body goes to church. The clergyman sees there people who, at other times, are often missing, and with them a great influx of strangers, outsiders from other villages, married sons or daughters who have come to visit the old folks. Such visitors are said to have come a 'Mothering,' and they bring with them a 'Mothering' cake as a present, less or larger, as their means may allow, but always frosted over with sugar.
"Neither is this custom confined to the poor. Families of condition are wont to observe it, and the squire's wife of the olden time (nay even down to times yet fully remembered) would betake herself to the kitchen to do what at other times she never condescended to. Mothering-cakes were supposed to be made by the givers, and if Madam wished to send one . . . . the cake was warranted of her own make."—(From a little pamphlet on Midlent Simnels, recently written by a clergyman at Scarborough for Frances Taylor, pastry-cook, of that town; but without date.)
Apple-Orchards and St. Peter's Day.
"Unless the apples are christened on St. Peter's Day the crop will not be good; and there ought to be a shower of rain when the people will go through the orchards, but no one seems to know for what purpose exactly."—(Extract from letter, dated 25th September, 1880, written at Elton, in the north of Herefordshire, about six miles from Ludlow in Shropshire, to C. S. Burne.)
Christmas.
A respectable middle-aged labourer (say 42 or 43) tells me that in his boyhood his father was always careful to provide a Christmas Yule-log. On Christmas morning he would put a bit saved from last year's log on the fire, and lay the new log on the top of it, so that it might be kindled from the last year's piece. Before the log was quite burnt out he took it off, extinguished it, and put it by to kindle the next log from. He lived in Herefordshire, just where the three counties of Hereford, Radnor, and Salop meet.—(Told me at Eccleshall, November 1885. C, S. Burne.)
