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Abstract
The Burning of the Clavie is a calendar custom traditionally associated with the ancient Pictish seaport of Burghead, but fishermen in north-east Scotland had their own ‘needfire’ version of the Clavie, used to instantly remedy spells of poor catches believed to have been caused by evil spirits, witches, or other forms of ill-luck. This article aims to delineate the maritime or fishermen’s Clavie as a reactive ritual rather than a calendar custom. The Clavie will be compared against other beliefs held and rituals re-enacted by the fishing communities, demonstrating that the fishermen had a specific set of ‘crisis’ rituals thought to rid them of ill-luck at sea. This article also offers, by its use of oral reminiscence, a snapshot of the contemporary belief concerning the Clavie found in mid twentieth- to early twenty-first-century fishermen in north-east Scotland and Shetland.
Notes
1 See entry in the CANMORE database of Historic Environment Scotland for Burghead and its Pictish fort: https://canmore.org.uk/site/16146/Burghead.
2 ‘With much ingenuity and learning Sir Arthur Mitchell seeks to connect the “Well,” the Bulls and the Burning of the Clavie with Mithras’ (MacDonald Citation1891, 82). Indeed, Mitchell based his premise on a suggestion proposed by Dr John McGrigor, MD, of Nairn, who moved his practice to Rome where he took a great interest in antiquarian matters (see Mitchell Citation1875, 666).
3 ‘Sain’ is derived from the Scottish Gaelic seun, which has a variety of meanings including to bless, charm, avoid, or forbear. Saining or seunadh is defined in Edward Dwelly’s Gaelic dictionary as an ‘act of defending by charms or enchantment’ (Dwelly Citation1993). See also Campbell (Citation2005, 211).
4 Jacob Grimm records many midsummer saining rituals being carried out across Europe on St John’s Day, 24 June. One example involved a fire being kindled in the name of St John and locals ‘leapt and ran and drave the cattle there thro’, and were filled of a thousand joys’ (Grimm Citation1883, 612). Also observed are French, German, and English examples of the Yule-log/clog/block that is burned around Christmastime; it would appear that the Germanic traditions were geared towards the summer rather than those of the Celts who celebrated in winter (Grimm Citation1883, 612–30).
5 ‘In the Highlands, New Year’s Day, like the old Quarter Days, was a time of saining’ (McNeill Citation1961, 113–14). Logierait’s burning of the faggots took place on 1 November, which was the most important of Quarter Days; that is, Samhain, the Celtic New Year. See description by parish minister Rev. Dr Thomas Bisset under Logierait, Perth in volume 5 of Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland (Sinclair Citation1793a, 75).
6 The Hebridean Caisein-Uchd, part of the Christmas/Yule/Hogmanay celebrations, was another form of purification ritual involving smoke which John Gregorson Campbell recorded in the nineteenth century. ‘Caisein-Uchd’ translates as the breast strip of an animal, usually a male sheep, which was wrapped around a stick with fat and set alight so it smoked, and was part of the ritual items carried around the community by the ‘Hogmanay Boys’. Each member of the household would then waft the smoking caisein around their heads deiseil (sunwise) for good luck in the following year. The full description appears in Campbell (Citation2005, 531). Ronald Black, editor of Campbell’s works, observes that the caisein was derived from the scapegoat rituals of the Middle East, where a sacrificial animal was sent into the desert symbolically carrying away the sins of the community (see Campbell Citation2005, 577). Kenny Beaton, a native of Stoneybridge, South Uist, and his neighbours recently revived the ‘Hogmanay Boys’ tradition and, as of 2018, let girls take part for the first time. He presented on this at the Winter’s Last online conference organized by the Taibhsear Collective in January 2021, where he demonstrated the modern incarnation of the caisein made from an old t-shirt covered in lard and wrapped around a stick, which smoked most effectively.
7 ‘Soip Seáin’ literally means ‘John’s wisp’; that is, a puff of smoke emanating from a wisp of straw (Ó Dónaill Citation1977, s.v.).
