Easter Football 1598: Surprising Details from some Star Chamber Depositions

Posted on April 22, 2026 by merryshrovetide

The Records of Early Football series highlights types of evidence and sources central to the study of medieval and early modern football, as compiled in the REF database. This post spotlights court depositions (legal witness statements).

During Easter celebrations in 1598, the villagers of North Moreton, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) gathered to watch and play football in the close of William Leaver, a wealthy yeoman farmer and high constable of the hundred. Multiple matches were ‘made and played’ on the day, including a particularly consequential one ‘between six persons’. Simon Watts, a husbandman from nearby Sandford, Oxfordshire and servant to a local gentleman, was present that day as a player and spectator:

…he and some others went to play at football in a close…. and after [he] had there played awhile he left off and then a new match was made and played in the said close between William Field, John Field, Robert Field, Richard Gregory, John Leaver and a boy of one Sydbury’s and in that play the said Richard Gregory stroke the said John Field with his fist at two several times and at the last time John Field with his fist stroke Richard Gregory again (at which time one Brian Gunter, William Gunter and this defendant and John Gregory and diverse other persons were looking on the said play). John Field and Richard Gregory then buffeting one another, William Gunter went to them to part them and thereupon a quarrel began and blows were given between William Gunter and John and Richard Gregory. And then Brian Gunter seeing that affray drew his poniard [dagger] and coming to the Gregories did therewith strike and wound them both a little on the heads that the blood followed in some small measure...¹

While this ‘small measure’ of bloodshed ended the fight, both of the young Gregory brothers would die some weeks later, allegedly from the head wounds sustained. The incident sparked a long-running family feud between the Gunters and the Gregories, which crackled on through a rising conflagration of assaults, witchcraft accusations, litigation, and ultimately an intervention from King James I himself. Historian Jim Sharpe masterfully reconstructed this sordid tale in his microhistory The Bewitching of Ann Gunter, which I highly recommend.² But here I want to focus on the football match which started it all. The testimonies of Simon Watts and many other witnesses come from a 1601 case before the notorious Star Chamber Court in Whitehall.³ The evidence demonstrates how rich court depositions can be as a source for early football, challenging some preconceptions about the premodern game.

The Star Chamber case was launched against Brian Gunter and his men by various well-heeled yeomen of North Moreton, including the owner of the close where the football had taken place. The Gunters exerted considerable influence in the village, being the only gentry family. But the senior Brian was clearly an unpopular figure. The bill against him and his household alleged much lawbreaking and violence (not just the football incident). Simon Watts was one of Gunter’s servants and fellow defendants. His testimony was hardly impartial, but a wide array of witnesses corroborate the basic details of the event. Taken together, we can reconstruct a day of play in an Elizabethan village, gaining some insight into the two main questions of football history: how was the sport organized and played; how was it viewed and valued within society?

To take game play and organization first (see slide above), the North Moreton matches do not conform to the typical popular and scholarly image of premodern football as a mob game: ‘played by variable, formally unrestricted numbers of people sometimes in excess of 1000’, with ‘no equalisation of numbers’, ranging ‘over open countryside and through streets of towns’, exhibiting a ‘loose distinction between players and spectators…and an unusually high level of violence’.⁴ Mass games like this were certainly played during the Tudor period. For example, in March 1576 some 100 people assembled to play football in the rural parish of Ruislip, Middlesex, a game which eventually gave rise to ‘a great affray’. And mass games are also the main form of traditional football that survives today, in festive fixtures like the Easter Tuesday ‘ba game’ at Workington, Cumbria (pictured below).

Yet North Moreton’s Easter football in 1598 did not look like this.⁵ At least one of the games featured very small sides: just three matched against three. There was an element of formality in delineating these teams, seen in the distinction between ‘making a match’ and the playing of it. There were far more spectators than players and the lines between these two were quite clear. Simon Watts had played in a match earlier in the day, but stood ‘looking on’ for the second one. When the spectators closed in, it was not to participate in an ad hoc way, but to break up a fight. The game was not played across country or through streets, but within the relatively defined space of a local close – by definition a smaller piece of land often enclosed or fenced. Within this close, the game must have been fairly spaced out, considering the small numbers involved. But the players also must have regularly come together for close contact, since Richard Gregory struck John Field twice before the fight even began. Gameplay may have looked something like the contemporary woodcut pictured below, showing six ‘country swains’ at football.

Over the last few decades, football historians have increasingly recognized that games of small and even sides existed alongside mass games, long before the codifications of the nineteenth century.⁶ London schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster advocated for this type of football play as early as 1581, while schools and colleges in Aberdeen were putting it into practice in the early 1600s. Significantly, the North Moreton evidence shows that this type of football also existed outside elite and educated circles, among rural farmers. It is also of note that, though the Fields, Gregories and Leavers were not necessarily highly educated or of gentle status, they did come from the most powerful families in the village. Looking at the background of the players and spectators can tell us something about football’s place in this agrarian society.

Football was technically an ‘unlawful game’ in Tudor England – the Ruislip players of 1576, for example, were indicted for the offense. Despite this, the local oligarchy of North Moreton clearly embraced the sport. Play took place in the close of a high constable; this was a significant legal office (usually held by lower gentry or prosperous yeomen) with criminal and administrative jurisdiction over a subdivision of the county called the hundred. Moreover, the list of spectators included a veritable who’s who of the parish – wealthy and elder yeomen and husbandmen who periodically held local offices (see slide below). Our list of those present on the day is undoubtedly biased towards the upper crust of village men: they would have been favoured as witnesses in the Star Chamber case. But those of more humble status were probably there too, to judge from the attendance of poorer husbandmen and servants like Simon Watts and John Taylor. It may be significant that Simon played a separate match to the one between the higher status yeomanry. Perhaps these matches were a reflection (and reinforcement) of local social hierarchies.

