instead Saint Gregory the Great.  (Originally the holiday fell on 12 March, which oddly is Saint Gregory’s feast-day in the Orthodox Church but not the Catholic Church.  Then, in the nineteenth century, it was moved to 9 May.  According to a local lacedealer interviewed by Baccaert, the explanation for this was that the weather was better in May.  However, 9 May is the feast-day of Saint Gregory Nazianzen, a different saint; it is also the feast of the translation of Saint Nicholas, which was an important holiday for lacemakers in Lille. So there may have been more going on here.)  Although Baccaert did not mention this, Saint Theresa of Avila’s feast on 15 October was also popular among lacemakers in West Flanders, in Bruges and Courtrai (Brugge and Kortrijk).  But this holiday was promoted by some religious orders which held the saint in particular esteem; in general Saint Anne was the recognized patron in West Flanders.

In Antwerp province, however, it was Saint Catherine.  It is worth quoting Baccaert’s description in full because it offers some interesting parallels with ‘catterning’ in the East Midlands.  The lace industry had been in decline in the region for several decades, so Baccaert was referring to the past, not current practice.

“On Saint Catherine’s eve, at sunset on 24 November, ‘the candleblock was washed’ [‘den lichter begoten’].  The candleblock was a wooden stand which served as an appliance to spread light over the lacemakers’ pillows.  It consisted of a candle or an oil-lamp as well as a spherical bottle filled with pure water, the so-called ‘ordinaal’, which concentrated the light falling on the pillow.

“In the evening they cooked up a brandy punch called ‘the Devil in Hell’, which was passed to and fro because there was always another willing mouth to take care of.  It was the season for smoked herring and these were laid on the fire to sizzle and spit; everyone also had some tasty morsel, especially gingerbread and sweetmeats, and thus late into the night they would sing, gossip and tell stories.”

‘Washing the candleblock’ was also the euphemistic name for celebrating Catterns in parts of the East Midlands.  Saint Catherine’s was ‘Candle Day’, because traditionally this was the day when lacemakers began to use artificial light.  And just as there was a Cattern cake in the East Midlands, so there was a ‘Sint Catharinagebak’ in East Flanders: the recipe is given on p.99 of André Delcart’s Winterfeesten en Gebak: Mythen, folklore en tradities (Cyclus, 2007) This is not the only parallel in the customs of the two regions: the chanting of ‘tells’ in Midlands lace-schools echoes the use of ‘tellingen’ to control the pace of work in Flemish lace workshops.  Here is another which also tends to confirm the claim ― often asserted but difficult to prove ― that lace skills came to England from the Low Countries with Flemish migrants in the sixteenth century.

 

Alexander Struys, ‘The Lacemaker of Mechelen’, 1902

 

Further Reading

Baccaert, Herman.  ‘Gebruiken bij Kantwerksters’, Volkskunde: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Folklore 19 (1907-8): 223-229

Baccaert, Herman.  ‘Bijdrage tot de Folklore van het kantwerk’, Volkskunde: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Folklore 21 (1910): 169-175.

There is a very good Flemish website on Mechelen lace and lace history, ‘Mechelen & Kant‘.

Gooding on Saint Thomas’s, 21 December

The longest day and the shortest night,
Jim Horn sat by candle light.
When his mother heard it, she did stamp and swear,
And from his head pulled a handful of hair.

According to Mrs Frederica Orlebar (1887), the promoter of lace and lacemakers’ feasts, this rhyme was sung during Cattern celebrations. Apparently Jim Horn was a male lacemaker whose family still lived in the village of Poddington; his mother was no doubt incensed by the waste of expensive candles when natural light was sufficient. Violence visited upon children by parents was a common theme of lacemakers’ rhymes and tells, as we’ll see in a subsequent post. However, the “longest day and the shortest night” element of this rhyme was more usually associated with “Barnaby Bright” and chanted on 11 June, which is Saint Barnabas’s day (and which, before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, would have fallen even closer to the summer solstice).

The winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night, when candles definitely were permitted, now falls on the feast of Saint Thomas. “Thomassing” is the last of the winter holidays associated with Midlands lacemakers. As with the other feasts we have discussed, it was not restricted to lacemakers. In fact it was celebrated much more widely than either Saint Catherine’s or Saint Andrew’s, as it has been recorded across most parts of England south of the Trent. The primary celebrants seem to have been older women, sometimes specifically widows, and occasionally young children. They would go “a-thomassing”, or “mumping” or “gooding” from door to door, perhaps singing or chanting, and collecting money, food and candles. This rhyme was used at Bliston Staffordshire in the nineteenth-century to encourage donations (we’ve found no records of such rhymes used in the east Midlands):

Well a day, well a day,
St Thomas goes too soon away,
Then your gooding we do pray,
For the good times will not stay,
St Thomas grey, St Thomas grey,
The longest night and the shortest day,
Please to remember St Thomas’s day.

Without these gifts from neighbours the poor would not be able to celebrate Christmas. “Mumping” is an old word meaning begging, but perhaps that does not quite capture the attitude of Thomassers. This is Walter Rose’s description of “Thomassing” in Haddenham (Bucks) before the Second World War:

On the twenty-first of December each year the old dames of the village, going about in pairs, canvassed those who could afford it for alms. Their attitude was not one of indigent poverty; they came in recognition of a time-honoured custom, a rite that needed no other explanation but the plain announcement, “If you please, we’ve come a-thomassing”. As a custom it was interesting and picturesque, but it was certainly evidence of an earlier poverty, and we may be glad that the granting of old age pensions brought it to an end. Yet one old lady (to her honour) still keeps the custom going – to whom, if it be my last, my sixpence shall be given.

