1

Halloween:
The Misunderstood
Festival

In 1762, British military engineer Charles Vallancey was sent to Ireland on a surveying mission. Vallancey, however, was no ordinary engineer: he was extraordinarily well-read in history and linguistics, corresponded with many of the leading proponents of the then-fashionable Orientalism and fancied himself a scholar and writer. He soon developed an obsession with the lore and language of Ireland’s ancient Celts, and he wrote hundreds of pages of collected fact, observation and speculation on the green isle’s early inhabitants.

There was just one problem: much of what Vallancey recorded was wrong.

By 1786, when Vallancey published the third volume of his opus Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis, it was already well established that the name ‘Samhain’ (pronounced ‘sow-in’) referred to the three-day Celtic New Year celebration that began when the sun went down on 31 October. Other linguists had recorded the translation of ‘summer’s end’ for Samhain, but Vallancey believed this was a ‘false derivation’, and went on to state that Samhain was actually a Celtic deity who was also known as ‘BALSAB . . . for Bal is lord, and Sab death’.1

It didn’t seem to matter much that the name ‘Balsab’ appears nowhere else in Celtic lore, or even that Vallancey’s work was dismissed during his lifetime (the Orientalist scholar Sir William Jones said of Vallancey, ‘Do you wish to laugh? Skim the book over. Do you wish to sleep? Read it regularly’²). Somehow Vallancey’s work found its way onto library shelves all over Britain, and formed a strange alternate history of Samhain (and its descendant Halloween) that ran alongside the traditional Celtic folklore texts and Irish dictionaries that defined the word correctly. Nearly two centuries after Vallancey first journeyed to Ireland, books like Halloween Through Twenty Centuries (1950) were still referring to ‘Samhain, Lord of the Dead’.³ By the early 1990s, Christian groups throughout America were urging parents to keep their children from celebrating a holiday during which ‘human beings were burned as an offering in order to appease and cajole Samhain, the lord of Death’.⁴

Romanticized image of a Druid sacrifice, c. 1880.

How is it possible that religious and community leaders would use the writings of a romantic who was denounced in 1818 as having written ‘more nonsense than any man of his time’ in order to denounce a major celebration?5 How could the history of what has become, in America at least, the second most popular holiday of the year be so little known?

Halloween is undoubtedly the most misunderstood of festivals. Virtually every English-speaker in the world can instantly tell you where the name ‘Christmas’ comes from – they could probably also provide an anecdote about St Patrick and his Day, and of course those celebrations with simple declarative titles, like New Year’s or Father’s Day, require no great linguistic skills – but amazingly few understand so much as the origin of the name ‘Halloween’. The word itself almost has a strange, pagan feel – which is ironic, since the name derives from ‘All Hallows’ Eve’. Prior to about AD 1500, the noun ‘hallow’ (derived from the Old English hálga, meaning ‘holy’) commonly referred to a holy personage or, specifically, a saint.⁶ All Saints’ Day was the original name for the Catholic celebration held on 1 November, but – long after ‘hallow’ had lost its meaning as a noun – the eve of that day would become known as Halloween.

Halloween owes part of its legacy of confusion and obfuscation to those same Celts who provided the basis for the celebration with their Samhain. Surprisingly little is known of them since they kept no written records. Our knowledge of Ireland’s Celts is based largely on orally transmitted lore (much of which was recorded by Christian monks of the first millennium) and scattered archaeological evidence. It’s no wonder that writers like Vallancey – the ones with a more exotic take on history – dreamt of a race of savages who offered up human sacrifices to demonic gods and spent the autumn warding off evil spirits by constructing huge, roaring bonfires. By the mid-twentieth century, Halloween historians had added another mistake to their understanding of the day, stating that it was based in part on a Roman festival called Pomona, when in fact there was no such celebration. In the 1960s, a veritable cult of urban legends built up around Halloween – especially the notorious ‘razor blade in the apple’ myth, which suggested that innocent young children were at risk during the beloved ritual of trick or treat – although there were no recorded instances of real cases behind these modern myths. Over the next few decades, there were reports of anonymous psychos poisoning candy, costumed killers stalking college dorms on Halloween night and Satanic cults offering up sacrifices of black cats, and warnings of gangs initiating new members by committing murders on 31 October. It sometimes seems as though the prank-playing and mischievousness that have been a key factor in Halloween celebrations for hundreds of years have crossed over and played tricks on its history.