Such interest across the social ranks shows how deeply embedded football was within village life. Moreover, it suggests a respectability to this sport, rather at odds with the view of contemporary intelligentsia. Most of them saw football as a brutal and dangerous pretext for settling scores, and engendering bad blood. In 1583, Puritan writer Phillip Stubbes derided it as ‘more a friendly kind of fight, than a play or recreation, a bloody and murdering practice, than a fellowly sport or pastime’. The North Moreton football would seem a case in point, until we look a bit closer.

There’s little evidence that the three-a-side match was an outlet for any pre-existing factionalism or enmity among the players and wider community. Or that such factionalism led to the fight. In fact, the depositions show the Field, Gregory, Leaver, and Sydbury families making common cause against the Gunters’ various indiscretions over the following years. Rough football play certainly led to the fisticuffs between John Field and Richard Gregory, but a multitude of witnesses saw William Gunter and others trying to break up or part the ‘buffeting’ players, rather than escalate things. According to John Taylor, the fighting was actually successfully quelled. But John Gregory objected to how William Gunter had handled his brother Richard, so they ‘fell to words and then to blows’. It’s this secondary fight that carried fatal consequences.

Rather than craving bloodshed, the players and spectators were seemingly trying to avoid it, trying to get the game back on track. Premodern football was obviously a violent sport: it was a close contact struggle to possess and advance a ball, prone to serious injury, flared tempers, pride and passion. But the same could be said for modern football codes. Bruising contact remains central in American and rugby football, while factional fighting has notoriously devolved to the hooligans and ultras in association football. The narrative that premodern football exhibited an ‘unusually high level of violence’ which the leisured classes then needed to reform during the 1800s to make our modern ‘civilized’ codes is a tidy story. Perhaps it is a comforting tale of progress to some. But using the past as a foil for the present does not make for good history.

As the rich incidental and contextual detail in this Star Chamber case hopefully makes clear, legal depositions can be an ideal source for premodern football history – something of a gold standard. Newspapers and antiquarian accounts may surpass them in detail, but those sources are invariably written from an outside perspective, usually elite and/or educated. And of course, newsprint only survives in numbers from the eighteenth century onward. What makes depositions particularly special is how they open windows onto the perspectives and experiences of ordinary people. We don’t have to simply take the hostile word of Stubbes or an indictment for granted: deponents can tell us (directly or indirectly) how and why they played football.

But just like any source, depositions have their own problems and limitations. For one, depositional references to football are exceedingly rare, though they can be found across the medieval and early modern periods. More problematic is the issue of reliability. Like today, legal witnesses such as Simon Watts were rarely impartial or infallible: they often had skin in the game and certainly had malleable memories. Testimonies could often contradict one another, and they were all mediated by convention, the legal process, and scribal language. How do we know the words on the manuscript reflect reality?

One approach is to compare and corroborate evidence across other sources, and the depositions of other plaintiffs, defendants and more impartial witnesses. You can then pair this with a degree of reasonable inference: Simon Watts would likely try to downplay any violence and injury, and portray himself, William Gunter, and others in his party as being concerned with keeping the peace, rather than causing a ruckus. But even witnesses who were no friend to the Gunters largely backed up Watts’ account. Moreover, he had far less reason to lie about the general organization of the football play, our main topic of interest. Beyond these techniques, we can use depositions as records of the plausible if not the definitively true. As Laura Gowing, historian of early modern gender and work, eloquently explains:

Fictions woven for court cases tend to reveal fantasies that had real power over people’s minds, and the power of the plausible means that fictionalised, exaggerated versions can be as useful to historians as strict truths. Alongside the key contested events, most testimonies include significant extraneous detail that reveals who was doing what, where and when. From the answers witnesses gave to leading questions, a landscape of daily life can be reconstituted alongside an attention to the fantasies and fictions people wove around their daily lives.⁷

Depositions from this Star Chamber case thus show early modern football as not merely a ‘bloody, murdering practice’, but a sport deeply inscribed into the ‘landscape of daily life’ in an Elizabethan village.

The National Archives (TNA), STAC 5/L30/23, Deposition of Simon Watts. ↩︎
James Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A horrible and true story of deception,
witchcraft, murder, and the King of England, (New York, 1999), chapter 2. ↩︎
TNA, STAC 5/L3/19, L30/23, L31/124, L35/5. ↩︎
John Goulstone, ‘Football’s Secret History – chapters 2 and 3’, Soccer & Society (2017), p. 2 quoting and critiquing E. Dunning, J. A. Maguire and R. E. Pearton, The Sports Process; A Comparative and Developmental Approach (1993). ↩︎
Sharpe dates the football play to May 1598, based on the death of the Gregories in May and a note in the burial register saying the injuries were sustained a fortnight prior. However, this register note was added later at an unknown date. The Star Chamber material consistently dates the football to ‘at/in or about the feast of Easter’ (16 April that year). Such dating could be vague and approximate but May Day would have been a more typical marker for something which occurred in early May. Regardless, this small-sided type of football was plausible enough as an Eastertide occurence not to raise any objections from deponents. ↩︎
Goulstone’s Football’s Secret History (2001) was a pioneering work in this regard. ↩︎
Laura Gowing, Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge, 2021), p. 6. ↩︎

The Oldest Firm: Institutional Football in Medieval Scotland

Posted on March 12, 2026 by merryshrovetide

It’s a historic time for Scottish football: the men’s national team has qualified for the World Cup, ending a near three-decade drought. And there’s a distinct possibility a club outside the ‘Old Firm‘ could win the top Scottish League for the first time since 1985. The erstwhile dominance of Celtic and Rangers has me wondering: what is the oldest ‘firm’ in the history of Scottish football? I don’t mean this in the modern sense of oldest surviving or earliest documented football club. Rather, what is the oldest evidence we have of Scottish organizations or institutions supporting football in a sustained way, and how did they do so?¹

The answer takes us back to medieval or pre-Reformation Scotland, and specifically the 1530s, when Perth’s trade incorporations (i.e. guilds), and St Andrews’ city government and university were all sponsoring football in some sense. I’ve written at length about the Perth guilds in my thesis, so this essay will focus on institutional patronage in St Andrews. It’s a good opportunity to consider how premodern football was organized and played, and its complicated relationship with authority.