The story of Saint Thomas and King Gondophares in a tapestry made by the Saint Thomas Guild of Nijmegen, a Dutch medieval re-enactment society. See: http://thomasguild.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/thomas-tapestry-project-choosing.html

The story of Saint Thomas and King Gondophares in a tapestry made by the Saint Thomas Guild of Nijmegen, a Dutch medieval re-enactment society.

 

The term “gooding” does not mean that Thomassers were after “goodies” but rather they presented an opportunity to do good. The story (which dates back to at least the 3rd century AD) goes that Saint Thomas the apostle was employed by a certain king Gondophares in what is now Afghanistan to build a glorious palace. Saint Thomas took all the money and gave it to the poor. The king was understandably angry until his deceased brother appeared to him in a dream and showed him the palace that his charity had built for him in heaven. Although this story does not seem to be widely known, it perhaps explains why Saint Thomas was an appropriate patron for seeking alms. According to Catholic doctrine, charity was the means to store up spiritual wealth. Yet oddly the historian Ronald Hutton (in his Stations of the Sun) has found little evidence of Thomassing before the Reformation, and while there are numerous parish benefactions, for instance at Leighton Buzzard (Beds) and Ravensden (Beds), which distributed doles to the parish poor on Saint Thomas’s day, most of these seem to date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Lacemakers very often numbered among the poor, including at Haddenham, Leighton Buzzard and Ravensden, but lacemakers were not specifically singled out for this charity. Lacemakers’ connection to Saint Thomas comes through the lace-schools which, as with Catterns and Tanders, provided an institutional framework for the maintenance of old traditions even while they were falling away in other regions. According to Catherine Channer, a Northamptonshire lace teacher at the beginning of the twentieth century, the children used to take the opportunity to “turn out” their teacher.

It is St. Thomas’s Day. The children are assembled; row behind row they are sitting, with their fat pillows resting against the stands before them. But by the look of repressed excitement on every face, there is evidently something about to happen. Presently the teacher leaves the room on the pretence of getting a parchment. In a minute the girl nearest the door has sprung up and bolted it; the pillows are put on one side, and an indescribable hubbub ensues. When the teacher returns she shakes the door violently, demanding to be let in; but the answer comes from thirty voices, “It’s St. Thomas’s Day; give us a half-holiday, and we’ll let you in.” For five minutes or so she stands outside grumbling and knocking, and then, finding that the children have turned the stools against her, she (not unwillingly, perhaps) gives in. The holiday is promised, the door is opened, and she walks in as the children rush out. As we watch them laughing and shouting, we think it is a pity that custom should have fixed their holiday for one of the dullest and certainly the shortest of the days in the year.

Channer does not mention the location of this school (and the implication is that the description could apply to many Midland lace schools), but possibilities include Ecton (Northants) and Stoke Goldington (Bucks). In his diary, John Cole of Ecton recorded the “turning out” of the mistress at Ecton lace school on Saint Thomas’s in 1832, while Thomas Wright records the same for Stoke Goldington in his The Romance of the Pillow.

Saint Andrew and ‘Tanders’, Midland Lacemakers’ Other Holiday

One ‘keeps cattern’ but one ’goes tandering’. We are not sure whether this semantic difference is meaningful. Nor are we certain why Saint Andrew became the patron of Midland lacemakers, who celebrated his feast either on ‘new’ (30th November) or ‘old’ (11 December) Saint Andrew’s Day. We know no legend or song that would account for this role similar to those told about Saint or Queen Catherine, and to our knowledge Saint Andrew was not held in particular reverence by any European lacemakers. One Catholic website suggests that it was because the Saint Andrew’s cross resembles intersecting threads… But we suspect that its origins are more ecclesiastical, because Saint Andrew is the patron of many of the churches in the diocese of Peterborough. It seems likely that Tanders was once a widely held village feast and that the association with lacemaking arose as other groups forgot, or were discouraged from, celebrating the saint.

 

Broughton village sign, featuring its tin can band on Tanders

Broughton village sign, featuring its tin can band on Tanders.  We borrowed this image from the ‘Broughton Bystander’, and we hope the bystander does not mind.

 

In some parts of Northamptonshire Tanders was not associated with lacemakers. In Broughton 54 people were bound over to keep the peace in 1930 after a night ‘tandering’, and a further 14 Broughton residents received summons to appear before Kettering magistrates in 1931 for celebrating Tanders too loudly. The crowd, estimated by the police at 1000 strong, had wandered the streets after midnight, banging tin cans and saucepan lids. The background to this mass demonstration was that the Parish Council had banned ‘tandering’, despite an overwhelming local referendum in favour of its maintenance: Saint Andrew being the patron of village church. None of those arrested were lacemakers; in fact there was only one woman among them, a fourteen-year-old ‘tailoress’ who was discharged as too young to be put through the trauma of a magistrates’ court hearing. The local magistrates obviously did not understand the custom, and in 1930 they assumed that this was a form of ‘rough music’ (a type of popular justice used to shame those who had broken the unspoken rules of community life, akin to the ‘Skimmington Ride’ which features in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge). In 1931 the defendants hired a Northampton lawyer, Mr Burton, who argued, successfully, that Tanders was a traditional custom, always celebrated on the Sunday closest to ‘Old Saint Andrew’s’. The defendants were discharged on the basis that, as the magistrates instructed, ‘nothing of the same kind occurs next year’. However, the revival of Tanders at Broughton continues still with a tin can band and other night-time revels (the website In search of traditional customs and ceremonies has some pictures of the band in action from 2014).