The unassailable facts of Halloween are fourfold. First, it boasts both a pagan and Christian history. Second, its position in the calendar – at the end of autumn/beginning of winter – means it has always served in part as a harvest celebration. Third, it is related to other festivals of the dead around the world, and so has always had a sombre, even morbid element. Finally, however, its combination of pagan New Year celebration and joyful harvest feast have also given it a raucous side, and it has almost always been observed with parties and mischief-making.

Samhain and the Celts

Any examination of Halloween’s history and its long line of misunderstandings must start by examining the Celts, an ancient people who themselves are often the subject of mistaken identity. The Celts were referred to as Keltoi by Greek and Roman writers (and probably by themselves), and it’s likely that the name derives from the Indo-European word for ‘hidden’ (kel-), making the Celts literally ‘the hidden people’. They once spread across most of Europe and throughout the British Isles, and they even occupied Rome for several months around 400 BC. Many of Vallancey’s contemporaries painted a picture of the Celts and their Druid priests that made his notions seem serene by comparison, as in this spectacular example from 1793:

This degenerated priesthood seem to have delighted in human blood: and their victims, though sometimes beasts, were oftener men. And not only criminals and captives, but their very disciples, were inhumanly sacrificed on their altars; whilst some transfixed by arrows, others crucified in their temples, some instantly stabbed to the heart, and others impaled in honor of the gods, bespoke, amidst variety of death, the most horrid proficiency in the science of murder.7

‘Frenzied Religious Orgies of the Druids’.

However, contrary to the romantic notions of both ancient historians – including Julius Caesar – and later writers, the Celts were far from being warmongering primitives whose Druids were bloodthirsty slayers. Modern archaeological evidence as well as written historical remnants suggests that the Celts were skilled in mining and working with metals, farming, road-making, legal systems and medicine. Their religion involved hundreds of deities and barred written records of their rituals and stories, but some histories and various inscriptions made in Greek, Latin and, later, Irish, have survived and make up most of what we know about their celebrations and festivals. The Celts did engage in human sacrifice, but often chose the victims from within their own tribes by drawing lots in the form of bits of cake – whoever received the piece with the blackened bottom was offered to the gods to ensure the fertility of the herds, a fruitful harvest or victory in battle. The number three figures prominently in Celtic beliefs – many of their gods and goddesses were depicted with three heads or aspects – which is possibly one of the reasons why so many later Halloween fortune-telling games required a task to be performed three times. They believed in an afterlife, with souls journeying to an Otherworld sometimes called Tir na tSamhraidh, or ‘Land of Summer’ (note the similarity to ‘Samhain’). They believed that the doors between this world and that Otherworld opened one night a year – Samhain, of course. On that night, the dead might return to the living, and creatures called sidh, or fairies, could cross over to bedevil humans.

Samhain features frequently in Celtic lore. In practical terms, it was the end of summer and so the beginning of winter. Crops were gathered and livestock were brought in from the fields. Pigs and cattle were slaughtered, with only a small number kept for breeding stock. A Celtic day began when the sun went down, and so Samhain started with the onset of darkness on 31 October, with a feast celebrating the recent harvest and temporary abundance of food. Some archaeological evidence suggests that Samhain may have been the only time when the Celts had ready access to an abundance of alcohol, and the surviving accounts of the festival – in which drunkenness always seems to occur – support this as well.

Samhain was also an important day for administration, akin to the U.S. Tax Day in modern times. A yearly gathering was held at Tara, the ancient seat of kings, where three days’ worth of feasting and sporting alternated with debt repayment and trials (those who were found guilty of particularly severe crimes were executed then as well). Before the eve of Samhain, all home hearth fires were extinguished, and the Druids used ‘needfire’, or fire created by friction, to construct a bonfire on the nearby hill of Tlachtga; embers from this fire were distributed to each household, and a tax was exacted for this service.

