Tag: Feast Week

We’re all looking forward to this year’s Feast, but will it match up to the 1902 celebrations? The Village Society tells of the frenzy around the eagerly awaited event over 100 years ago.

It is early July 1902. In Histon the schools have closed for the long summer holidays and the children and their parents are looking forward to the most important days of the summer. Histon Feast is about to begin and for the next four days there will be many events to attend. Some have managed to earn some extra spending money by fruit picking; others have been saving for months.

The houses have been cleaned from top to bottom and all round the Green the walls of the thatched cottages have been freshly lime washed. Special meals are being prepared for all the relatives and friends who are visiting the village for the celebrations. Many work in service or on the land in other towns and villages and this is one of the few times of the year they can return home. They arrive by every means of transport: train, bus, brake, pony and trap, bicycle or even on foot.

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On parade

Some new clothes have been purchased or made for all the family, and these will be worn for the first time at the special church and chapel services held on Feast Sunday morning. After the family roast dinner, everyone hurries out to see the Friendly Societies Parade, a new event this year, which has been arranged to raise money for Addenbrooke’s hospital. The band from Cambridge leads the procession which finishes on the Green.

There a service is held and the children fidget while many long speeches are made by the speakers on the platform. Then home for a special strawberry tea and out again to promenade the village and meet old friends. The village streets are crowded with people all in their Sunday best swapping news and gossip. Then onto the Green for the Sacred Band Concert where another collection is taken for the hospital.

To the Green…

Many of the fair wagons have now arrived pulled by horses or steam traction engines; they are lined up in Station Road and Impington Lane. They should wait until 6am on Monday morning when they are officially allowed onto the Green; but as soon as the concert ends there is a rush of vehicles and much jockeying by the stall-holders to get the best pitches on both sides of the road. There is a complete transformation of the site in about two hours.

Thurston’s Fair opens on Monday afternoon and ‘is patronised by the families of the elite, who wish to avoid the rough and tumble of the evening’! All want a chance to ride the steam gallopers and ostriches and hear the popular tunes of the day played on the steam organ.

Those that work for Chivers have the afternoon off on Tuesday; and the crowds are the largest at the second of three cricket matches in Park Lane and at the fair on that day as many come out from Cambridge and from the surrounding villages. Special buses and trains run to and from Histon each evening and these are packed with visitors.

Revelry

In the new schoolroom on Tuesday and Wednesday evening, a soiree organised by the Philo-Union is held. Up to a hundred couples ‘trip the light fantastic’, from nine until the early hours of the morning, to the music of Smith and Dring’s String Band. The public houses are doing a roaring trade and extra bars have been set up so all can be served.

Young men purchase water squirts, confetti and paper teasers and use them to great effect on the eligible girls in the crowd. ‘The roadway is red, white and blue with little paper discs. Worst of all the more frivolous girls pick out their favourites and empty a tube of water down their necks’. Many a love match has started this way.

Having given pleasure to many, the fair closes at mid-night on Tuesday; but not before Arthur Claydon of Newmarket Road has fallen out of swing boat and been taken to Addenbrooke’s Hospital and detained with a severely cut head.

There is another cricket match on Wednesday afternoon. But the fair is smaller, as some of the stall holders have already left for Linton Flower Show. At a quarter to mid-night the fair steam organ plays ‘God save the King’ and the Feast is over for another year. By Thursday morning the fair is already moving off to another venue.

This article is an extract from ‘A History of Histon Feast’ by John Whitmore 1996 [Out of print] © Histon & Impington Village Society.

H&I Village Society membership is currently free and includes a weekly historical article about the village and free access to Zoom talks. Contact them to register as a new member and have a chat with committee members at their stall at the Feast. If you’ve got historic photos of the village or its residents, bring them along so that the Society can take copies for the village archive.

The next Zoom talk is Tuesday 29th June at 7.30pm: The Creation of Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and it’s collection, by Andrew Smith.

Wrestling, cudgelling, donkey racing, chasing a greasy pig, running in sacks, and badger-baiting… These won’t be featured at this year’s Feast – but they probably were in days gone by. The Village Society reveals some history.

Villages have probably been holding summer revels since long before the coming of Christianity, but the first written records survive from 1240 when clerics were condemned by bishops for attending and encouraging celebrations of summer and of village life.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries May Day began a three-month period when May Day celebrations could occur on any day the community chose.

Many parishes held a communal feast on the dedication day of their church and in honour of its patron saint. Although they should have been held on the anniversary, they were in practice concentrated in the early summer or late summer and early autumn.

Philanthropic beginnings

At this time parishioners were responsible for the upkeep of the church and there was a belief that people could come to salvation by good deeds, such as increasing the decoration and ornamentation of the churches, so parochial feasting and annual customs became important fund-raising events.