Although widespread across central and southern Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire (some indication of Tanders celebrations, mostly held by lacemakers, have been recorded from Blisworth, Carlton, Cranfield, Elstow, Hanslope, Harrold, Kimbolton (Huntingdonshire), Leighton Buzzard, Milton Malsor, North Crawley, Olney, Pavenham, Stevington, Spratton, Stoke Goldington, Turvey, Wilstead, and Yardley Hastings) the custom passed largely unnoticed until the mid-nineteenth century. The first detailed account we have found so far was provided by Thomas Sternberg in 1851:

Of all the numerous red-letter days which diversified the lives of our ancestors, this is the only one which has survived to our own times in anything like its pristine character. St Andrew appears to be looked upon by the lace-makers as their patron saint; which may perhaps account for the estimation in which his festival is held. In many places, where progress has not yet shown her face, the day is one of unbridled licence – a kind of miniature carnival. Village ‘scholards’ bar out their master; the lace-schools are deserted, and drinking and feasting prevail to a riotous extent. Towards evening the sober villagers appear to have become suddenly smitten with a violent taste for masquerading. Women may be seen walking about in male attire, while men and boys have donned the female dress, and visit each other’s cottages, drinking hot ‘eldern wine,’ the staple beverage of the season. Then commences the Mumming, too often described to need mention here, save to note that in the rude drama performed in the Northamptonshire villages, St George has given place to George III, and the dragon, formerly the greatest attraction of the piece, been supplanted by Napoleon, who is annually killed on this night in personal encounter with the aforesaid monarch, to the intense delight and edification of the loyal audience.

Sternberg’s describes something more boisterous than the ‘cattern teas’ described in our last post, but in many villages the two events passed off in a comparable manner, with ‘washing the candle-block’ the central element. This next description of ‘Tanders’ in Bedfordshire sounds quite like ‘keeping catterns’. It was written by Mrs Kate Leila Edmonds from Summerfield, Carlton… not quite as grand as the Orlebars of Hinwick House who promoted Cattern in Podington over three generations, but still a local mover and shaker, president of the Carlton W.I. after the war, and a promoter of the lace industry. She wrote two extensive accounts of ‘Tanders’ for the Bedfordshire Times and Independent, one in 1900, the second in 1905. We have transcribed the first of these from The British Newspaper Archive. In neither does she give her source, but the memories are not her own; they describe events in the 1850s, whereas Mrs Edmonds was born in 1866. Both descriptions are strongly marked by nostalgia for simpler times of industrious peasants, a sentiment that often characterised attempts to revive the lace-trade:

Fifty years ago, in a little village of Bedfordshire there was great excitement amongst the pupils of the ‘lace school’ one cold November morning. The school dame had no need to scold that day for idleness, or for tardiness in arriving; all had come punctually, and worked with a will. For this was ‘St. Andrews Day,’ or as the lace-makers termed it ‘Tanders’ which brought a half holiday for them all. So the heads were bent over the lace pillows, and the quick fingers picked out the pins and stuck them in again rapidly that a novice would think it looked like play. Ah! but each pupil knew how much she can do in an hour; and she also knew that if she loitered or idled in the least, she could never make up for the lost time. For this lace making cannot be hurried; every stitch must receive the orthodox number of twists and crosses of the bobbins, to make good saleable lace. It was no uncommon thing for the ‘lace buyer’ to take off one half-penny in the yard if a lace was ill-made or not a pure white colour, and this was a consideration of much moment in days when halfpennies were so scarce. Holidays were almost as scarce as half-pennies; hence the unwonted attention of ‘Tanders’ morning fifty years ago. At last the welcome hour of twelve arrived, and one by one the pupils prepare to go home. Bobbins are carefully parted and pushed back each side of the pillow to prevent tangles. The ‘drawer,’ or narrow strip of patchwork is drawn over the lace to keep it spotless; a ‘cover,’ also made of print pieces, is pinned over the lace pillow, and work is over for the day. What a merry time they have! Let us look into one house and see how the lacemakers keep ‘Tanders day.’ The table, chairs, etc., are removed, and the ‘house-place’ cleared; for this is to be no stiff ceremonial party as we shall see. Someone has brought the ‘blades’ of a bobbin wheel, used in non-holiday times to stretch the skein of thread while winding. The ‘blades’ consist of two pieces of wood crossing each other in form like the letter X. The four points of the ‘blades’ being sharpened, a quarter of an apple is stuck on three points, and a piece of tallow candle on the fourth. Now the fun begins; the blades are suspended by a string from the ceiling. one of the party being blind-folded, the hands are tied behind, and as the blades are spun round the blind-folded one has to try to catch in the mouth a piece of apple from one of the points. Great is the fun and delight when, instead of a bite of apple, a bite of candle is taken. But much good temper prevails, and all are willing to take their turn at the ‘snap-apple,’ and so passes the amusement round. But now, the supply of apples being exhausted, and everybody tired of romping, the ‘snap-apple’ is abandoned, and the making of ‘Tanders’ sweets’ begins. These were days when dentists were almost unknown to country folk. Was this due to the fact that sugar was 5d a lb., and sweets regarded as a great luxury for the children? Whether this was so or not, the ‘Tanders’ sweets’ were good and wholesome, and coming only once a year they were in the eyes of the youngsters delicious. Brown sugar, and a very small lump of butter were the ingredients used in making the sweets, and until the boiling process was over everyone was in a state of great excitement and fear, lest the sweets should ‘turn to sugar’ and burn. The boiled sugar being poured on to a floured dish, each one had a hand in rolling or cutting sweets, and putting them by to cool.

