The day after Twelfth Day was the first free day after the Christmas holidays, and was jokingly called St Distaff’s Day because the women took up their spinning again. The ploughmen, in no hurry to work themselves, made sport of setting the flax alight, and the maids paid them back with pails of water. Herrick wrote the day’s rules in verse: part work and part play, burn the flax and fire the tow, then bid Christmas sport good night.
St Distaff’s Day
7 January
No longer kept
made it their sport to set the flax a-burning; in requital of which prank, the maids soused the men from the water-pails.
From Chambers's Book of Days, vol. 1, p. 68. Read the original
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