Midsummer

Forget the war, if you can.

I want to tell you about Midsummer's Day, 1945.

This end of the war was over, you see.

And so I put in for some leave, as I'd been planning to do for the four years I'd been in Britain.

You wanted to know why I got put in jail.

Okay.

So, when I got to the Circle, it was a morning of Midsummer's Day.

The 24th day of June in England, the quarter day.

March twenty-fifth, Lady Day, Annunciation of the Virgin.

June twenty-four, Midsummer Day, Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist.

July fifteen, St. Swithin's Day, the old superstition being that if rain fell on this day, it would continue forty days.

August one, Lammas Day, originally in England the festival of the wheat harvest.

November eleven, Martinmas, the feast of St. Martin.

December twenty-eight, Childermas, Holy Innocents' Day.

The quarter days used for calculating rents and tradesmen's accounts are Lady Day, Midsummer Day, Michaelmas, and Christmas in England.

Whit Sunday, Martinmas, Candlemas, and Lammas Day in Scotland.

Certainly with the wind, the fact that she would be a woman or a fairy woman, it was only ever the voice that struck terror.

On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the fairies are at their gayest, and sometimes steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides.

But on November Eve, Samhain, or Halloween, the fairies are at their gloomiest.

For, according to the old Gaelic reckoning, this is the first night of winter.

You don't ideally march an army over a mountain.

But nevertheless, one of the locals was convinced on Midsummer Eve that there was indeed a ghostly army up there.

Told his friends, was laughed at, was ridiculed.

A couple of years later, somebody else sees it again on Midsummer Eve, which I think is a bit suggestive, thinking back to... to folk history and folk traditions and things.

And then it goes a bit quiet, but clearly these two guys have got it in their minds that they saw something, and they eventually persuade a whole gaggle of locals to go and have a look.

If it comes on Midsummer Eve, let's go up on Midsummer's Eve and see if we can see it.

And this is now Midsummer Eve.

Well, depending how you read the accounts, it's either 1744 or 1745, because the key thing is it's the Midsummer Eve before the Jacobite Rising.

A few weeks before midsummer brought round the feast of Corpus Christi, one of the greatest holidays of the year.

The members of every guild, and practically every Rustolian belonged to a guild, assembled with music, flags, and banners to join in the splendid ecclesiastical procession through the streets, where the houses were decorated with tapestry, brilliant cloth, and garlands of flowers, and the afternoon was spent in the performance in the open air of miracle plays, in which every craft claimed its special part to be the enjoyment of the whole community.

The excitement caused by this festival can have scarcely subsided before the inhabitants were called upon to participate in a corporate parade called the Setting of the Watch on Midsummer's Eve.

In imitation of a similar ceremony in London, which cost an enormous sum yearly, The members of the chief trade companies, who emulated each other in the display of gay dresses, banners, burning crossets, and torches, and in the supply of minstrels and musical instruments, marched in procession through the streets, the proceedings terminating in Morris dancing and various games, in which the populace participated.

The corporation left the chief expenditure of the day to be defrayed by the guilds but provided a hundred and fourteen gallons of wine presumably for the subsequent suppers of the companies the weavers and tuckers receiving ten gallons each whilst the remainder was distributed amongst the other twenty-six fraternities when the streets were muddy and they were rarely otherwise the city treasurer also paid the cost of covering them with twenty or thirty tons of sand Another civic outlay of the day is somewhat puzzling.