The next morning was a trying time to the School Dame. Every lace-maker brought specimen’s of ‘Tander’s sweets’; some burnt black, some sugary, some clear as candy, and all exceedingly sticky. In vain does the School Dame threaten to ‘keep in’ and ‘tell your mother.’ The delinquents still eat sweets and muse on the joys of ‘Tander’s Day,’ thinking dismally what a pity it is that they have to wait a whole year before it comes again. Is it a pity? I think not.

 

A lacemakers' bobbin winder from the Pitt Rivers Museum (1911.29.17). It was collected by Percy Manning from Maria Woods of Launton near Bicester (Oxon) in 1894. The blades suggest a St Andrew's Cross, perhaps the reason for its use in games on Tanders.

A lacemaker’s bobbin winder from the Pitt Rivers Museum (1911.29.17). It was collected by Percy Manning from Maria Woods of Launton near Bicester (Oxon) in 1894. The blades suggest a St Andrew’s Cross, perhaps the reason for its use in games on Tanders.

 

Mrs Edmonds’ second article ended with an impassioned plea: ‘Wake up, English lace-makers? Teach your children all you know yourselves, and save the English lace trade from going out of the villages where it has been made for generations.’ Although probably not a lacemaker herself, her description of ‘snap apple’ and ‘Tanders sweets’ tally with other accounts. The reference to a school holiday may account for why lacemakers were among the last celebrators of Saint Andrew’s Day, as they were of St Catherine’s. The lace-school institutionalised memory of these holidays, and gave young lacemakers an incentive to maintain them. Hence the well-known account of ‘barring out’ at Spratton lace school, written in the 1890s but referring to events in the 1850s:

On S. Andrew’s Day they had a curious custom to seize the opportunity of the mistress leaving the room and then lock her out, and on her return they sang,

Pardon Mistress, Pardon Master, Pardon for a pin;
If you won’t give a holiday, We will not let you in.

After a brief display of counterfeited anger the mistress would give way, and the pupils had their half-holiday. The mistress was pretty severe, carrying a cane, and often giving them a cut if they behaved badly, and it is more than likely, says my informant, that they from time to time deserved it.

(The author of this account, which first appeared in Northamptonshire Notes and Queries in 1892, was Margaret Emily Roberts, the daughter of the vicar of Saint Andrew’s, Spratton, a lace teacher and active in the Midland Lace Association.)

Several accounts of Tanders mention a special cake consumed on that day. Pavenham W.I. contributed a recipe for a ‘Tandra cake’ to the 1948 Cookery Book of Traditional Dishes. We have still not tracked this down, but in the meantime here is Julia Jones’ and Barbara Deer’s recipe for a St Andrew’s Cake from Cattern Cakes and Lace. A Calendar of Feasts:

Ingredients

  • 1lb/450g plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • ½ oz/15 g fresh or ½ tablespoon dried yeast
  • 1 teaspoon caster sugar
  • ½ pint/300 ml warm water
  • 1 egg beaten
  • 4oz/100g lard, melted
  • 4oz/100g currants
  • 4oz/100 g sugar
  • 1 oz diced crystallized lemon peel 

Instructions

  • Oven 180 degrees C.
  • Sift the flour and salt into a bowl.
  • Cream the yeast with the teaspoon of sugar and blend in the water.
  • Leave the yeast to froth and bubble, then mix with the beaten egg and add to the flour.
  • Pour in the cooled, melted lard, and mix until smooth.
  • Knead well, cover and leave to double in size.
  • Knock back the dough and knead in the currants, sugar, and peel.
  • Transfer to a greased 2lb/1kg loaf tin.
  • Leave to rise until the dough reaches the top of the tin. 20-30 mins.
  • Then back to oven for 60-70 mins until well risen and golden.
  • Cool on a wire rack.
  • Slice and serve with butter.

 

Nicolette 'enjoying' David's attempts to bake a Tanders cake.

Nicolette ‘enjoying’ David’s attempts to bake a Tanders cake.

 

Sources

Anne Elizabeth Baker, Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases, With Examples of their Colloquial Use, And Illustrations from Various Authors: To Which are Added, the Customs of the County  (London: John Russell Smith, 1854).

Kate Leila Edmonds, ‘The Lace Makers’ Patron Saint.  Fifty Years Ago’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 16 February 1900.

Kate Leila Edmonds, ‘St. Andrew’s Day or “Tanders”,’ Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 24 November, 1905.

Rev. E.R. Grant (Unitarian minister of Northampton), text of talk given on ‘The Legends and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire’ at Northampton Town Hall, reported in the Northampton Mercury, 13 March 1880.

Dorothy Grimes, Like Dew Before the Sun.  Life and Language in Northamptonshire  (Northampton: Dorothy Grimes, 1991).

Julia Jones and Barbara Deer, Cattern Cakes and Lace: A Calendar of Feasts (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1987).

‘M.E.R’ [Margaret Emily Roberts], ‘Spratton Lace School’, Northamptonshire Notes and Queries, 4, 1892.

‘Tin Can Band in Court: Broughton Mummers who Celebrated “Tander”,’ Northampton Mercury, 2 January 1931.

Thomas Sternberg, The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire  (London & Northampton: John Russell Smith, 1851).

Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow  (Olney: H.H. Armstrong, 1919).

 

 

Of Saints, Queens and ‘Cattern Cakes’: Saint Catherine’s Day, the Lacemakers’ Holiday

25 November is the Feast of Saint Catherine, and historically a holiday for the Midlands lacemakers, particularly those in Buckinghamshire and some northern parts of Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. (Lacemakers in the southern and central parts of the latter counties tended to celebrate Saint Andrew’s Day instead; we deal with this holiday on his feast, 30 November.)

