248 The Lifting of the Bride.
the young woman's feet sprinkled with it ' by way of a blessing/ while she was held aloft in the gaily decorated
chair Others give more details of the ceremony.
The chair must be lifted from the ground three times and turned round in the air, .... and the feet then sprinkled with the bunch of flowers dipped in water. The heaving party were rewarded with a kiss, and generally when the men were ' heaved,' by a gift of money. Those
who refused to be ' heaved ' had to pay forfeit In
Durham and Yorkshire * heaving ' is disused, but the forfeit for its omission is still exacted. The boys may pull off the shoes from the girls' unblessed feet on Easter Sunday, and the girls may retaliate on the boys' caps on Monday."
The same proceedings take place at Easter in other places also. The Rev. Peter Roberts, writing about 1815,^ says : " On Easter Monday and Tuesday a ceremony takes place among the lower orders in North Wales which is scarcely known, I believe, elsewhere. It is called ' lifting,' as it consists in lifting a person in a chair three times from the ground. On Monday the men lift the women, and on Tuesday the women lift the men. The ceremony ceases, however, at twelve o'clock. The ' lifters,' as they are called, go in troops, and with a permitted freedom seize the person w^hom they intend to
- lift,' and having persuaded or obliged him (or her) to
sit on the chair, lift whoever it is, three times with cheering, and then require a small compliment. A little resistance, real or pretended, creates no small merriment ; much resistance would excite contempt, and perhaps indig- nation. That this custom owes its origin to the season needs no illustration."
And so on the Welsh Border, a writer in the Mont- gomery Collections of the Powys-land club,~ speaking of the "lifting" or "heaving day," says: " * Pullye, haul
' Cat/ibrian Popular Antiquities, p. 125.
- Quoted in Fourth Series Notes and Queries, viii., 328.
