Folklore of South East

9 June

Folklore from the old calendars

Bonfires of amity in London No longer kept LondonStow, quoted by Hone, described how in June and July, on the eves of feast days, bonfires were made in the London streets with every man giving wood or labour.
Green birch on the sign-posts at Little Brickhill No longer kept Buckinghamshire, LondonThe herbalist William Coles remembered riding through Little Brickhill, a town on the London road between Dunstable and Stony Stratford, and finding nearly every sign-post decked with green birch.
St Margaret’s dragon lent to St Sepulchre’s No longer kept LondonThe parish of St Margaret, Westminster, kept a dragon for the Midsummer Eve processions and was paid when a City parish borrowed it.
The Burford dragon and giant No longer kept OxfordshirePlot's History of Oxfordshire records that the people of Burford, within living memory in 1677, made a dragon every year and carried it up and down the town with great jollity on Midsummer Eve, adding a giant as well for no reason anyone knew.
The Marching Watch No longer kept LondonIn medieval London a watch of at least two thousand men paraded the city on Midsummer Eve and again on the eves of St Peter and St Paul.

Folklore from the old calendars

A coal under the plantain root Lore and belief LondonAt noon on Midsummer Day 1694 Aubrey came upon twenty-two or twenty-three young women, most of them well dressed, on their knees in the pasture behind Montague House as if they were weeding.
St John’s verses and bonfire at Eton No longer kept BuckinghamshireThe account of Eton School written in 1560 describes how, for as long as the custom lasted, the boys on St John the Baptist's Eve decorated their beds with pictures and wrote verses on the life and deeds of the saint, fair copies of which were pinned to the bed-posts for the learned to read.
The sermon in green boughs Still kept OxfordshireOn St John the Baptist's Day a sermon was preached at Magdalen College from a stone pulpit in the corner of the first court, and the court was hung with green boughs so that the preaching would look like the Baptist's in the wilderness.