The Feast Week

A correspondent described for Hone the feast week kept in many villages of the Midlands and other counties, the yearly holiday that followed the dedication day of the parish church. The week before, every cottage was scrubbed and whitewashed, and a ham or a plum pudding laid in for the visitors. On the Sunday the bells rang and relations and friends came from all round to dinner and to church, and through the next days work stopped, with gingerbread and fruit stalls, swings and roundabouts, bowls, quoits and ninepins for the men and dancing at night. The writer thought it cost the poor far too dear and preferred the single fair day kept in other counties.