According to the ‘official’ legend — and we’ll see that lacemakers, and in fact almost everybody else who celebrated her feast, told a rather different story — Saint Catherine was a virgin martyr from early fourth century Alexandria in Egypt. Her father was the Roman governor of the province, but Catherine was a philosopher and Christian convert. She refused to submit first to the persecutions of Emperor Maxentius, then to his lascivious attentions, declaring that she was the bride of Christ. Infuriated, Maxentius ordered that she be broken on a wheel, but the device fell apart at her touch. Finally he had her beheaded.

 

Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1504-9, 'The Martyrdom of St. Catherine'. The painting is in the collection of the Ráday Library of the Reformed Church, Budapest (source Wikipedia Commons)

Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1504-9, ‘The Martyrdom of St. Catherine’. The painting is in the collection of the Ráday Library of the Reformed Church, Budapest (source Wikipedia Commons)

 

Although there is little historical evidence for Catherine, she was one of the most popular saints in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and her cult clearly survived the Protestant Reformation in England. Because her attribute is the wheel, she became the patron of wheelwrights, and by extension carpenters, as well as ropemakers and spinners. She was the patron of both young women and old maids (spinsters in another sense), and as these groups formed the labour force for the needle trades, her patronage extended to all involved in textile production. The ‘bal de Sainte Catherine’ is still an important event in the calendar of the Paris fashion houses.[1]

 

A 'Catherinette' celebrating Saint Catherine's Day in early C20 France. We might explain the significance of the hat and the colours yellow and green in a future blog. For further examples of how the French celebrate Saint Catherine's Day, see Guy Larcy's pinterest board 'Fête Sainte Catherine'

A ‘Catherinette’ celebrating Saint Catherine’s Day in early C20 France. We might explain the significance of the hat and the colours yellow and green in a future blog. For further examples of how the French celebrate Saint Catherine’s Day, see Guy Larcy’s pinterest board ‘Fête Sainte Catherine’.

 

In England, ‘keeping Cattern’ —that is celebrating Saint Catherine’s Day — was by no means confined to lacemakers. Even after the Reformation, women in the workhouse would receive a dole in order to ‘keep Cattern’.[2] In some towns, such as Ware and Peterborough, women — in the latter town principally the female inmates of the workhouse — paraded behind their own ‘queen’, singing:

Here comes Queen Catherine, as fine as any queen,
With a coach and six horses, a-coming to be seen,
And a-spinning we will go, will go,
And a-spinning we will go.

No doubt this was an opportunity to raise money for a feast later in the day.[3] In other parts of the country, particularly Worcestershire (though the custom has been recorded elsewhere), it was young children who used this day as an opportunity to tramp from house to house collecting apples and ale, aided by a rhyme such as this one:

Catherine and Clement be here, be here,
Some of your apples and some of your beer;
Some for Peter, and some for Paul,
And some for Him that made us all.
Clement was good old man,
For his sake give us some,
None of the worst but some of the best,
And God will send your soul to rest![4]

Saint Clement’s feast falls on 23 November and was another important holiday, though usually observed in different regions to Saint Catherine’s. A Sussex version of this rhyme names ‘Cattern’ as the mother of ‘Clemen’, an unlikely relationship for a virgin saint![5] Other indications of her widespread popularity are a recipe for a Cattern pie from Somerset,[6] and Cattern Fair held outside Guildford, where Cattern cakes were sold well into the nineteenth century.[7]

However, by the late nineteenth century, lacemakers were almost the only group to still hold her in honour. Occasionally in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire the mummers who put on the traditional drama of Saint George and the Turkish Knight in the run-up to Christmas were called ‘Katterners’, though any specific memory of Saint Catherine seems to have been forgotten.[8] Newspaper accounts suggest that ‘Cattern’ was still kept by carpenters in Chatteris (Cambridgeshire) in the 1860s,[9] and the farmer Mr Lot Arnsby of Raunds (Northamptonshire), though a Baptist, still treated his labourers to cakes and ale on Saint Catherine’s Day in the 1870s.[10] In both cases, the feast was held on 6 December, ‘Old Saint Catherine’s’, that is date of her feast before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in Britain in 1752 had entailed the loss of eleven days. These examples are very isolated compared with the numerous newspaper mentions of lacemakers ‘keeping Cattern’, sometimes on Old and sometimes on New Saint Catherine’s Day. In fact the feast seems to have undergone periodic revivals among lacemakers, often sponsored by local landowners and patrons of the lace industry.

Although there are references to women ‘Catherning’ or ‘keeping Catterns’ from the seventeenth and eighteenth century,[11] the earliest reference we have so far found to this day as a special feast among lacemakers is in a short article in Notes and Queries for May 1862 by ‘A.A.’ (we have not identified the initials) reporting that:

In Buckinghamshire, on Cattern Day (St. Catherine’s, 25th of November,) these hard-working people hold merry-makings, and eat a sort of cakes they call ‘wigs,’ and drink ale. The tradition says it is in remembrance of a Queen Catharine; who, when the trade was dull, burnt all her lace, and ordered new to be made.[12]

Although A.A. asked readers who this Queen might have been, the topic went quiet in that journal until in 1868. Interest was revived then by a review in The Quarterly Review of Mrs Bury Palliser’s 1865 A History of Lace, in which the author claimed (and in this the reviewer was following Mrs Palliser’s lead) that:

Catherine of Aragon, according to tradition, introduced the art of making lace into Bedfordshire during her sojourn at Ampthill in 1531-33. She was a great adept in the arts of the needle. Until quite lately the lace-makers kept ‘Cattern’s-day’ as the holiday of their craft, in memory of the good Queen Catherine.[13]