Annotated map 'Scotia Regnum' c. 1595 by Gerhard Mercator, highlighting Perth and St Andrews as the first known locations of institutional football in Scotland, c. 1530s. — Annotation of map ‘Scotia Regnum’ c. 1595 by Gerhard Mercator, highlighting Perth and St Andrews as the first known locations of institutional football in Scotland. Map reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. CC-BY

Football in Medieval Scotland and St Andrews

Football – as a broad family of games where a ball is contested via foot and/or hands and usually advanced to goals – has deep roots in Scotland. Unfortunately, the country’s relatively sparse medieval records make it difficult to assess just how deep, or to illuminate the early game’s nature. Our oldest Scottish references date to the fifteenth century, when official prohibitions suggest that football was already popular among the rural populace and university students. As the slide below shows, the crown, Parliament and other authorities didn’t much approve of the sport.

Powerpoint slide detailing various parliamentary acts and university statutes from Scotland concerning the prohibition of football and other sports from the 1400s and early 1500s.

Around the turn of the sixteenth century, St Andrews University and its constituent faculties and colleges deemed the game ‘dishonest and dangerous’, threatening to expel or excommunicate students who played. But considering this hostility, it’s perplexing to find the bursar of the university’s Arts Faculty purchasing footballs: for 6 pence and 8 pence Scots in 1535 and 1537 respectively (roughly equal to a building labourer’s day wage at the time). An entry in the Faculty’s act book dated to 19 February 1537 sheds further light on the curious sponsorship (translated from the original Latin on the slide below). It records the minutes of a faculty congregation which discussed, among other things, disorder caused by football play the week prior on Shrove Tuesday, the pre-Lent Carnival (known as Fastern’s E’en in Lowland Scotland). By digging into the dense and sometimes confusing details of this act, the bursar’s payments, and some other comparative and contextual evidence, we can piece together the story of Scotland’s oldest firm.²

Powerpoint slide on the institutional patronage of football in St Andrews, featuring a quote in translation from the University's Faculty of Arts acts dated to February 1537. It demonstrates that the Faculty and the burgh government sponsored football on Shrove Tuesday, and that the Faculty planned to withhold this support in future due to the disorder caused by the sport.

Let’s summarize what we know. During the 1530s and presumably earlier, the provost (mayor) of St Andrews – or the city bailies (bailiffs) on his behalf – customarily provided one football each to the three main colleges of the university on Shrove Tuesday for play in the fields outside the city. For some undeclared reason, in 1537 (and based on the bursar’s accounts presumably 1535 too) the Faculty of Arts’ Dean (instead of the burgh provost) furnished the football for one of the colleges called the Pedagogy. But then on the day of play, the Faculty’s Beadle (a type of officer) ended up confiscating that same ball, causing a ‘great schism’ in the fields. Prompted by this particular disorder, and the ‘many ills’ the football had engendered in the past, the Faculty decided to withdraw their tacit or direct support for the tradition: Arts students should no longer receive a ball from the burgh hereafter.

St Andrews and Shrovetide Sport

To make sense of all this, we need to start with the institutions involved. The provost and his two baillies were the elected leaders of the burgh council. This was the city government made up of select burgesses/freemen (merchants and craftsmen who were members of the city’s ‘freedom’ with its special economic and political privileges). The colleges in question were St Leonard and St Salvatore, and the Pedagogy – a quasi-college run by the Faculty of Arts. Like at Oxford or Cambridge today, these colleges were semi-autonomous educational institutions responsible for the housing and teaching of students. Teachers, curricula and exams were organized under faculties, with Arts being the lowest and largest, acting as a prerequisite for the three higher faculties of Medicine, Law and Theology. Faculties and colleges all came under the unifying authority of ‘the University of St Andrews’ which had been incorporated under a foundational charter from the pope in 1413. The sixteenth-century map below summarizes when and where the institutional players in this football drama emerged over the course of the university’s first century.³

Annotated map of sixteenth-century St Andrews 'S. Andre sive Andreapolis Scotiae Universitas Metropolitana' c.1580 by John Geddy, highlighting key institutions and locations for patronage of Shrove Tuesday football in 1530s. — Annotation of sixteenth-century map of St Andrews ‘S. Andre sive Andreapolis Scotiae Universitas Metropolitana’ c.1580 by John Geddy, highlighting key institutions and locations for patronage of Shrove Tuesday football in 1530s. Map reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. CC-BY

We can deduce that the Shrove Tuesday football tradition changed over the years, merely by looking at when the colleges had been founded. St Leonard’s had only come into existence about two decades prior to the 1537 incident. Before this time, the burgh presumably only had two footballs on its Shrovetide gift list. Or perhaps the whole tradition was a quite recent innovation. For several reasons, however, I think the custom stretched back into the fifteenth century, and was simply adapted as the university grew and changed.

For one, Shrovetide sports are documented at the university from its earliest years. In 1415 the Faculty of Arts allowed the grammar schoolboys their old customary privilege of Shrovetide cockfighting, as long as these bloodsports were restricted to three days, rather than three weeks (!). No mention is made of football then, but cockfighting, football and Shrovetide were a package deal in many medieval communities. In twelfth-century London, scholars held cockfights on Shrove Tuesday morning, and played a ball game in the afternoon, while the great and good of the city looked on with approval. Likewise in the fifteenth-century Norman town of Abbeville, the schoolboy who won the Shrovetide cockfight helped the mayor preside over the ball game.⁴ It’s therefore quite possible that students and the burgh council were already involved with football back when the university was founded.

