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 1st.”
This long-standing problem was set to continue well into this century!
To find out what happened in the 20th 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.