On what authority did Mrs Bury Palliser make this statement, asked J.M. Cowper in Notes and Queries?[14] The several responses did not resolve that issue, but they did provide plenty of evidence for lacemakers ‘keeping Catterns’. For example, John Plummer, who originally came from Kettering, reported that the feast

is known to be kept, for several generations, throughout the whole of Northamptonshire lace-making districts, as well as in those of Bedfordshire. By some it is called ‘candle-day,’ from its forming the commencement of the season for working at lacemaking by candle-light.[15]

He reiterated the tradition that ‘Queen Katherine was a great friend to the lacemakers’, but suggested that instead of Catherine of Aragon, Catherine Parr was meant, because the Parrs were a Northamptonshire family. However later in the same month A.A. returned to the topic and reiterated his story, this time definitely identifying the lace-burning queen as Catherine of Aragon.[16]

Readers will have noticed that, so far, there is no reference to a saint in any of these lacemakers’ celebrations, only queens. Two different stories were told. The oldest, though how old we are uncertain, concerns a queen burning her lace in order to create more work for lacemakers. A ballad, claimed as traditional (though we have our doubts) was apparently sung at a Kattern Day revival in Marsh Gibbon in 1905:

Queen Katherine loved to deck with lace
The royal robes she wore;
But though she loved to wear her lace,
She loved the lace-folk more.
So now for good Queen Katherine’s sake
Put bones and sticks away,
And keep the yearly festival
And sing on ‘Kattern Day.’[17]

As one recent historian has written, this story encapsulates a feminine, utopian economy which completely denies the laws of supply and demand, and in which the great existed to provide work for the small, and ‘harmoniously brings together the otherwise separate processes of production and consumption.”’18]

The second story, crediting Queen Catherine of Aragon as the original teacher of lace in England, is slightly later in origin but far more widespread, as it was regularly repeated in newspaper accounts in the late nineteenth century, became the focus of W.I. lectures and pageants in the twentieth, and is now regularly repeated on the web. This continuing tradition owes everything to Mrs Palliser’s reputation as a reliable historian of lace, it has no basis in any oral tradition linking that queen with the genesis of the lace industry. Mrs Palliser inferred from rather vague lacemakers’ traditions concerning a ‘good queen who protected their craft’, that the art of lace-working, as it then existed, was first imparted to the peasantry of Bedfordshire, as a means of subsistence, through the charity of Katherine of Aragon.’[19] To return to J.M. Cowper’s question in Notes and Queries — on what authority had this claim been advanced — the answer is on no greater authority than Mrs Palliser’s romantic inference. However, her invention has proved enormously popular, for it invoked a tradition of royal patronage of lace that was, at the time, still vital to the trade.

 

Catherine of Aragon by Lucas Hornebolte. now in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch (a Northamptonshire landowner; according to Rev Lindsay of Kettering, in the 1860s the then Duke of Buccleuch was responsible for promoting Katterns). From Wikipedia Commons.

Catherine of Aragon by Lucas Hornebolte, now in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch (the dukes of Buccleuch were Northamptonshire landowners as well as Scottish aristocracy; according to Rev Lindsay of Kettering, in the 1860s the then Duke of Buccleuch was responsible for promoting Katterns in that town). From Wikipedia Commons.

 

 

We doubt that Catterns had a connection to any English queen; rather it was the continuation of a Catholic saint’s day feast in Protestant England. We cannot say when and where the tradition turned the saint into queen: it may have been a post-Reformation defensive measure, for it was permitted to celebrate royalty when Catholic saints had fallen into disrepute. However, it is worth pointing out that in the popular culture of Catholic Europe, Catherine was always imagined as a queen, or at least a princess. The first line of a song popular throughout Spain, France and Italy, and indeed much further afield, tells us that Catalina/Catherine/Caterina was a ‘hija de un rey’ (in Spanish), ‘fille d’un roi’ (in French), ‘figlia di un re’ (in Italian).[20] Sometimes she is specifically identified as the daughter of the king of Hungary; in all cases it is her father, not a Roman emperor, who is responsible for her martyrdom. And while Saint Catherine was not usually the named patron of European lacemakers, nonetheless European lacemakers knew and sang her story. For example, in an audio recording made by Jean Dumas in 1959, you can hear Virginie Granouillet, a seventy-year-old lacemaker from Roche-en-Régnier (Haute-Loire), accompanying her bobbins with a version of the song.[21]

 

Virginie Granouillet, lacemaker and singer of Roche-en-Régnier (Haute-Loire). The photo, c. 1960, was taken by the song collector Jean Dumas. Dumas' recordings of 178 of Virginie's songs, including 'Sainte Catherine', are now available online on http://patrimoine-oral.org/

Virginie Granouillet, lacemaker and singer of Roche-en-Régnier (Haute-Loire). The photo, c. 1960, was taken by the song collector Jean Dumas. Dumas’ recordings of 178 of Virginie’s songs, including ‘Sainte Catherine’, are now available online.

 

How did lacemakers ‘keep Catterns’? There are vague references to an earlier period when women dressed up in male attire and indulged in unfettered merry-making, including amorous (or violent) advances to passing men, a moment of female license, but we have no specific information.[22] The fullest description comes from Mrs Frederica Orlebar of Hinwick House, Podington (Bedfordshire) who wrote an account of an attempted revival in 1887 — which would form the template for further revivals in 1906 and 1937.[23] The Orlebars were landed gentry who had provided leadership to the county, as magistrates, M.P.s and masters of the hunt for several generations. Their patronage of the lace industry was part and parcel of this paternalistic concern for their tenants and electors. Catherine Channer used the manuscript ‘Orlebar Chronicles’ to write her 1900 account:

Cattern Tea.