Certainly, by the end of the century, football was popular enough to prompt university, faculty and college bans. But where would that leave any established Shrovetide matches? While football was technically an unlawful game, many authorities in medieval and early modern Britain made an exception on Shrove Tuesday and other important festivals. South of the border, for example, Durham priory regularly banned football among its tenants during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet in 1492 the prior explicitly allowed certain villages to play the game on two days of the year: Plough Monday and Shrove Tuesday.⁵

Reasons for Institutional Support of Football

Why would those in power make such exceptions? Tolerating or even sponsoring football on established occasions could give officials a degree of control over a rowdy game – a chance to channel students’ festive energies into approved and supervised outlets. But as I’ve written elsewhere, institutional interest in football often went beyond a desire for social control. This was especially true for civic institutions, like the burgh government of St Andrews. Many urban craftsmen and tradesmen in medieval and early modern Britain were deeply invested in football, whether as players or patrons. Some within this burgeoning middling sort found great value in the sport, despite its illegal stature and violent nature. It could be a marker of a freeman’s status – both a privilege and obligation – to facilitate football, and thereby provide entertainment and ‘manly exercise’ for the ‘commonwealth’. We see the currency of football as a common good and right of the people of St Andrews in a 1553 contract between the burgh council and the Archbishop. It allowed the Archbishop a rabbit warren in the common links (pictured below), but reserved to the community ‘all manner of right and possession’ on the commons, including ‘playing at golf, football, shooting at game, with all manner of other pastimes as ever they please’.⁶

St Andrews Old Course. Once the common links of the city used for resources, and recreations like football as well as golf. It is likely where the Shrove Tuesday football took place in the medieval burgh. Image credit: UK Golf Guy.

Freemen who did not uphold football could be punished severely, like the maltman from Rutherglen (near Glasgow) who had his goods seized in 1626 because he didn’t join the rest of the burgesses on the town green for the annual Fastern’s Eve match. There’s a seriousness about football here that I think modern fans would recognize, although you won’t get fined for missing the derby these days! And I think this seriousness is key to understanding the 1530s incident. When the provost stopped giving a football to the Pedagogy, he seems to have continued giving ones to the two rival colleges. I suspect the Arts Faculty stepped in to make sure their associated college received proper due as befitted its equal status and privileges, something all three colleges guarded fiercely. Moreover, receiving the provost’s football gifts and participating in the Shrovetide sport likely reaffirmed symbolically the city and university’s important (yet sometimes fraught) relationship. The Faculty may not have approved of football themselves, but exclusion from a longstanding and laudable Shrovetide custom would be a dishonour on many counts. This prompts the question: why did the burgh slight the Pedagogy by withholding their ball, and why did the Dean’s substitute ball end up causing controversy? Context is key here.

Since its founding in the early fifteenth century, the Pedagogy had been chronically underfunded. Periodic attempts over the century to re-found it as a proper college with adequate endowment and buildings had failed. After 1533, the Pedagogy and its buildings were in such decay that student enrollment plummeted. While St Salvator’s and St Leonard’s were graduating around thirteen students a year, the Pedagogy could claim zero. Something was finally done in February 1538, one year after the Faculty pulled out of the Shrovetide football. The Pedagogy was re-founded as the properly endowed St Mary’s College.⁷ With this context in mind, I hypothesize that the burgh stopped giving the Pedagogy a customary ball once it became clear there was no coherent student body to accept it; the Faculty tried to save face for a few years by purchasing their own balls before withdrawing support for the custom entirely. This theory tracks with the Arts bursar’s accounts, which span before and after the 1530s, but only show football purchases in 1535 and 1537.

St Mary’s College, St Andrews. Built on the location of the old Pedagogy in the sixteenth century. Image Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, ID PGA-6-10 © The University of St Andrews

Football Play and Profitability

We don’t get any specific details on how the St Andrews football games were played, but we can speculate based on the ball distribution, location, and comparative examples. Historians have assumed the game was either intercollegiate or between city and university. These are reasonable assumptions. We can find examples of town vs gown Shrovetide matches in early modern Cambridge and Oxford. In the late fifteenth century, rivalry between the Pedagogy and St Salvator’s led to bloodshed, while about a century later St Leonard’s and St Salvator’s students were ordered to take recreation in different fields to avoid conflict.⁸ However, based on the fact that each college received their own ball, it seems more likely to me that the games were intra-collegiate: students played their own college peers. We find this structure later in the century at Cambridge, where football was allowed but only within colleges, never between them.⁹ Similarly at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the University of Aberdeen’s Marischal College propagated weekly football matches within the college student body. Students were further divided based on their year, and there were complicated rules for how new balls should be supplied when the ones in play inevitably burst (see slide below).

Slide with some examples of institutional support from schools universities and burgh governments for football after the Scottish Reformation. It details regulations from Marischal College (Aberdeen) in 1605 and mentions of David Wedderburn's educational contributions to the sport in the 1630s. The text also details burgh corporations like Glasgow and Rutherglen providing footballs and promoting the game during the late 1500s and 1600s.

It’s often assumed that premodern football was a bloody free-for-all with uneven throngs of players, indeterminate boundaries, and no rules. But not only could this cross-country style of play exhibit sophisticated tactics and rules in its own right, it was also not the sport’s only form.¹⁰ From post-Reformation Scotland we can also find examples of small and even-sided games, defined playing areas and goals, passing and goal keeping. Play at the Aberdeen schools and colleges had some of these features, and if the St Andrews Shrovetide football was intra-collegiate and confined to the links it may have looked similar. Certainly, university officials (normally hostile to football) were more likely to tolerate play of this more structured form.

