Note 876 — Chapter XII · NEW YEAR CUSTOMS

Ibid. 172; Ashton, 105, quoting Aubrey, Natural Hist. of Wilts, ‘Mr. Anthony Hinton, one of the officers of the Earle of Pembroke, did inoculate, not long before the late civill warres (ten yeares or more), a bud of Glastonbury Thorne, on a thorne, at his farm house, at Wilton, which blossoms at Christmas, as the other did. My mother has had branches of them for a flower-pott, several Christmasses, which I have seen. Elias Ashmole, Esq., in his notes upon Theatrum Chymicum, saies that in the churchyard at Glastonbury grew a walnutt tree, that did putt out young leaves at Christmas, as doth the King’s Oake in the New Forest. In Parham Park, in Suffolk (Mr. Boutele’s), is a pretty ancient thorne, that blossomes like that at Glastonbury; the people flock hither to see it on Christmas day. But in the rode that leades from Worcester to Droitwiche is a black thorne hedge at Clayes, half a mile long or more, that blossoms about Christmas-day for a week or more together. Dr. Ezerel Tong sayd that about Rumly-Marsh in Kent, are thornes naturally like that near Glastonbury. The Soldiers did cutt downe that near Glastonbury: the stump remaines.’ Specimens are still found about Glastonbury of Crataegus oxyacantha praecox, a winter-flowering variety of hawthorn: some of the alleged slips from the Glastonbury thorn appear, however, to be Prunus communis, or blackthorn. A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1753 reports that the opponents of the ‘New Style’ introduced in 1752 were encouraged by the refusal of the thorns at Glastonbury and Quainton in Buckinghamshire to flower before Old Christmas day. A Somerset woman told a writer in 3 N. Q. ix. 33 that the buds of the thorns burst into flower at midnight on Christmas Eve, ‘As they comed out, you could hear ‘um haffer.’