In Podington and neighbouring villages the lacemakers have, within the memory of middle-aged people, ‘kept Cattern’, on December 6th – St. Catherine’s Day (Old Style).
I believe it was Catherine of Aragon who used to drink the waters of a mineral spring in Wellingborough, and who (as is supposed) introduced lace-making into Beds. The poor people know nothing of the Queen, only state that it was an old custom to keep ‘Cattern.’
The way was for the women to club together for a tea, paying 6d. apiece, which they could well afford when their lace brought them in 5s. or 6s. a week. The tea-drinking ceremony was called ‘washing the candle-block,’ but this was merely an expression. It really consisted in getting through a great deal of gossip, tea, and Cattern cakes – seed cakes of large size. Sugar balls went round as a matter of course. After tea they danced, just one old man whistling or fiddling for them, and ‘they enjoyed themselves like queens!
The entertainment ended with the cutting of a large apple pie, which they divided for supper. Their usual bedtime was about eight o’clock.[24]

This may be more staid than earlier celebrations, but some of the elements referred to here come up in other accounts too. The first is that it was a communal women’s festival: a man might provide the music but the lacemakers danced with each other. Money was pooled to provide food, drink and entertainment: rabbit or steak with onion sauce, followed by pies and cakes. Cattern pies — sometimes containing mincemeat, sometimes apples (as we have seen, Catterners collected apples) — might be arranged in the shape of a wheel, with partakers being offered a ‘spoke’.[25] Mrs Orlebar quoted a rhyme, apparently sung by the nightwatchman of Kettering, which made the pies the centrepiece of the celebration:

Rise, maids arise!
Bake your Cattern pies!
Bake enough, and bake no waste,
So that the old bell-man may have a taste!

Cattern cakes appear to be a different thing to a Cattern pie: the cakes come in various descriptions but the recipes almost always contain caraway seeds, which connects them to the ‘soul cakes’ consumed at Halloween in other parts of the country. The drink mentioned in connection with these festivities was methleglin, a honey mead termed ‘meytheagle’ in the Bedfordshire dialect.[26]

The term ‘washing’ or ‘wetting the candle-block’ explains why Plummer called this a ‘candle-day’. The holiday was not just the celebration of the patroness of lacemakers, it was the ritual marking of an important moment in the lacemakers’ year, for this was the day when candles, objects of enormous expense, could legitimately be used for evening work. These kind of candle feasts, opening and closing the period of neighbourly winter evening work gatherings, were quite common all over Europe. Among English lacemakers the closing day of the season appears to have been Candlemas (2 February), though it was not celebrated as much as Catterns.[27] This practice of working together to share light and heat also explains why Catterns was a communal feast. A candle-block provided light not for one lacemaker but many: a single candle would be mounted in the centre of several glass globes or flasks filled with snow-water, which would concentrate the light on the pillows of several lacemakers (the highest number of users of a single candle that we have so far encountered is eighteen!). But lacemakers did not only symbolically ‘wash’ the candleblock, they also leapt over it. According to John Aubrey, back in the 1680s, Oxfordshire girls (not specifically lacemakers) would ‘set a candle in the middle of the room in a candlestick, and then draw up their coats into the form of breaches [another hint at cross-dressing], and dance over the candle back and forth, with these words’:

The tailor of Biciter [Bicester] He has but one eye
He cannot cut a pair of green galagaskins
If he were to die.

Aubrey thought the custom was obsolete even in his time, but in fact the same game, and the same rhyme, have been recorded as late as 1910.[28]

Thomas Wright notes a different song being chanted by pupils jumping the candlestick in the lace schools at Wendover:

Wallflowers, Wallflowers, growing up so high,
All young maidens surely have to die;
Excepting Emma Caudrey, she’s the best of all.
She can dance and she can skip,
She can turn the candlestick.
Turn, turn, turn your face to the wall again[29]

Given the height of a lighted candle on a block players ran significant risks during this game. It is interesting to observe that even on holiday, lacemakers insist on the presence of death.

 

A lacemakers' candle block or 'flash stool', with central candle and four light condensing flasks or 'flashes'. This one is from Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney. Catterns and Tanders were 'candle days', the official beginning of the season of evening work by candlelight.

A lacemakers’ candle block or ‘flash stool’, with central candle and four light condensing flasks or ‘flashes’. This one is from Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney. Catterns and Tanders were ‘candle days’, the official beginning of the season of evening work by candlelight.

 

 

We can’t leave Catterns without giving a recipe for Cattern cakes. In 1948, Podington, Hinwick and Farndish Women’s Institute provided a recipe for the Cookery Book of Traditional Dishes which accompanied the ‘Home Produce Exhibition’.[30] We have not been able to track down a copy of this, so we have borrowed a recipe from the North Downs Lacemakers’ website[31]:

Ingredients

  • 9oz /275g self raising flour
  • ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 oz/25g currants
    2oz/50g ground almonds
  • 2 teaspoons caraway seeds
  • 7oz/200g caster sugar
  • 4oz/100g melted butter
  • 1 medium egg, beaten
  • A little extra sugar and cinnamon for sprinkling

 

Instructions

  • Sift the flour and cinnamon into a bowl and stir in currants, almonds, caraway seeds and sugar.
  • Add the melted butter and beaten egg, mix well to give a soft dough (add a little milk if too dry).
  • Roll out on a floured board into a rectangle, about 12×10 inches/30x25cm.
  • Brush the dough with water and sprinkle with the extra sugar and cinnamon.
  • Roll up like a swiss roll and cut into ¾ inch/2cm slices.
  • Place on a greased baking tray spaced well apart and bake for 10 minutes. Oven set at 200 degrees C /400 degrees F/Gas 6.
  • Cool on a wire rack.