On the other hand, it is possible there was just one free-for-all game where the balls were tossed up in turn. This was how the civic-sponsored Shrove Tuesday game worked in Chester during the 1530s.¹¹ Plus, the Faculty act technically refers to a ‘game’ in the singular (ludo) which followed the receiving of the balls, though this could also be translated as the more ambiguous word ‘play’. Perhaps the provost even gave out additional balls to other civic institutions (beyond the colleges) which went unmentioned in the Faculty records. Later in the century, for example, the Glasgow burgh council annually bought six footballs for their town’s own Fastern’s Eve festivities, though no rhyme or reason was ever given for such a specific number (see slide above). But again, I think the events narrated in the Faculty’s act support the intra-collegiate hypothesis. If the Pedagogy’s ball was just one of a series to be played by everyone in the fields, it’s not clear why it specifically should prompt disorder and confiscation. There was obviously something controversial about who should possess this particular ball. I suspect that without a substantial Pedagogy student body to play with the Dean’s football, students from the other colleges tried to claim it for themselves. When the Arts Beadle intervened, the students were not pleased.

The Faculty of Arts used this incident as pretext for withdrawing support from the Shrovetide game, at least ‘so far as concerned it’. This wording speaks to the Faculty’s limited jurisdiction in the matter. Although the congregation couched the decision as in the best interests of the whole university, the Faculty only held power over its own students and the Pedagogy. They could not stop the burgh from offering the footballs, nor the other colleges from accepting them. This makes it even more likely the single game referred to in the act was the Pedagogy’s game, something the Faculty had some say in, rather than a general free-for-all. It’s also a reminder that Shrovetide football may have continued in St Andrews long after the Faculty signaled its disapproval. If the 1553 contract concerning access to the common links (mentioned above) is anything to go on, the burgh council remained sympathetic to football for some time, as did many civic institutions in Scotland.

Slide summarizing conflicting views on the social value of football in medieval and early modern Scotland, featuring points from various sources including quotes from Parliament acts and notable figures, discussing football's dangers and unprofitable nature on one hand, and benefits as a manly exercise on the other.

The burgh and university’s differing attitudes towards football point to an ongoing and underlying ideological debate about the premodern sport’s social value (see slide above): was it a manly exercise of good fellowship and community worthy of patronage, or an unprofitable waste of time, health and property to be prohibited? This St Andrews case shows how complicated this sort of cost-benefit analysis could get. When the Faculty’s ledger finally swung fully to ‘unprofitable’, it cited the ‘many ills’ and disorder football brought to the university. But it was perhaps just as much (or more) about avoiding further embarrassment over the derelict state of their Pedagogy and its lack of students. After all, the Faculty had only just gone out of their way to keep the Pedagogy involved in the custom. Clearly, football held a value that was difficult to quantify or ignore, something which prompted educational and civic institutions throughout premodern Scotland to invest.

As we know, universities and cities (schoolboys and workers) would continue to shape the development of Scottish football into the modern era. The story of the ‘oldest firm’ shows just how deep that heritage goes. And for just how long Scottish football has been ‘more than a game’.

This question formed part of a talk I gave for the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in November 2024. The slides in this post are from that talk. For football in medieval and early modern Perth, see pp. 120-125 of my thesis. ↩︎
The bursar payments are in St Andrews Special Collections, UYUY412 Faculty of Arts. Bursars book, 1456-1853, fols. 27v, 28v. The faculty act is printed in A. I. Dunlop, ed. Acta Facultatis atrium Universitatis Sanctiandree 1413 – 1588, 2 vols. (Scottish History Society, 1964), vol. 2 pp. 380-381. For digitization of the original manuscript see SASC, UY411/1 Acta facultatis arterium. 1413-1728, fol. 166v. From 1534-7, day wages for building labourers in Linlithgow, Falkland and Edinburgh averaged 8-10 pence. See A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout. Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780 (CUP, 1994), p. 313. ↩︎
Roger A. Mason, ‘University, City and Society’, in K. Stevenson and M. Brown (eds.) Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Boydell & Brewer, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History, 2017), pp. 268–297. ↩︎
On Shrovetide sports in St Andrews see David Ditchburn, ‘Religion, Ritual and the Rhythm of the Year in Later Medieval St Andrews’, in K. Stevenson and M. Brown (eds.) Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Boydell & Brewer, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History, 2017), p. 105. For Shrovetide cockfighting and football in Britain see chapters 1 and 2 of my thesis. The Abbeville reference is to the football-like ball game of ‘cholle’ or soule. See John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies and Superstitions, 2 vols. ed. Henry Ellis (1811 edition), vol 1, p. 66. ↩︎
Durham University Special Collections, DCD-Halm.Rolls, 1492 Spring, Billingham and Cowpen Bewley. ↩︎
Norman Reid, ‘Five Centuries of Dispute: The Common Land of St Andrews’, Scottish Archives 21 (2015), p. 31. ↩︎
Mason, pp. 288-296. ↩︎
Ronald Gordon Cant, The University of St Andrews: A Short History (3rd edition, 1992), pp. 32,37. St. Leonard’s students were ordered to take recreation in St Nicholas fields, outside the city near their college, while St Salvator’s students were to go to the old links, near their college. ↩︎
I hope to write soon on college football in Tudor and Stuart Cambridge. ↩︎
On the sophisticated tactics of traditional cross-country football games see Hugh Hornby, Uppies and Downies: The Extraordinary Football Games of Britain, (Swindon: English Heritage, 2008). ↩︎
See chapter 2 of my thesis for details on the Chester game. ↩︎

‘The Ploughman’s Feasting Days’: Festive Work Relations in Thomas Tusser

Posted on January 12, 2026 by merryshrovetide

Originally posted on the University of Exeter’s History of Economy Research Blog on 23 February 2021.

This blog post explores the relationship between work and festivity (and play more generally) in early modern England, through the lens of Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry united to as many of Good Huswifery.¹ Tusser’s poetic advice manual on Elizabethan agrarian life provided useful and entertaining information for modest landholders, addressing the farming year, working day, and household management, among other subjects. Published and reworked in stages from 1557 until the author’s death in 1580, it was immensely popular during Elizabeth’s reign (perhaps the best-selling book of poetry), with eighteen editions in the 16th century and periodic re-printings throughout the 17th. During the 18th and 19th centuries the treatise remained a cultural touchstone, with new editions adding commentary which reflected contemporary rural practices. Structured around the agrarian calendar, issues of seasonality and festive custom naturally pervade the text. Yet one section in particular celebrates the feasting days of rural servants and workers, and that will be my focus here.