But Samhain wasn’t just a time of debts, livestock and feasting. It was also – with Beltane, or I May – one of the two most important days in Celtic heroic tales, which almost invariably contain some frightening element. In one early story, the Fomorians, a race of demonic giants who have conquered Ireland after a great battle, demand a yearly tax of two-thirds of the subdued survivors’ corn, milk and children, to be paid each year on Samhain. The Tuatha de Danann, a race of godlike, benevolent ancestors chronicled in Celtic mythology, battle against the Fomorians for years, but it takes the Morrigan, a mother god, and the hero Angus Og to finally drive the monsters from Ireland – on Samhain, of course.

Samhain could have a romantic side as well, as attested to by a later story involving Angus. In ‘The Dream of Angus Og’, Angus is visited in his dreams every night for a year by a beautiful young girl with whom he falls in love. When she stops appearing to him, Angus begins to waste away until his father, the Celtic god the Dagda, goes to the sidh for help in finding the girl. After two years she is located among 150 other maidens who all bear silver chains. She is Princess Caer, daughter of King Ethal; the King, however, refuses to hand her over to Angus, and so the Dagda and his allies destroy Ethal’s palace. It is only then that Ethal reveals the strange truth about his daughter: she has been bewitched, spending one year in human form and the next as a swan, transforming each Samhain. Angus goes to visit her in her swan form, and he changes himself into a swan so they can fly away together.

Halloween’s sinister aspect is presaged in another traditional Celtic tale, that of the boy hero Finn mac Cumhaill, who journeys to the yearly Samhain gathering at Tara, presided over by the High King. The King soon puts a challenge before the rugged assemblage: each Samhain, a man of the sidh, Aillen, comes to Tara playing a harp that places all those who hear it under an enchanted sleep; Aillen then issues a wall of flame from his mouth and burns down the palace. Aillen has destroyed Tara nine times, and this year the King offers a reward to anyone who can stop him. Finn undertakes the task, and an ally gifts him with an enchanted spear. Finn uses the head of the spear to ward off the magical music and his cloak to turn aside the flame. Aillen tries to flee, but Finn casts the spear just as Aillen is stepping through the entrance to the Otherworld, and the sidh warrior is slain. Finn cuts off Aillen’s head and returns it to the King the following morning, at which point he receives his reward.

Perhaps the most famous and eeriest Samhain story is ‘The Adventure of Nera’, in which the eponymous hero is challenged by King Ailill to place a loop around the foot of a hanging corpse on Samhain. Nera succeeds, and the corpse promptly begs him for a drink, claiming to have been thirsty when he was hanged. Nera removes the dead man from the gallows, and tries to find a house where he can treat the corpse to a drink; when he does, the corpse spits the drink back at the humans who are present, and they immediately die. Nera returns the corpse to the gallows and journeys back to Ailill’s fort, only to find it engulfed in flames set by a fairy army. He follows the army back through their mound, and finds himself in the Otherworld. He takes a fairy wife there, who tells him that the fire was a hallucination but will actually happen unless he can warn Ailill. Returning to our world, Nera finds that no time has passed (a common theme in later Halloween tales is how time passes differently in the fairy realm), and he warns Ailill, who manages to destroy the malevolent sidh before they can attack again. Nera, however, spends the rest of his life in the Otherworld.

Although historians have argued over how much Samhain really contributed to the modern celebration of Halloween, it seems likely that the Celtic festival’s peculiar mix of harvest, rowdy celebration and fearful supernatural beliefs gave Halloween much of its character. Just as Celtic culture was recorded by later Christianized Irish scribes, so those same Irish integrated aspects of their ancestors’ Samhain into their own All Saints’ Day – an integration that would prove an uncomfortable mix to the very Church that initially promoted it.

All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day

By the seventh century, the Catholic Church had spread throughout most of Europe; missionaries – including St Patrick, who would become the patron saint of Ireland – had successfully converted the pagan Celts. The Church had found that conversion was far more successful when attempts were made to offer clear alternatives to existing calendar celebrations, rather than simply stamping them out. Pope Gregory I (who would later be canonized) famously wrote a letter in 601 to an abbot en route to Britain, suggesting that existing temples and even sacrificial rituals should not be destroyed but rather turned to use for Christian purposes. This doctrine, known as syncretism, even replaced lesser pagan gods with Catholic saints.