In many communities, particularly villages, they were the largest single source of revenue. They were often held in the church and the churchyard or in a special hall owned by the parish. Ale was brewed, often by the church wardens and sometimes a meal was eaten. It is the church wardens’ accounts of the period that give details of such events.

Many of these feasts were organised by parish gilds and if the gild had a gildhall, the ale or feast was held there.

In Cambridgeshire there were 350 gilds recorded in 125 out of 170 parishes. These devotional societies collected subscriptions from members and generated funds from a variety of events.

As well as paying to maintain lights burning before effigies of the saints or build chapels for these figures, they raised money to look after the poor and ill, and organised the funeral rites for departed members. Wealthy gilds might even employ an additional priest.

In Histon the parish of St Andrew’s had three gilds: the Gilds of St Katherine, the Purification of Our Lady and All Saints, and the parish of St Etheldreda’s had the Gild of St Katherine. St Andrew’s Impington had the Gild of the Resurrection.

The present Feast in Histon probably derives from one of their annual fund-raising events. St Etheldreda’s Day was 23 June. This provides one possible explanation for the current date, although the tradition in the village is that Feast Sunday is the Sunday following St Peter’s Day (29 June) and is is always the week following Midsummer Fair (24 June).

A local saying still quoted (and often accurate) uses the weather prevailing during Midsummer Fair to forecast the weather for the period of the Histon Feast: “Fine for the Fair, wet for the Feast. Wet for the Fair, fine for the Feast.”

Evolution

Gilds were common until their dissolution by Edward VI in 1547. The Reformation and the rise of Protestantism changed the context of worship, gilds were banned and the effigies and decorations in the churches destroyed, so the need for fund raising events was diminished.

Many of the Saints’ Days were abandoned and the opportunities for feasting reduced, partly due to a growing fear of public disorder that could occur on these occasions. In 1640 Parliament prohibited Sunday dancing and sports and seasonal celebrations were further diminished. The Puritan Revolution still further reduced the communal festivities and this was particularly true in the Puritan stronghold of East Anglia.

The traditions were only partly restored by the restoration of the monarchy. Parochial feasts or wakes were widely recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but had become predominantly secular events. Religious rites, when they did survive, were usually confined to a special church service on the Sunday.

In many parishes the feast provided an excuse for much eating and abundant drinking, for music and dancing, for sports and entertainments and for hospitality.

It would usually include familiar sports and pastimes of the time: wrestling, boxing or cudgelling; perhaps donkey racing, a wheelbarrow race (blindfolded), a smock race for woman, chasing a greasy pig, running in sacks, or smoking pipes of tobacco; and sometimes bull baiting, cock-fighting, or badger-baiting.

Public-houses often provided prizes for the sports. A fiddler played for dancing. In most parishes many visitors attended, as a feast was the time when scattered relatives and friends assembled to renew their social ties.

Antisocial behaviour

At this time these celebrations drew much criticism. Rivalry between villages and feasts provided the excuse for youths from neighbouring villages to indulge in fights; large crowds were difficult for the authorities to control; and the excessive drinking and the sexual promiscuity that followed were condemned by local residents.

As one letter writer to the Cambridge Independent Press in 1889 said: “The Feast time is simply an opportunity for unlimited drunkenness and all the evils consequent on such indulgence. Where the greater part of the population indulge for three days in the year in every kind of vice which appears attractive to them, what morality can be looked for during the remainder of the year?”

The very first mention of the Histon Feast was in the Cambridgeshire Chronicle, in June 1861:

“There has been a great nuisance in this village for the last few years, and two places of worship (Methodists – the Co-op. and Baptists – Kortens) have been greatly disturbed by stall keepers and theatrical parties placing sometimes upwards of twenty carts and other vehicles laden with materials for erection of stalls etc. on the Green in the centre of the village on the Sunday previous to the Feast (Monday) and thereby causing a large assembly of disorderly, and of course, noisy company. Our readers will find in another portion of the paper an advertisement from Messrs. Whitehead and French, announcing that the parishioners have determined to put an end to the disturbance in future. No carts, stalls etc. will be allowed on the green, hereafter until the feast Monday which this year is July 1^st.”

This long-standing problem was set to continue well into this century!

To find out what happened in the 20^th century, read Part 2 in HI HUB next week

This article is an edited extract based on ‘A History of Histon Feast’ by John Whitmore 1996 [Out of print] © Histon & Impington Village Society.

H&I Village Society membership is currently free and includes a weekly historical article about the village and free access to Zoom talks. Contact them to register as a new member and have a chat with committee members at their stall at the Feast. If you’ve got historic photos of the village or its residents, bring them along so that the Society can take copies for the village archive.

The next Zoom talk is Tuesday 29th June at 7.30pm: The Creation of Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and it’s collection, by Andrew Smith.