But first, a little more background on the author and the publication history. Thomas Tusser was a gentleman farmer and poet, born around 1526 in Essex. Educated at St Paul’s, London (as a chorister), Eton College and then Cambridge University, Tusser began his career as a musician at the royal court, under patronage of William Paget, from around 1544 to 1552. After his patron fell from royal favour, Tusser left court, married, and took up farming in Cattiwade (Suffolk). Here he began writing his farming manual, initially entitled A Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (published 1557). Due to his wife’s ill health, Tusser moved to Ipswich (where his wife died) and then settled with a new wife and family in West Dereham (Norfolk). They would move again to Norwich, and finally to Fairsted (Essex), where Tusser would spend the remainder of his life farming on tithe land. Although not a particularly successful husbandman, Tusser’s real and varied experience as a farmer in Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex would greatly influence his poetry.

Over the last two decades of his life, Tusser continually shaped his husbandry manual. In 1562 he ‘married’ his hundred points on husbandry (focused on the husbandman’s monthly tasks) to ‘a hundred good points of huswifery’ (focused on the huswife’s daily labours). This format was published again in 1570 and 1571, and then in 1573 expanded to ‘five hundred points’ of advice. This was essentially the final form of the book, though there were small changes and additions throughout the 1570s, and particularly in the 1580 edition. As will be discussed below, these small edits could significantly supplement or alter meaning.

Subsequent editions largely copied the 1580 format, until Daniel Hilman’s Tusser Redivivus (1710). This was a partial re-print with substantial ‘observations explaining many obsolete terms…and what is agreeable to the present practice’. Later scholarly editions in 1812 (Mavor), and 1878 (Payne and Herrtage) would follow Hilman’s lead, attempting both interpretation and contemporary comparison. As a result, the many editions of Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry provide something of a running commentary on rural industry and custom in England from the mid-16th through the 19th centuries, with notes on change over time and regional differences.

This intertextual conversation is particularly pertinent to the section called ‘the ploughman’s feasting days’. First appearing in the 1570 edition, in the ‘book of huswifery’, it describes a series of celebrations important to servants-in-husbandry. The opening quatrain sets the stage:

Good huswives, whom God hath enriched enough,

forget not the feasts that belong to the plough.

The meaning is only to joy and be glad,

for comfort with labour is fit to be had.

Stanzas follow dedicated to each feast and its associated activities. They proceed in calendrical order, starting with Plough Monday – traditionally the first day back at work after Christmastide break:

Plough Monday, next after that Twelfthtide is past,

bids out with the plough, the worst husband is last.

If ploughman get hatchet or whip to the screen,

maids loseth their cock if no water be seen.

This quatrain captures the general spirit and form of the others which follow. For simplicity’s sake, I have distilled the rest of the poem into a chart below, summarizing and interpreting where possible. Of course, the Plough Monday stanza also captures just how difficult interpretation can be when dealing with obscure terms and festive customs. What is going on with the ‘hatchet or whip to the screen’ or the cock and the water, for instance?

Plough Monday Festivities from *The Costume of Yorkshire* (1814) by George Walker (1781-1856)

To parse these customs’ meanings, historians and literary scholars have perhaps been too quick to rely on subsequent commentaries. Payne and Herrtage (1878) and Mavor (1812) drew heavily on contemporary descriptions of festive ‘survivals’, and most heavily on the ‘observations’ of Daniel Hilman. While an early modern himself, Hilman was a surveyor from Surrey who wrote 140 years after Tusser. His explanations of these feast day activities likely say more about customs in his own time and region than they do about Tudor East Anglia. We should not fall into the trap of thinking festive customs immutable or invariable.

Indeed, Tusser supplies direct evidence of regional variance in these feast day traditions through his own glosses. From the 1580 edition onwards, glosses indicate in which (nearby) counties these customs were found (i.e. they were not universal). Such glosses replaced older ones (from the 1570, 1571 and 1573 editions) which clarified the feast day occasion, sometimes with comical redundancy. For example, the stanza, ‘Shrovetide: At Shrovetide to shroving, go thresh the fat hen’ includes the superfluous gloss *At Shrovetide.

Still, elsewhere the glosses provide our only direct evidence of occasion. Using these glosses, and prioritizing contemporary (or near contemporary) evidence, the following chart presents the full panoply of the ploughman’s feasts, with attempts to discern ‘hen-threshing’ and the like. The original verses can be viewed in this online edition of Payne and Herrtage.

The ploughman’s feasting daies. [Original terms/text in italics]