In 609, the Church put syncretism into action by converting the Pantheon in Rome to the service of the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs. The famed pagan temple was rechristened the Santa Maria Rotunda on 13 May of that year, and the forerunner of All Saints’ Day was born. The choice of 13 May was important as well, since it had formerly marked the final night of Lemuria, a Roman festival of the dead. Like Samhain, Lemuria was celebrated over three nights, and was a time when the dead returned to the world of the living; however, the ghostly visitors of Lemuria (the lemurs) were terrifying creatures who were ritually expelled from the household at midnight on 13 May. The Romans also celebrated the spirits of their ancestors during Parentalia and its closing ceremony, Feralia, which took place on 22 February (and which later became the Catholic feast of St Peter).

One holiday the Romans did not celebrate (and which has become the source of historical misinformation) was a festival in honour of Pomona, a minor goddess of fruits and orchards. A contemporary of Vallancey’s by the name of William Hutchinson may have started the error when he stated in 1776: ‘The 1st day of November seems to retain the celebration of a festival to Pomona, when it is supposed the summer stores are opened on the approach of winter.’8 Hutchinson was probably taking inspiration from poetry; the mythological tale of Pomona and Vertumnus was much in vogue in the eighteenth century thanks largely to Alexander Pope’s translation of the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Vertumnus, after being spurned by the lovely Pomona, takes on various forms until he convinces her of his love. Like Vallancey, Hutchinson was quoted frequently over the next two centuries, and historians began to assume that Halloween really was simply a revamped celebration of Pomona. However, the truth was that Pomona had no festival, and that November was the dullest month in the Roman calendar, with no important holidays or festivals. But the notion that Halloween was somehow partly Roman seemed simply too delicious for most historians to give up. Take, for example, this reference from a book on Halloween dating from 1935: after discussing ‘The Vigil of Samhain’ (and, incidentally, referring to ‘Samhain, the lord of death’), the author states: ‘Our Hallowe’en is almost equally descended from the ancient Roman festival in honor of Pomona, the goddess of fruit and gardens, who was honored about the first of November.’9 Amusingly, the next paragraph offers a compounding of errors when it is suggested that Halloween has been fused into ‘a single magic celebration . . . sacred both to Samhain and Pomona’.¹⁰

Samhain’s existence, however, is unquestionable, and some time in the mid-eighth century, Pope Gregory III moved the feast of the martyrs to 1 November, the date of Samhain, and indicated that it was henceforth to be a celebration of ‘all the saints’; a hundred years later, Gregory IV ordered universal observance of the day. Was the date moved to 1 November so that the harvest could be used to feed the hordes of pilgrims flocking to Rome for the saints’ celebration, as some historians have suggested? Or was it relocated in the calendar in an attempt to co-opt Samhain, which the Christianized Celts were slow to give up? A famed ninth-century Irish religious calendar, the Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee, offers intriguing clues: later English translations of the entry for 1 November give the day as ‘stormy All-Saints’ day’, but the original Irish text plainly shows ‘samain’.¹¹

The Church provided another argument in favour of the 1 November date being chosen as a deliberate Samhain replacement when, around AD 1000, it added the celebration of All Souls’ Day on 2 November. Legend has it that All Souls’ Day was inaugurated in 998 by Odilon, Bishop of Cluny, after he heard of an island where a cave mouth emitted the agonized sounds of souls in torment. The official explanation given for the new festival was that it would offer the living a chance to pray for the souls of the deceased, especially those in Purgatory; however, it seems more likely that the gloomy, ghostly new celebration was added to cement the transformation of Samhain from pagan to Christian holiday. By the fourteenth century, All Souls’ Day was observed throughout the western Church and had been added to all official books and calendars.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the first recorded celebrations of Halloween begin to appear about this time. The Festyvall of 1511 says: ‘We rede in olde tyme good people wolde on All Halowen daye bake brade and dele it for crysten soules’,12 suggesting that the practice of making special foods for Halloween was already long established. A Festivall from 1493 noted, ‘Good frendes suche a daye ye shall haue all halowen daye.’¹³ By the sixteenth century, there are numerous accounts in parish records of ‘full contention of the ryngeres on alhallow nyght’,¹⁴ meaning that Halloween was sounded out with the raucous ringing of bells. Henry VIII tried to abolish ‘ringing of bells all the night long upon Allhallow Day at night’,¹⁵ as did his daughter Elizabeth, but many parishes were so reluctant to give up the practice that their bell-ringers were repeatedly fined.

