Note (return) — Chapter IV

In the north of England these fires used to be lit in the open streets. Young and old gathered round them, and while the young leaped over the fires and engaged in games, their elders looked on and probably remembered with regret the days when they used to foot it as nimbly. Sometimes the fires were kindled on the tops of high hills. The people also carried firebrands about the fields.499 The custom of kindling bonfires on Midsummer Eve prevailed all over Cumberland down to the second half of the eighteenth century.500 In Northumberland the custom seems to have lasted into the first quarter of the nineteenth century; the fires were lit in the villages and on the tops of high hills, and the people sported and danced round them.501 Moreover, the villagers used to run with burning brands round their fields and to snatch ashes from a neighbour's fire, saying as they did so, "We have the flower (or flour) of the wake."502 At Sandhill bonfires were kindled on the Eve of St. Peter as well as on Midsummer Eve; the custom is attested for the year 1575, when it was described as ancient.503 We are told that "on Midsummer's eve, reckoned according to the old style, it was formerly the custom of the inhabitants, young and old, not only of Whalton, but of most of the adjacent villages, to collect a large cartload of whins and other combustible materials, which was dragged by them with great rejoicing (a fiddler being seated on the top of the cart) into the village and erected into a pile. The people from the surrounding country assembled towards evening, when it was set on fire; and whilst the young danced around it, the elders looked on smoking their pipes and drinking their beer, until it was consumed. There can be little doubt that this curious old custom dates from a very remote antiquity." In a law-suit, which was tried in 1878, the rector of Whalton gave evidence of the constant use of the village green for the ceremony since 1843. "The bonfire," he said, "was lighted a little to the north-east of the well at Whalton, and partly on the footpath, and people danced round it and jumped through it. That was never interrupted." The Rev. G.R. Hall, writing in 1879, says that "the fire festivals or bonfires of the summer solstice at the Old Midsummer until recently were commemorated on Christenburg Crags and elsewhere by leaping through and dancing round the fires, as those who have been present have told me."504 Down to the early part of the nineteenth century bonfires called Beal-fires used to be lit on Midsummer Eve all over the wolds in the East Riding of Yorkshire.505