St Vincent’s Sunshine

An old Latin line bade people remember whether the sun shone on St Vincent’s Day, 22 January, without saying why. The answer turned up in Guernsey, where a gentleman looking through sixteenth-century family papers found a scrap of verse in old Norman French: if the sun shone clear and fine on St Vincent’s Day, there would be more wine than water. Chambers takes it as a promise to vine growers of a dry year and a good vintage, and notes that it is only one of many days whose weather was said to foretell the season.