In some areas, Halloween marked the beginning of the Christmas season, and thus was the time to choose a ‘Lord of Misrule’ – typically a serving man in a lord’s household – to oversee the merriment. One account from 1598 notes:

These Lords, beginning their rule at Allhallond Eve, continued the same till the morrow after the Feast of the Purification, commonly called Candlemas Day: in which space there were fine and subtle disguisings, masks, and mummeries.¹⁶

The use of Lords of Misrule was officially banned in Scotland (where they were called ‘Abbots of Unreason’) in 1555, and fell out of favour throughout most of England in the 1600s, partly because religious reformers considered the practice to stem from the Roman Saturnalia, also a December festival.

By 1550, Samhain had been completely absorbed into the dual festival of All Saints and All Souls, and yet the Christian celebrations retained much of the pagan character, still offering both joyful celebration and sombre contemplation of death. But there were other events happening in Europe that had become just as central to the evolution and future of Halloween.

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Dance of Death: The Duchess, 1523–5, woodcut.

Erhard Schoen, Burning of a Witch, 1533, woodcut.

In 1346, the Black Death began to rampage throughout the western hemisphere. Although it would reappear at intervals for the next 400 years, it peaked in about 1350, killing as much as 60 per cent of Europe’s population. It not only left Europe reeling from the loss of human life but also changed popular culture, introducing a new obsession with images of death into the arts. The plague and the printing press were both spreading, and soon images of the Danse Macabre featuring gruesome skeletal figures became widely available to the surviving population. The new common obsession with depictions of skeletal Grim Reapers found a natural home in a festival once thought to be the night when the dead crossed over into the world of the living.

Following in the footsteps of the Black Death was another kind of epidemic: witch-hunts. Beginning in about 1480, tens of thousands of people – mostly women – were imprisoned, beheaded, hanged or burned alive at the stake as witches. They were sometimes accused of having killed by creating or spreading plague, and thanks to such works as the Malleus Maleficarum, which became the manual for witch-hunters, they were commonly associated with the Devil, even to the point of accusations of sexual relations (one entire section of the Malleus is ‘Concerning Witches who copulate with the Devil’17). The witch trials allowed both feudal lords and the Church to prosper by seizing the property of those charged, and solidified the image of the witch as a malicious hag with broom, cauldron and cat, three symbols of feminine housekeeping. In some trials, the victims were accused of having participated in gatherings and ‘Sabbaths’ held on All Hallows’. The choice of All Hallows’ as a major holiday for witches and devils was no doubt coerced from the accused with a political agenda in mind: after Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509, he sought to separate the Church of England from the Vatican, a struggle that continued with Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I. Both Henry and Elizabeth viewed All Saints’ Day as a papal holiday, and both issued proclamations intended to subdue celebration of it: after Henry’s ban on bell-ringing, Elizabeth extended the law to include ‘the superstitious ringing of bells on Allhallowntide and at All Souls’ Day, with the two nights before and after’.¹⁸ A spectacular witch trial took place during the reign of the Protestant king James I: in 1590, dozens of Scots were accused of having attempted to prevent James from reaching his queen-to-be, Anne of Denmark, by gathering on Halloween night and then riding the sea in sieves while creating storms by tossing live cats tied to human body parts into the water. After the infamous North Berwick Witch Trials, as they were called, Halloween was forever to be firmly associated with witches, cats, cauldrons, brooms and the Devil.

A postcard of 1909 warning to ‘Beware of ye wiles of Satan’.

