Hallowe’en and Valentine: The Culture of Saints’ Days in the English-Speaking World

Abstract

The early modern history of the festivities associated with Hallowe’en and St Valentine’s Day reveals a significant overlap in early forms of celebration and customary practices. In the eighteenth century, however, each day developed its own distinctive traditional identity. This article argues that this was a result of mass print culture and the spread of literature: primarily in popular verses, the poetry of Robert Burns, and the influence of William Shakespeare.

Notes

1 Schmidt gives an example from 1810 held by Hallmark Design Collections, Hallmark Cards, Kansas City; see also Schmidt (1995), Barth (1982), and McDannell (1995).

2 I have tried to avoid repeating material on St Valentine’s Day and Hallowe’en concerning St Valentine himself, John Lydgate and Robert Herrick on birds, Charles Lamb on cards, Valentining, Samhain fires, Punky Night, Mizzy Night, weather prognostication, souling and soulcakes, and so forth already covered in my book The Seasons (Groom 2014, 294–97and 255–56).

3 Harris, for instance, proposes that practices (as well as objects and places) are ‘polychronic’, in which earlier meanings and purposes co-exist with present ones.

4 See http://www.knoxlib.org/local-family-history/custom-house-chronicles/valentines-day-feast-fools

5 The term is used by Ben Jonson in his play Sejanus, but ‘Plum Shuttles’ appears to be the preferred name today.

6 ‘Mr. Pennant tells us in his Tour in Scotland, that the young Women there determine the Figure and Size of their Husbands by drawing Cabbages blindfold on Allhallow Even, and like the English fling Nuts into the Fire’ (Brand 1777, 344).

7 From 20 February 1755 (pages are wrongly numbered).

8 This is listed in several songsters from 1780: see, for example, The Chearful Companion (1780, 165).

9 See also the traditional ‘Come foul—come fair—come frost—come fine / Dear, will you be my Valentine?’ quoted by Darling (1951, 47).

10 ‘Tom’ was the generic name for a butler or pantryman.

11 ‘DICK the Groom, to DOLL the Dairy-Maid’; the ‘hay’ is a weaving move common in English country dancing.

12 See, for example, ‘Dr B–––y’, ‘Lines sent to a Young Lady, with a Pair of Gloves, on St. Valentine’s Day’, in The Poetical Farrago (1794, 48).

13 For the ditty, see The Merry Musician (1716, 3: 18).

14 They also cast elf-shot at cattle or lay the evil-eye on them; ‘Gyar-Carlin’ is not glossed, but in Scotland is a class of fairy folk, especially a witch or an ogress.

15 Here, Samhain is figured (fancifully) as the deity of the moon in whose honour fires are lit on the eve of November. However, a subsequent wordlist does define the word as ‘all saints’, without reference to a god (MacFarlan 1795, 133).

16 Kale or kail was a generic name for cabbage.

17 There is an unnerving inversion of this in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, when Jonathan Harker, gazing into a mirror, fails to see the Count peering over his shoulder as he shaves (Stoker 2011, 27).

18 There is very little glossing of this in either in the Johnson-Steevens-Malone edition of 1780–82 (vol. 10, 346), nor in Percy’s Reliques.

19 See http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-question/Lords/2017-03-27/HL6360

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nick Groom

Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter. Among his many books are The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year (London: Atlantic, 2014), shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Prize, and The Vampire: A New History (Yale University Press, 2018).