Feast Title	Summary/Interpretation of Activities	Gloss – Occasion (Editions 1570, 1571, 1573)	Gloss – County (Editions 1580 onwards)
Plough Monday	Back to work after Christmastide. Competition to avoid being last husbandman to bid out with the plough. Also competition within household to return tools to the screen/hearth first [ie finish tasks first], between serving-men [ploughing, pruning] and maids [fetching water]. Prize at stake seems to be a cockerel, perhaps for eating/play at next feast.	At Twelfthtide [Monday after Plough Sunday, ie first Sunday after Twelfth Day, 6 January]	Leicestershire
Shrovetide	Devoted to ‘shroving’ [carousing/celebrating]. A fat hen given to the serving-men to thresh – a blood sport where blindfolded competitors try to strike the immobilized bird, killing and tenderizing it. Besides feasting on this poultry, servant-maids make enough fritters and pancakes for the household. Even the lowly slut [scullery maid] gets one for company sake [fellowship’s sake].	At Shrovetide [Moveable festival ending with Shrove Tuesday on eve of Lent, falls in February or March]	Essex and Suffolk
Sheep Shearing	Feasting during/after the shearing of sheep. Huswife to prepare the dinner, sparing flesh neither corn and making wafers and cakes. Seems to be a communal work activity which includes the neighbours as well as servants in husbandry, all expecting good cheer and welcome.	At Midsummer[24 June]	Northamptonshire
Wake Day	Maids tasked with staying up on the eve of Wake Day, baking flans in the oven. The parish festival would be characterised by general revelry for the serving-men and women, when every wanton [merry girl] may dance at her will, both Tomkin with Tomlin, and Jankin with Gill.	The Wake Day [Dedication feast for parish church or chapel, most occurred between June & October]	Leicestershire
Harvest Home	After the harvest finishes, the ploughmen are given a harvest home goose to feast upon.	In August
Seed Cake	During this week, if the weather hold clear, the last of the wheat sowing should be completed. The huswife is tasked with preparing the seed Cake, the Pasties [pies], and Furmenty pot [similar to cream of wheat] for a celebratory feast.	At Hallowtide [Halloween, All Saints, All Souls, ie 31 Oct-2 Nov]	Essex and Suffolk
Twice a Week Roast	By custom and right, good ploughmen expect roast meat suppers twice weekly. Who so keeps these and the above customs, they will call thee good huswife, [and] love thee likewise.	Twice a Week [On Sunday and Thursday nights]

What conclusions can we draw about early modern work, play and festivity from these ploughmen’s feasts, and what further questions do they spark?

First, we might view them in terms of classic historiographical approaches to festivals. Social histories of festive culture in early modern England (and Europe more broadly) often query, in a general sense, how far festive phenomena reinforced or subverted the social or political order through public action (Burke, 1978). In more specific senses, they focus on periods of contestation, when the very ideas and actions of festivity became the subject of political conflict. Early modern England was full of such periods, from macro reformations, revolutions and restorations (Hutton), to micro struggles over local enforcement of King James I’s Book of Sports (Marcus).

Tusser’s poem, in contrast, speaks more to festivity’s ability to inform the social order of a single household, rather than society as a whole. It also highlights the vital and enduring social importance of festivity, whether or not it happened to be a political football contested at the time.

Scholarly approaches to feasting as a reciprocal act informing social relations might be more pertinent here. Felicity Heal’s research on gift-giving, hospitality and charity in early modern England, for example, has highlighted how feasting and food-gifts ‘established and developed the bonds of good lordship and clientage’ in premodern society (2008:45). Most scholarship in this vein, however, has focused on the bonds between hosts and guests, tenants and landlords, and neighbours, often with an emphasis on Christmastide feasting.

Tusser’s ploughmen feasts stand somewhat apart in concentrating on the master-servant relationship, and in taking place outside the high holy seasons of Christmas, Easter or Whitsun. Indeed, most of his feasts had only a tenuous link to the liturgical calendar and, significantly, were characterised by blurred lines between work and play: ‘comfort with labour is fit to be had’. These feasts thus do not sit easily within classic labour-leisure models, where ‘pre-industrial societies had festivals…while industrial societies have leisure’ (Burke: 137; Marfany). If the latter was so, where did premodern festivals infused with work fit? Nor do they complement early modern elite understandings of play as antithetical to work, projecting instead a sympathetic view of play as essential to work identities and relations. A perspective perhaps indicative of Tusser’s experience as a musician and poet.

More broadly, the ploughmen’s feasts point to the complexity of the festive gift economy as a social and symbolic system. We know feasting informed early modern social relations, but the specific seasonal (not to mention liturgical) context of a feast could influence exactly which social bonds were informed and why. Tusser, for example, devotes a separate section of his book to Christmas feasting, highlighting the multi-lateral giving among various levels of society during that season [emphasis mine]:

At Christmas be merie and thankfull withall,
And feast thy poore neighbors, the great with the small,

This stands in contrast to the more pointed, downward giving to household servants during the ploughmen’s feasts (save perhaps sheep shearing, which included neighbours as well).

Lastly, if these feasts speak to the master-servant relationship, what do they say? For one, the latter should be definitively renamed the ‘dame-servant’ relationship, for Tusser makes clear that the huswife negotiated, managed and maintained such work relations. Elsewhere in his book, Tusser advises huswives how best to order, manage and discipline servants. But on the feast days, the shoe was on the other foot: feasts were both practical and symbolic manifestations of a social contract (a two-way exchange), epitomising what was owed the servant by ‘custom and right’ in this relationship. Tusser employs imperative after imperative to reinforce this point: ‘This must not be slept / Old Guise must be kept’. With a final flourish, he drives home the far reaching significance of these festive exchanges, not just to household cohesion and amity, but also to the essential premodern commodity of reputation:

This doing and keeping such custom and guise,
they call thee good huswife, they love thee likewise.

[¹] I have modernised Tusser’s spellings throughout this post, with exceptions here and there, when the early modern spelling helps draw a distinction between premodern and modern definitions (e.g. ‘huswifery’ and ‘huswife’) or contributes to meter or rhyme.

Common Wealth Games: Civic Shrove Tuesday Football in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

Posted on February 21, 2023 by merryshrovetide

An adapted version of this post was published as Pancakes and football: a brief history of Shrove Tuesday in the UK for The Conversation.

For nearly a millennium, Brits have celebrated Shrove Tuesday with food and sport. Today, pancakes have become the chief focus of what was once a more elaborate pre-Lent festival called Shrovetide. But during the medieval and early modern periods, a spirit of communal play and competition pervaded almost every aspect of Britain’s Carnival. Shrovetide games ranged from cruel animal blood-sports like cock-fighting, to tug-o-wars and skipping. Yet no Shrovetide sport was more widespread and long standing than football.

