There was no ‘dead time’ between Christmas and New Year in long-ago Cornwall
The west of England had traditions that had no counterparts in the rest of the country.
YOU would have been well advised not to go on a country walk in Cornwall on December 26 in the days before guns had to be licensed.
It was traditional for every man and boy who could lay his hands on a gun to go out shooting and take pot-shots at birds.
This St Stephen’s Day custom was said to have derived from a legend of one of St Stephen’s guards being awakened by a bird, just as his prisoner was about to escape.
In the week after Christmas Day, ‘Giglet Fairs’ were held in Launceston in Cornwall and Okehampton in Devonshire. A ‘giglet’ or ‘giglot’ was defined as a ‘giddy young woman’ and the fairs, attended mostly by young people, were essentially ‘wife markets’.
According to contemporary records: “The rustic young swain was privileged with self-introduction to any of the nymphs around him, so that he had a good opportunity of choosing a suitable partner if tired of a single life.” (Britton and Brayley – Devon and Cornwall)
It was deemed unlucky to set out on a voyage on Childermas or Innocents’ Day, December 28. Washing clothes or doing any unnecessary housework were also taboo.
In the villages of east Cornwall, parties of men would set out soon after dusk on New Year’s Eve, carrying small bowls and going from house to house begging money to make a feast. The practice was dying out by the mid-19th century though it was thought that some remote villages were still carrying on the tradition as late as the 1890s.
There was one saint whose name was familiar to all in Cornwall a century or so ago and who had much to answer for. Promises made – but never intended to be kept – were all to be fulfilled on the next St Tibbs’s Eve, a day described as falling between the old and the new year.
Parties to welcome the new year seem to have been pretty standard although there was one tradition that was specifically ‘west country’. Old women opened their Bibles at random and and the text on which the forefinger of the right hand rested was supposed to foretell the future.
Money, generally a piece of silver, was placed on the threshold to be the first thing brought in on New Year’s Day to ensure there would be no lack of it in the ensuing year.
(Information from Folklore and Legends of Cornwall, first published as Cornish Feasts and Folklore, 1890)