8 Illustrator W. J. Wakeman provided an accurate sketch in Wood-Martin’s work (see Wood-Martin 1901, 35, fig. 6).
9 The spread of the needfire ritual into ‘Protestant’ Ulster may suggest that it originated in Scotland and was brought there by settlers during King James I’s ‘Plantation’, beginning in 1606. Fermanagh, where Wood-Martin recorded the example, was one of the counties settled. Scotland’s ‘Jamie the Saxt’, now king of the United Kingdom, was determined to drive out Catholicism by sending Presbyterian Protestant Scots from the western Lowlands to live there. However, such a ritual as needfire rooted in the Celtic and other traditions of Britain and Europe may not have been acceptable to such people; many of the earliest Scottish settlers were noblemen whom the king sought to reward and were barred from taking Irish tenants. The fact that native Gaels were not displaced as planned means that the direction of influence may have actually been over the Lowland Scots tenants by the local Irish. The main legacy of Scottish settlement in Ulster is language, with the dialect of ‘Ulster Scots’ still common today. For a recent history on the Plantation, see Bardon (Citation2012).
10 Calendar (New Style) Act, 1750, c. 23 (24 Geo. 2). http://www.legislation.gov.uk/apgb/Geo2/24/23.
11 See Robert Poole’s article ‘“Give us our eleven days!” (1995). The slogan was taken from a satirical print entitled An Election Entertainment by William Hogarth, dated 1755. It has been shown through subsequent research that Hogarth’s work referred to a riot following an election and was a ‘composite satire on the ignorance and deceit of the electoral process’ (Poole Citation1995, 102–103; see also Macey Citation1976).
12 For examples of boisterous English calendar customs and the attempts of various authorities to curb them, see Howkins (Citation1981).
13 The Provost or Alderman’s involvement in the ceremony echoes the provision of ‘a good two-horse load of coal’ from the landowner in the English community of Middleton to the community for use on Guy Fawkes Night; see Malcolmson (Citation1978, 26). Although many of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century rural festivals of England relied upon the support of the landed class for their survival, that is not the case in Burghead. Today’s Clavie crew merely rely on the aid of the emergency services for the smooth running of their event, as do the inhabitants of Biggar and Stonehaven for their Hogmanay fire rituals.
14 Reprinted as part of an appendix to the ‘Annual Report of the Council’. Folk-Lore Journal 7, no. 1 (1889): Appendix IV, ‘Analysis of Customs and Superstitions’, 11–16 (14).
15 ‘Yole’, also ‘yoal’, is defined in the online Dictionary of the Scots Language as ‘A small undecked two-masted fishing-boat, pointed fore and aft and with a jib sail’. http://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/yole.
16 Believed to be a corruption of the Scots ‘Auld Man’s Hythe’; that is, old man’s wharf.
17 Andrew Strachan’s description of the function of the ‘Clavie’ he experienced as ‘chasin the demons oot’ resonates with a Swiss ritual known as ‘Castrating the Fog’. J. B. Smith refers to this ‘crisis custom’ which was enacted by Swiss herdboys in order to disperse a thick fog that could potentially divide them from their sheep. It involved igniting a flame by friction and calling out a verbal charm threatening to ‘castrate’ the fog, which was thought to personify a demon or even the Devil himself (Smith Citation2016, 44). Smith later discovered a mid twentieth-century study by Richard Weiss in which the latter pointed to the 1867 work Deutscher Glaube und Brauch (German belief and custom) by Swiss folklorist Ernst Ludwig Rochholz. Rochholz describes a summer solstice ritual in Lucerne which resulted in torches made of ‘resin and tow soaked in oil’ and kindled using friction being taken to the common pastures where the smoke was believed to ‘ensur[e] malevolent forces kept their distance’. This sounds like a ‘clavie’-type torch which had developed from the herdboy’s ‘game’ to banish fog into a calendar custom that Rochholz’s informant, a Catholic peasant, called ‘Weidbräuki’ (cognate with ‘pasture-smoking’). See J. B. Smith, ‘Castrating the Fog Revisited’. FLS News, no. 92 (November 2020), 14.
18 The earliest map of Aberdeen, by Rev. James Gordon, Presbyterian minister of Rothiemay near Huntly, dating from 1661, labels the medieval ‘kirktoun’ as ‘Futty’, a representation of the local pronunciation, which is further corrupted to ‘Fittie’ today. Yet, by 1789, the area is labelled ‘Footdee’ by cartographer Alexander Milne. Footdee is a misnomer, as one cannot have the ‘foot’ of a river, despite the planned village being built right at the estuary of Aberdeen’s River Dee. See James Gordon, Description of new and of old Aberdeens, with the places nearest adjacent (1661), https://maps.nls.uk/towns/rec/209; also Alexander Milne, ‘A plan of the City of Aberdeen with all the inclosures surrounding the town to the adjacent country, from a survey taken 1789’, https://maps.nls.uk/towns/rec/311. It would appear to have been an overcorrection on Milne’s part, imagining that locals were ‘ignorant’, and giving no credence to the likely Gaelic origin of the name, fèithe, which means a bog or morass, an exact description of the local topography before the planned village was erected in 1805. See Dwelly (Citation1993): fèith(e), ‘stagnant channel in a bog (often overgrown with moss and dry in summer)’.
