Burning the Witch

In the East Riding, on the evening the last of a farmer’s corn was cut, the reapers heaped eight or ten small piles of dried peas together in the field and set them alight. They danced round the fire, ate the scorched peas and blacked each other’s faces with the burnt straw, the lads chasing the lasses and the lasses the lads, and sometimes the farmer’s wife joined in. Before this came the cream-pot, a supper of cream and currant cakes in the house. The writer thought it began as a charm against witchcraft overturning the wagons or laming the horses, and in 1827 he still saw three such fires burning in the fields at North Burton.