We’ve tried it, and the results were very tasty, though they didn’t look as much like Catherine Wheels as we had intended.

 

A sampling of David's Cattern cakes. They were quite popular.

A sampling of David’s Cattern cakes. They were quite popular.

 

 

[1] See Ann Monjaret’s wonderful study, La Sainte Catherine: Culture festive dans l’entreprise (Paris, 1997).

[2] Robert Gibbs refers to an entry in the Aylesbury overseers’ accounts for 1672: A Historyof Aylesbury with the Borough and Hundreds, The Hamlet of Walton, and The Electoral Division. Aylesbury, Bucks Advertiser, 1885

[3] A. R. Wright, British Calendar Customs, ed. T. E. Lones, (Folk-Lore Society, 1936), iii. 108, 144. The tune, presumably, is ‘A begging we will go’. Pete Castle recorded a version of the song on the album ‘False Waters’. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABjMfqjl2pQ

[4] James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England (London, 1849) p. 238. For a map of ‘Catterning’ in the West Midlands See Charlotte S. Burne. ‘Souling, Clementing, and Catterning. Three November Customs of the Western Midlands’, Folk-Lore 25:3 (1914), p. 285.

[5] William Douglas Parish, A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect and Collection of Provincialisms in Use in the County of Sussex (Lewes, 1875), p.25: ‘Catterning’.

[6] Margaret Baker. Folklore and Customs of Rural England (Newton Abbot, 1974), p. 132.

[7] A.J.M. ‘Catherine Hill in Surrey’, Notes and Queries 7th series II, 14 August 1886.

[8] Walter Rose, Good Neighbours. Some Recollections of an English Village and its People, Cambridge UP, 1943, pp. 131-5 (based on his experiences in Haddenham, Bucks). Fred Hamer recorded the same usage in Bedfordshire, though the ‘Folk Play Distribution Map: Actors’ Names’ on Peter Millington’s Master Mummers Website suggests it was quite rare even in this region: http://www.mastermummers.org/atlas/ActorsNames.php?maptype=outline&go=Go+%3E%3E

[9] Cambridge Independent Press, Saturday 8 December 1860.

[10] Peterborough Advertiser, 13 December 1879.

[11] Charles Lamotte, An Essay upon Poetry and Painting, with Relation to the Sacred and Profane History (London, 1730), p. 126.

[12] A.A., ‘Lace-Makers’ Custom: Wigs, A Sort of Cake’, Notes and Queries 3rd series I, 17 May, 1862, p. 387.

[13]History of Lace, by Mrs Bury Palliser’, review in The Quarterly Review 125 (July-Oct., 1868): pp. 166-188, p. 168.

[14] J.M. Cowper, ‘Cattern’s Day’, Notes and Queries 4th series II, 29 August, 1868, p. 201.

[15] John Plummer, ‘Kattern’s Day’, Notes and Queries 4th series II. 3 October, 1868., p. 333.

[16] A.A. ‘Kattern’s Day’, Notes and Queries 4th series II, 17 October, 1868, p. 377.

[17] Buckingham Advertiser and Free Press, Saturday 2 December 1905.

[18] Elaine Freedgood, ‘“Fine Fingers”: Victorian Handmade Lace and Utopian Consumption’, Victorian Studies 45 (2003), p. 637.

[19] Fanny Bury Palliser, A History of Lace (2nd edition: London, 1869), p. 326.

[20] The Pan-Hispanic Ballad Project lists 42 versions of IGRH song-type 0126 ‘Santa Catalina’ https://depts.washington.edu/hisprom/optional/balladaction.php?igrh=0126 ; the Coirault catalogue of French folk songs likewise lists numerous versions of song-type 8906 ‘Le martyre de sainte Catherine’; there is no equivalent Italian catalogue of folk-songs, but it is quite a common children’s song: in our experience all Italians know of it.

[21] http://patrimoine-oral.org/dyn/portal/index.seam?aloId=15575&page=alo&fonds=3

[22] Christina Hole. A Dictionary of British Folk Customs. Hutchinson, 1976

[23] Northampton Mercury, Friday 14 December 1906; Northampton Mercury, Friday 26 February 1937.

[24] Catherine C. Channer and Margaret E. Roberts, Lace-making in the Midlands, Past and Present (London, 1900), pp. 70-71.

[25] A recipe is offered in Joanna Bogle, A Book of Feasts and Seasons (Leominster, 1992).

[26] ‘Wetting the Candleblock’, Bedfordshire Mercury, Friday 13 December 1912.

[27] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace PillowOlney, Bucks: H.H. Armstrong, 1919, p. 202.

[28] James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales: A Sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England (London, 1849), p.231, quoting from the manuscript of Aubrey’s Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme; Arthur R. Wright and T.E. Lones, British Calendar Customs: England (London, 1940), vol. 3, p. 178.

[29] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney, 1919), p. 195. Obviously the name used depends on the player. A similar rhyme was recorded by Fred Hamer at Biddenham in Bedfordshire.

[30] ‘Women’s Institutes. Traditional Dishes for National Exhibition. Bedfordshire’s Contributions’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, Friday 24 September 1948

[31] http://www.northdownslacemakers.org.uk/features/2007/catterns-day.php A very similar recipe is provided in Julia Jones and Barbara Deer, Cattern Cakes and Lace: A Calender of Feasts (London, 1987).

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