On May Day they carried garlands round, and asked people if they would like to see the garland. Money was collected, which was spent on a tea. The garland was hung up in the paddock where the tea was, and in the evening they danced round it and threw balls through it, and had games. On the same day the men had their club feast and 'sharing out.' The Club did not walk in procession.
Eggs are always sold by the score.
"At Hinchinbrook Castle a monkey took Oliver Cromwell when he was a baby" and carried him on to the battlements. Nobody knew till "they heard the monkey laugh." Then they "got out all the feather beds from the Castle; but, however, the monkey didn't drop him, but carried the baby and laid him back in his bed again."[1]
Kent.
When, about 1897, a man of my acquaintance, living near Dartford, was ill of ague, one of the old women visiting him suggested that he should swallow a live spider, which would cause the ague egg to be vomited.[2]
Throughout Lent the shops at Gravesend sell 'pudding-pies' (tartlets containing custard sprinkled with currants), and some people call the first Sunday in Lent "Pudding-pie Sunday." But I have been told that the pudding-pies should be eaten on the Sunday nearest the middle of Lent, i.e. Mothering Sunday.
At Fair-time (October 29th) there used to be sold at Gravesend,
- ↑ Cf. T. Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1875), vol. i., p. 30; W. H. B. Saunders, Legends etc. of Huntingdonshire, pp. 238-9; and N. and Q., 7th S., vol. vii., p. 26, for similar tale of Christian, the tyrant of Sweden.
- ↑ 'Cf. N. and Q., 1st S., vol. ii., p. 259 (S. Ireland); County Folk-Lore, vol. i. (Suffolk), p. 15. According to Douce's Ms. Notes (quoted in Brand, Popular Antiquities, vol. iii. (1855), p. 298, "It is usual with many persons about Exeter, who are affected with agues, to visit at dead of night the nearest cross-road five different times, and there bury a new-laid egg . . . and they are persuaded that with the egg they shall bury the ague."
