their sickles aloft. One in the middle held up some ears of corn tied together with flowers, and the party shouted three times (what she writes as) ‘Arnack, arnack, arnack, we haven, we haven, we haven.’ They went home, accompanied by women and children carrying boughs of flowers, shouting and singing. The man-servant who attended Mrs. Bray, said, ‘it was only the people making their games, as they always did, to the spirit of harvest.’ ”[1] Here, as Miss Burne remarks, “ ‘arnack, we haven!’ is obviously in the Devon dialect, ‘a neck (or nack)! we have un’ ” “The neck” is generally hung up in the farmhouse, where it sometimes remains for two or three years.[2] A similar custom is still observed in some parts of Cornwall, as I am informed by my friend Professor J. H. Middleton. “The last sheaf is decked with ribbons. Two strong-voiced men are chosen and placed (one with the sheaf) on opposite sides of a valley. One shouts, ‘I’ve gotten it.’ The other shouts, ‘What hast gotten?’ The first answers, ‘I’se gotten the neck.’ ”
In these Devonshire and Cornish customs a particular bunch of ears, generally the last left standing,[3] is conceived as the neck of the corn-spirit, who is consequently beheaded when the bunch is cut down. Similarly in Shropshire the name “neck,” or “the gander’s neck,” used to be commonly given to the last handful of ears left standing in the middle of the field, when all the rest of the corn was cut. It was plaited together, and the reapers, standing ten or twenty paces off, threw their sickles at it. Whoever cut it through was said to have cut off the gander’s neck.