19 ‘The said day a regrat maid by Mrs All: Saunders da Collace & Wr Campbell anent some of their Seamen who superstitiously caried fyrr torches about their boats ye last day of December’. Records of Elgin Presbytery, 11 January 1655, quoted in Mitchell (Citation1875 652; italics mine).
20 ‘To accuse, denounce judicially, esp. before an ecclesiastical court’; in this case, the clavie-burners were reported to the minister. https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/delate.
22 The character of Katesy is mentioned by two Peterhead informants, Jim ‘Sodger’ Reid and Peter Duncan, Sr in the following archive recordings: EI 2005.005/07 and EI 2005.004/05.
23 The Shetland Islands had been sold to the Scots monarchy in 1469 by King Christian of Denmark as part of his daughter Margaret’s dowry when she married James III of Scotland. The ownership was ratified by Charles II in 1669, but Robert Stewart was Lord of Shetland since his appointment in 1564.
24 Robert appointed his half-brother, Laurence Bruce, as ‘foud’ (chief officer or sheriff), but Bruce proved so unpopular, amassing a fortune at the expense of the locals, that the Scots Privy Council was forced to remove him from office in 1577 as a result of complaints (Graham Citation1983, 217).
25 Strathbogie is the ancient name for the agricultural district around Huntly, Aberdeenshire, which was presented as a lordship to the ancestors of the Gordon family by Robert the Bruce. It lies thirty-six miles north-west of Burghead.
26 Note, the session called it ‘heathen’ not ‘Popish’, thus the Clavie was not regarded as having any link with Catholic rituals involving incense. Historian Greg Dues observes that the burning of incense ‘has seldom been used privately as a sacramental’, and each one of these cases involves a small group of individuals, not the entire community (Dues Citation1993, 191).
27 One example renowned in Aberdeenshire’s ecclesiastical annals is ‘The Rabbling of Deer’ when, on 23 March 1711, the local congregation in the village of Old Deer barricaded their parish church against the induction of a new minister, Rev. John Gordon, who was wholly opposed to Episcopal ways. When challenged by the Aberdeen militia, who had accompanied Gordon from the city where his father was Provost, the people pelted them with stones and successfully drove them off. Ultimately, the congregation were forced to accept Gordon, who had been chosen by their landlord; rather than face eviction, they submitted and kept their grumblings to themselves (Pratt Citation1978, 84–86; Wodrow Citation1742, 328–29; Meston Citation1738).
28 Rosemary has long been a known curative herb, particularly for circulation problems, as described by the first-century Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in De Materia Medica (50–70 AD). It was also part of medieval daily skincare in Britain, first described in print by Richard Banckes in his 1525 Herball. See also Baker (Citation2005, 132–33).
29 Suerte: Spanish for luck, fortune, or destiny. Orbach explains that the tuna fishers of the area use both ‘conventional religion’, that is, Roman Catholicism, and ‘superstition’, a ‘belief system’ which he writes ‘concerns itself with explaining undesirable events or situations’ (Orbach Citation1992, 204 and 210).
30 Exodus 25:3–7. Incense as an offering seems to have been its primary purpose, with purification secondary. Catholic historian Matthew Herrera comments, perhaps slightly facetiously, that ‘the clouds of smoke’ from the giant thurible which hung from the ceiling of the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in Spain from the eleventh century ‘not only masked the scent of unwashed pilgrims it was also believed to provide a prophylactic effect that guarded against plagues and other epidemics of eras past’ (Herrera Citation2011, 6).
31 The Dictionary of the Scots Language defines ‘jougs’ as: ‘An instrument of punishment or public ignominy consisting of a hinged iron collar attached by a chain to a wall or post and locked round the neck of the offender’. http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/jougs_n_pl1_v.
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Fiona-Jane Brown
Fiona-Jane Brown is an independent researcher and author. She received her MLitt and doctorate at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland in 2005 and 2010, respectively. She is a part-time tutor at Aberdeen’s Elphinstone Institute, teaching both postgraduate and undergraduate students. Her main research interests are supernatural/spiritual beliefs in Scottish fishing communities and the role they play in identity, as well as the local culture, folklore, and history of north-east Scotland. She has three commercial books published by Black & White of Edinburgh on Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.