The latter figure could certainly be called Halloween’s most controversial icon. The Devil, that fallen angel who is the antagonist of Christianity, appears frequently in reference to Halloween and under a variety of names, including Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles (from Faust) and Old Scratch. Some historians have suggested that the Devil may have originated as a way to transform pagan horned gods – including the Greeks’ Pan and the Celts’ Cernunnos – into a symbol of evil. The Devil first appears in relation to Halloween as the god, consort and leader of witches. For example, in 1597 a Scot named Thomas Leyis who was eventually burned as a witch was accused

of having come upon Halloween about midnight, accompanied by his mother (since burnt) and many other sorcerers and witches, to the market and fish-cross of Aberdeen, under the conduct and guiding of the devil, present with them all in company, playing before them on his kind of instruments, when they all danced about both the said crosses and the meal market, a long pace of time . . . 19

There are numerous other accounts of witches dancing with the Devil on Halloween night, and Scottish boys were supposed to notice that their cats were tired on the day after Halloween, from carrying witches to feasts with the Devil. Many fortune-telling charms were performed in the name of the Devil, and in Aberdeenshire boys would flee a dying Halloween bonfire while exclaiming, ‘The devil take the hindmost!’ By the arrival of the twentieth century, the Devil had been reduced to little more than a humorous imp, usually portrayed in a red costume with horns and a tail, either appearing as a quaint paper decoration or assisting a witch on a colourful postcard. Halloween parties even featured the Devil in foods – devil’s food cake and devilled eggs made frequent appearances on October menus – and later in the century, when costumes were mass-produced, devils were perpetual bestsellers.

And yet just when it seemed the Devil had been consigned to a hell of trivial merchandising, he was resurrected by late twentieth-century fundamentalist Christian groups that tagged Halloween ‘The Devil’s Birthday’. Christian books and websites suggested that Halloween ‘is closely connected with worship of the Enemy of this world, Satan’, and urged parents to keep their children from engaging in trick or treating or any other Halloween activity.20 These groups often cite Vallancey as giving ‘proof ’ of the day’s diabolical origins, and some even go so far as to condemn church-held ‘harvest parties’ intended to replace Halloween activities on 31 October.

Bonfire Night

In 1605, a human devil nearly drove a stake through Halloween’s heart. In the early hours of the morning of 5 November, a Catholic gentleman named Guy Fawkes (or Guido, as he’d come to call himself after a failed mission to secure Spanish support for English Catholics) was discovered beneath the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder. Although the plot had been organized largely by Robert Catesby and involved around a dozen other conspirators – all Catholics unhappy with James I’s attempts at suppressing their religion – it was Fawkes who would become the man most associated with the ‘Gunpowder Plot’. Fawkes, who was subjected to so much torture that he was literally unable to climb the gallows to his own execution, was hanged, drawn and quartered on 31 January 1606, but his failed attempt at assassinating the King was far from forgotten. Earlier in January, Parliament had declared 5 November ‘a holiday forever in thankfulness to God for our deliverance and detestation of the Papists’,²¹ and Guy Fawkes Day/Eve soon became one of the British calendar’s most beloved festivals.

Crispijn de Passe the Elder, The Gunpowder Plot Conspirators, c. 1606, engraving.

For about 40 years, Guy Fawkes and Halloween existed peacefully side by side. The Poor Robin’s Almanack of 1677 describes 5 November thus:

Now boys with
Squibs and crackers play,
And bonfires’ blaze
Turns night to day.22

The journal for 1629 of Bulstrode Whitelocke, then a prominent young London lawyer, describes a festive Halloween evening with revellers bedecked in finery dancing at a tavern until very late into the night.²³

All that changed in 1647, when Parliament banned all festivals except Guy Fawkes. Because of its close proximity to All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days on 1 and 2 November, the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day had already acquired many of the traditions that had formerly been associated with them. Bonfires had been lit on 5 November 1605 to celebrate the King’s deliverance (the eve is still often known as Bonfire Night), and that tradition would continue in some form or other to contemporary times. Young people worked weeks in advance to collect fuel for the great fires, and so houseto-house begging was involved; sometimes the children even smeared their faces with charcoal and dressed in rags, a sort of early ancestor of the twentieth-century American house-to-house begging ritual of trick or treat. Pranks that could evolve into vandalism might take place, just as they did in Irish and (later) American Halloweens. In the British town of Lewes, which is famed for the grand Guy Fawkes festivities that still take place there every year, an attempt in 1779 to limit rowdiness by banning bonfires was met with threats of burning down houses instead. The bonfires, needless to say, were allowed to continue.

