No ploughing on St Mark’s Day

25 April · North Wales

Lore and belief

On St Mark’s Day blessings were asked on the growing corn. According to a manuscript of Pennant’s, no farmer in North Wales dared work his team that day, because a man who once did so had lost an ox. Hone adds an old puzzle about the saint’s fast: one side of Cheapside, in the diocese of London, kept it, and the other, in the diocese of Canterbury, did not.

no farmer in North Wales dare hold his team on this day

From Hone's Every-Day Book, vol. 1, col. 524. Read the original

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