and beg for food and orfier articles at the cottages, and it was necessary to give them whatever they asked for. But I doubt if they were (at least, within memory) much more than a bugbear to scare children with, and to prevent them from going too near the old pit-mouths.
To pass to Trade Customs. Lock-making is in some ways a very old-fashioned trade, and the journeymen locksmiths retain a custom which almost amounts to selling themselves into slavery. They frequently receive their wages in a lump sum on engagement, and bind themselves to work for no other master till they have worked off the debt.
Agricultural servants, both men and women, are hired at Christmas for the year, receiving a shilling as "earnest" of their wages to "bind the bargain." Christmas is the hiring time for farm-servants in Cheshire and North Shropshire also; but in Wales and South Shropshire, on one side of the county, the hiring-time is in May; and in Derbyshire, on the other, it is in November; while in Warwickshire and most of the Midland Counties it is at Michaelmas. I need not point out to you that these varieties may practically be reduced to two modes of reckoning the year: by the legal quarters (Michaelmas, Christmas, &c.), and by the seasons of summer and winter, anciently considered to begin in May and November. Thus we have in Staffordshire, Cheshire, and North Shropshire (where they hire at Christmas) a local variant of the general South Midland custom of reckoning the year by the legal quarters, while in South Shropshire and Wales, on the westward, and in Derbyshire, to the north-eastward, we have two varieties of the more ancient reckoning by seasons. Professor Rhys, we know, considers that the May and November reckoning is the ancient Celtic one, while the Michaelmas or Christmas observance represents the more modern Teutonic or Roman ecclesiastical civilisation; and I am much disposed to agree with him.
