Carrying off the flower of the wake

Brand was told that about fifty years before he wrote, the people of Northumberland villages carried firebrands of some kind about their fields on the night of St Peter. They would also raid the bonfires of neighbouring townships and carry off some of the ashes by force, which they called carrying off the flower of the wake. Brand thought the word was perhaps flour, and Moresin saw such torch-bearing as a relic of the Roman festival of Ceres.