One for Sorrow (10 page)

St Swithun's day if thou dost rain

For forty days it will remain.

St Swithun's day if thou be fair,

For forty days 'twill rain nae mare.

An ancient saying that blends traditional weather lore with legend. St Swithun, now sometimes written as Swithin, was a Bishop of Winchester in Saxon times who was renowned for his philanthropy and for his dedication to building churches. Legend has it that on his deathbed St Swithun asked to be buried outside, rather than in his cathedral so that his body could, as William of Malmesbury recorded in the twelfth century, ‘be subject to the feet of passers-by and to the raindrops pouring from on high'.
    His last wish was granted but nine years after his death the monks of Winchester built him a shrine within the cathedral walls and moved his remains there. The legend states that during the ceremony that marked the removal of his bones, the heavens opened and there was a huge downpour, which gave rise to the piece of folklore that says St Swithun's mood on the anniversary of his removal from the fresh air determines the weather for the next forty days.
    But it seems likely that the forty days part of the story came from observation of the weather patterns, as there is actually a scientific basis for this outlandish sounding idea. In mid-July the jet stream tends to settle into position for the summer; and if by 15 July it's on a southerly pathway, bringing rain, it will often stay rainy until the end of August. If it's on a more northerly course, warmer weather will usually last.

   

This ancient phrase is often interpreted to mean that neither time nor the ebb and flow of the sea can be influenced by the actions of man, and in a broad sense, it was intended to convey the idea that mankind is powerless over nature and its unstoppable forces. But the idea that the sea was part of the image came much later as our understanding of Middle English words began to fade. An early record exists in
St Marher
(1225) which reads: ‘And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet.'
    But in Middle English ‘tide' meant a period of time, as in Yuletide, noontide or eventide. So in the Middle Ages the phrase meant specifically that no person was powerful enough to halt the passage of time.
    The sentiment that time will keep ticking on no matter what we do appears in ‘The Clerk's Tale', one of Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
, in the lines:

For though we slepe or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the
tyme, it nil no man abyde.

In everyday use, the phrase has become a way of encouraging someone who is taking an unnecessarily long time over something to hurry up. In the US a second line is sometimes added to the phrase to make it more useful to parents, so it ends: ‘. . . and the school bus waits for no boy.'

Ash before oak the summer

is all a soak,

Oak before ash the summer

is but a splash.

In their quest to predict what kind of fortunes they could expect in the year ahead, country folk turned to the trees for signs of how much rain the summer would bring.
    Oak trees feature frequently in folklore as they were important to the Greeks, Romans, Celts and Teutonic tribes. The gods these civilizations worshipped, who had power over the fertility of the land and determined how much rain would fall, all held the oak tree as sacred, which conferred on the tree a respect that was passed down through generations of country dwellers.
    The ash was also a significant tree, especially to the Druids, who believed it had healing powers, and because the oak and the ash often grow side by side in woodland, getting the same amount of sunshine and rain, they made a very convenient weather forecasting kit. People believed that if the leaves of the ash tree unfurled before those of the oak, the summer would be rainy, if the oak came into leaf first the summer would be mostly dry.
    These days we use the snappier ‘Oak before ash, in for a splash, Ash before oak, in for a soak' though no direct correlation has been found between rainfall and the order in which these trees come into leaf. We do now know though that the oak is sensitive to temperature and its leaves unfurl as the weather gets warmer, whereas the ash is light sensitive and its leaves open as the hours of daylight lengthen. In the last ten years, as global warming has produced warmer and warmer springs, the oak has beaten the ash in seven out of ten years.

Seagull, seagull, sit on the sand,

It's never good weather when you're

on land.

In traditional fishing communities, it is unlucky to kill a seagull because they are believed to embody the souls of drowned fishermen. As ‘soul birds' they are said to have prophetic powers and since medieval times those whose lives were at the mercy of the sea would take whatever guidance from them that they could. In fair weather, seagulls usually stay in flight and if they need to rest they sleep on the water. In stormy weather, they find the gusts in the air and the choppy water make it more difficult to stay at sea and often head inland. The sight of a flock of seagulls huddled together on the ground would have been worrying for the families of fishermen who were already at sea and children would recite this rhyme in the hope of bringing better weather.
    These days though, seagulls can often be found inland for a different reason: food. Though historically their diet has been small fish, they are notorious for eating almost any kind of leftovers they can lay their beaks on and many now subsist almost entirely on the scraps they find at rubbish dumps and landfill sites, even in the finest weather.

