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over to common use from Lammas to Candlemas –
a practice that was to remain widespread until the
Enclosure Acts of the early nineteenth century put
common lands into private hands. Lammas and the
other old quarter days of Candlemas, Whitsuntide
and Martinmas were often printed in red on calendars,
hence the expression 'red-letter day' to denote an
important event or special occasion.
In northern England and southern Scotland “Riding”
was the practice of asserting territorial rights in
border disputes by riding over the disputed lands
on horseback. The custom of “riding” was also used
to maintain the rights to graze animals and forage for
wood on areas of common land known as 'Lammas
lands'. Lammas went on to become one of the quarter
days on which criminal and civil courts were
convened, contracts were signed and guess what –
marriages were made, just like our Neolithic
ancestors out on the open grasslands beneath the stars
during the cattle round ups 4000 years ago.
It is an intriguing idea that men so very long ago
came together to negotiate how they were going to
share the natural resources of wood pasture and open
grassland grazing. Back in the impossibly distant
past, (when the Egyptian Pharaohs were building
pyramids) our ancestors created physical boundaries
that still mark our landscape today and generation
after generation recognised and respected them
without anything being written down. This was
thousands of years of living memory.
that the dykes built in the middle Bronze Age
following ridges or along watersheds were intended
to mark pasture boundaries as populations and
therefore demand for grazing grew. Good fences
make good neighbours. In many areas there is
growing evidence to support the belief that the
Bronze Age boundaries and local agreements on
grazing were maintained right through the Iron Age
and into the Romano-British period.
Red Letter Days
Back in the 1920s more than 1000 cattle skulls
were found buried at an Iron Age stock enclosure
at Harrow Hill in Sussex and another of these Iron
Age
middens
, or rubbish heaps, was uncovered in
Wiltshire. Archaeologists believe these to be the
remains of huge annual feasts held on grasslands
during the annual round-ups of collective herds.
Folklore has long suggested that these were times
of games and sports and matchmaking when
marriages were made. Was this not Lammas?
Lammas, from the Anglo-Saxon
hlaef-mass
meaning
'loaf-mass' marked the first harvest when the first
grain gathered in was ground and baked into a loaf.
It was celebrated only in Britain - no other Germanic
or Nordic peoples observed Lammas or held any
other feasts on the 1st August, which suggests that
Lammas might be the Iron Age Celtic festival of
Lughnasa given a new name.
Lammas was a rent day when land tenure and pasture
rights were often settled with grazing lands, given
The Lammas Festival Eastbourne