Guy Fawkes Day/Night soon became the preeminent autumn celebration throughout Great Britain. Celebrations varied from parish to parish (one of the most peculiar was found in Holderness, East Yorkshire, where boys used strips of leather to beat the church pews), but typically consisted of young people begging money for fireworks and gathering fuel for bonfires as well as making an effigy of Fawkes that would be thrown onto the flames. The typical brief solicitation was to beg ‘a penny for the guy’, but quite often the children engaged in a longer rhyming performance, of which many variations were recorded, including this version from Worcestershire as noted down in 1892:

Burning the Pope in effigy at Temple Bar, London, on Pope Night.

Don’t you remember the 5th of November
Is gunpowder treason and plot?
I don’t see the reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
A stick and a stake, for Queen Victoria’s sake,
I pray master give us a faggot;
If you don’t give us one, we’ll take two
The better for us and the worse for you.24

During this recital, the boys all thumped heavy sticks on the ground at the words ‘plot’, ‘forgot’, and ‘faggot’.

Adult celebrations took place in the evening, and included lighting and supervising the bonfires, although in some towns tar barrels were lit and rolled into the nearest river. In Lewes, ‘bonfire societies’ also dress in costume and stage large-scale parades, still witnessed by thousands. Guy Fawkes Day also has its own foods: ‘bonfire parkin’ is a heavy cake, and ‘bonfire toffee’ is made mostly from butter and black treacle.

Guy Fawkes bonfires were popular until the nineteenth century, when a practical consideration came into play: in many areas, hillsides had been so completely stripped of vegetation that very little fuel was available anymore. Nowadays, most British cities celebrate with a civic fireworks display and perhaps a parade.

Guy Fawkes celebrations did eventually find their way west to America with English settlers, under the title ‘Pope Night’; however, American leaders in the Revolutionary War (including George Washington) were opposed to the festival, since they feared its celebration might offend the religious sensibilities of their French allies. There were still scattered celebrations reported in America until the end of the nineteenth century, though the festival had lost so much of its original meaning that the name had been degraded to ‘Pork Night’.

Old Samhain and Martinmas

In 1582 came an event that would, in some areas, lead to a second night of Halloween celebration: Pope Gregory XIII signed the Gregorian calendar into effect. The old Julian calendar, which had been employed throughout Europe since 45 BC, had reckoned each year at 365.25 days, but led to an error of around three days per four centuries. This made calculating the date for Easter difficult since the spring equinox kept shifting, so the Catholic church reformed the calendar. Even though the Pope decreed the change in 1582, Martin Luther had begun the Protestant Reformation 65 years earlier (on 31 October, when he presented his ‘Ninety-five Theses’), and countries that had moved largely to Protestantism were slow to accept the new calendar. In Britain, it wasn’t adopted until 1752, at which point the new calendar had accrued eleven days in error.

Many inhabitants of Britain and Ireland were reluctant to adopt the new calendar, especially where their beloved festivals were concerned. In Ireland, though some inhabitants started to hold their Halloween revels on 31 October, others clung to the old calendar, meaning they now celebrated their Hallows Eve on 11 November. Yet others created two celebrations, referring to 11 November as Oiche Shean Shamhain (‘Old Samhain Eve’) and 12 November as La Shean Shamhain (‘Old Samhain Day’). In what is now Northern Ireland, 12 November was known as ‘Old Halleve’, and was celebrated until the early twentieth century with dancing and fortune-telling (especially the burning of nuts).

Fortunately, there was already a festival on 11 November, and soon Martinmas began to serve as the displaced Halloween. St Martin (AD 317–397) was the patron saint of the harvest, and the date of his observance day may have been chosen to replace a great feast of Jupiter, the epulum Iovis (just as All Saints’ Day replaced Samhain). Martinmas was celebrated around Europe and the British Isles with many rituals similar to Halloween, including the settling of debts, weather customs, feasting and merrymaking and some fortune-telling. Drinking, however, was also a major part of Martinmas, which in some areas even came to be known as ‘Martinalia’. Hiring fairs were especially popular on Martinmas, and it was also a traditional time for slaughtering livestock and laying in provisions against the coming winter. Martinmas faded considerably after cattle and pig production was industrialized and meat became plentiful throughout the year.

Bonfire Night was left as the principal autumn festival in England, but Halloween was still observed in Scotland, Ireland and Wales and on the Isle of Man. And not merely observed, but celebrated with such mystery and revelry that neither religious nor political conflicts could dampen its spirit.