   

When this phrase first came into use in the sixteenth century, begging was a very different business to the sort we're used to today. The slow breakdown of the feudal system left many of the poorest tenant farmers dispossessed and towns and cities were inundated with poverty-stricken agricultural workers looking for food and shelter. The state did offer support for those who it determined had a valid reason for being unable to support themselves, but the rest were branded vagabonds and were looked down upon by the rest of society as idle and good for nothing.
    It was against the backdrop of this hard-line attitude that this proverb became established, and when it appeared in 1546 in Heywood's
Dialogue of Proverbs
, it was recorded as:

Folke saie alwaie, beggers shulde be no choosers.

Subsequent collections usually had ‘must not' – which places the emphasis firmly on the fact that beggars had no option. It meant that if a beggar was offered work or lodgings, perhaps by the Church or a privately funded charity, they should accept with good grace and be glad of whatever they were given rather than making further demands.
    The first time ‘Beggars
can't
be choosers' was used in print seems to be in an American novel,
Snatched from the poor-house: a young girl's life history
by N. J. Clodfelter, published in1888. Over time, and perhaps influenced by the twentieth century's more sympathetic attitudes towards homelessness, this version has taken over, and we now most often use the phrase when describing a decision of our own to take whatever we can get if there's something we really need.

Early to bed and early to rise

Makes a man healthy, wealthy

and wise.

In the days before electricity, the hours of daylight dictated people's working patterns and this rhyme, thought to have been in use since the sixteenth century, explains the benefits of maximizing productivity by going to bed at sunset and getting up with the dawn . It first appeared in print in this form in John Clarke's collection of proverbs  
Parœmiologia
in 1639, but around 1450 Dame Juliana Berners wrote in her ‘Treatise of Fishing with Angle' (published around 1496, and part of her  
Boke of St Albans
):

As the olde englysshe prouerbe sayth in this wyse. Who soo woll ryse erly shall be holy helthy and zely [fortunate].

The saying was popularized in the United States by its inclusion in Benjamin Franklin's
Poor Richard's Almanack
of 1735 and remained popular in anthologies of children's rhymes throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
    Another verse, which appeared in
Little Rhymes for Little Folks
in 1812 sheds light on the attitudes towards oversleeping that prevailed at the time:

The cock crows in the morn,

To tell us to rise,

And that he who lies late

Will never be wise:

For heavy and stupid,

He can't learn his book:

So long as he lives,

Like a Dunce he must look.

The phrase is still used traditionally today, though its slightly high-handed moral tone has invited modern subversions. In 1939 American satirist James Thurber wrote his own interpretation in
The New Yorker
, ‘Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead,' which has proved almost as enduring as the original.

This biblical proverb contains such an important Christian message that it appears in the Bible three times. In Deuteronomy and in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
    The Bible story that best explains the meaning of the phrase is the Temptation of Christ described in Luke (4:3). Jesus is in the desert having fasted for forty days when the Devil comes to taunt him. He tells Jesus to use his divine power to turn the stones at his feet into loaves of bread so that he can satisfy his hunger, but though he is on the brink of starvation, Jesus replies ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.' The Christian interpretation of this episode is that the Gospel is what really sustains mankind and gives life value and that though the body can be sustained by food and water, to be truly alive man must follow the will of God according to the scriptures.
    The phrase is still used by Christians to advocate the benefits of a modest but spiritual life, but it is also often used in more secular terms to express stoicism in the face of material hardship, implying that there are more important things in life than the trappings of wealth. Since the twentieth century the phrase has been upended and is sometimes used as a tongue-in-cheek way of justifying over-indulgence.

The winter solstice occurs on either 21 or 22 December in the northern hemisphere. It marks the day on which the sun is lowest in the sky at noon, and the hours of daylight are at their shortest. Since the twelfth century this day has been known by some Christian churches as St Thomas's day (others have it as 3 July), which features in several pieces of folklore. Celebration in these dark days was crucial to keeping up the spirits and it was traditional for farmers to make their last slaughters for the Christmas table on the shortest day, something that is illustrated by the following rhyme recorded in 1846:

The day of St Thomas, the blessed

divine,

Is good for brewing, baking, and

killing fat swine.

Another tradition held that the wind direction on St Thomas's day would stay the same for three months so it was customary to look at the weathervane at midday to see what the rest of the winter would bring. If the weather was already frosty by the last week in December the rest of the winter would stay bitterly cold.
    But in the Middle Ages, a ‘bad' winter was actually better than a warm one. Another saying, which has now thankfully fallen out of use, warned that ‘A green Christmas means a fat churchyard'. Unseasonably mild weather in December could disrupt the natural cycles of planting and growth, causing crops to fail and leaving those dependent on them for their food with nothing to live on.