According to players from the Scottish Borders town of Duns in 1686, it was ‘an ancient custom throughout all this kingdom to play at football upon Fastens Eve [i.e. Shrove Tuesday]’. And indeed, Shrovetide ball games are documented from the 12^th century onwards, in scores of communities throughout Britain and northern France, with several surviving today in England and Scotland. Despite legal bans on football in pre-modern Britain, many Shrove Tuesday matches benefited from the support of those in charge, like the bailiff and elders of Duns. Why did some civic institutions and leaders embrace this game in the face of prohibition, and what can this tell us about the social value of football, sport and festivity in the past?

Shrove Tuesday football in Ashbourne, Derbyshire on 9 February 2016. Two games are played every year. One on Shrove Tuesday and the other on Ash Wednesday. Evidence for the tradition may date back as early as 1683. Photo Credit: Taylor Aucoin

‘Football’ in this pre-modern sense refers to a loose family of games where players contested a ball with hand and/or foot, usually towards a goal. As ancestors to our modern football codes (association, rugby, American, etc.), ‘folk football’ matches varied considerably in manner of play. Shrovetide games were often the marquee match-ups of the day, mass games with scores or even hundreds of participants. Whether town versus country, or married against bachelors, teams battled to move the ball through streets and countryside, towards goals like mills, streams, or even the kirk.

Due to its destructive potential, football oft fell afoul of authority. Medieval royal prohibitions called it ‘vain, unthrifty and idle’, while Puritans deemed it ‘a bloody and murdering practise’. But others in power obviously saw its appeal, to judge from its festive sponsorship in many cities and towns. Tudor Chester provides a detailed and prototypical example. Every Shrove Tuesday in the early 16^th century, the Merchant Drapers’ Company received a football from the Shoemakers’ Company, a wooden ball from the Saddlers’ Company, and a small silk ball from each city freeman married within the last year. Under the mayor’s supervision, the Drapers tossed up the balls (which doubled as prizes) for the craftsmen and crowd to play from the common field to the city’s Common Hall.

The particulars of Chester’s Shrovetide sponsorship were mirrored throughout the British Isles. Craftsmen and guilds played key roles as participants and providers of the ball. On Shrove Tuesday 1373, skinners and tailors played in the streets of London, while butchers did the same in Jedburgh 1704. The Skinners’ and Shoemakers’ companies paraded the ball to the match between married and bachelor freemen in late 18^th-century Alnwick. Indeed, leather-workers like shoemakers were especially important, crafting Shrovetide footballs in 15^th-century London, 16^th-century Glasgow and 17^th-century Carlisle.

Newlyweds also fronted the ball in many communities. As in Chester, recently married freemen of Dublin had to present a ball to city magistrates every Shrove Tuesday during the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Newlywed members of trade guilds in Perth and Corfe Castle (Dorset) also paid a Shrovetide ‘football due’, while a similar custom seems to have existed in medieval London. These were part of a broader folk tradition, where new married couples owed a ‘bride ball’ or ‘ball money’ to their community. Since weddings were customary during Shrovetide (and prohibited in Lent), it was an ideal time to collect.

Behind all this, civic governments might collect the ‘wedding ball’ dues, hire drummers and pipers to pump up the crowds, or pay for equipment. Gradually, authorities in most major cities did withdraw their support from Shrovetide football. Some cities like St Andrews simply banned it; in 1537 the burgh provost and university dean cancelled the annual match because of its ‘many ills’ and ‘disorder’. Others ‘reformed’ the games into less dangerous entertainments, like foot and horse races in 1540 Chester, or a public display of the city fire-engine’s capabilities in 1725 Carlisle. By the middle of the 18^th century, officially sanctioned Shrovetide ball games were mostly confined to smaller market towns and villages. But why did official support for an ‘unlawful game’ linger as long as it did?

Carlisle chamberlain account expenses on ‘Shrovetewsday for the plaies’ in 1663, including 12 pence for a football. CRO: CA/4/3, 1 Mar. 1662-3. Credit: Image reproduced with kind permission from Cumbria Archive Centre, Carlisle.

Partially, sponsorship let officials (somewhat) contain a rowdy game that might happen with or without their consent. Certainly, outright bans were rarely effective, to judge from repeated mayoral ordinances ‘against football play at Shrovetide’ in the streets of Elizabethan London. Yet, the appeal of patronage went beyond social control. The often exclusive participation of guild or burgh members (known as ‘freemen’) in Shrovetide ball games reaffirmed corporate status, with its privileges and obligations. These obligations could include football itself. In January 1590, the shoemaker John Neil was made a ‘burgess’ or freeman of Glasgow in exchange for supplying ‘six good and sufficient footballs’ every Shrove Tuesday during his lifetime.

Failure to participate in or furnish football, via payments of the ‘wedding ball’ for example, could result in imprisonment, heavy fines, or the forced closing of a craftsman’s shop. The goods of maltman Robert Dykes of Rutherglen were distrained in 1626 because he failed to join the rest the burgesses on the town green for the annual Shrovetide match. These harsh consequences reflect the worth of Shrove Tuesday football to these pre-modern communities. To them it was not a ‘vain and idle’ game, but an ‘ancient and laudable custom’ of ‘goodly feats and exercise’. Rather than ‘unthrifty’, its value equated to the ‘benefit of the Company’, and the ‘common wealth of the city’, ideals which civic officials deemed well worth preserving.

May-Dew’s Medicinal Uses: An Early Modern Top Ten List

Posted on May 2, 2019 by merryshrovetide

I suppose that he who would gather the best May-Deaw, for Medicine, should gather it from the Hills.

Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (1626)

Yesterday, I climbed Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh at daybreak to gather May-Dew – an old tradition that from what I could see has mostly fallen into abeyance. For those not in the know, May-Dew is the moisture that collects around dawn during the month of May, but especially on May Day. According to folklore, the dew can convey (variously) luck, beauty and health for the coming year, usually through direct contact with the skin.

These last two ideas about beauty and health first show up on record in the late medieval and early modern period, when, as Francis Bacon’s quote suggests, the medicinal properties of May-Dew were taken quite seriously. To give this old tradition a proper 21st century treatment, here’s a Top Ten List of the Medicinal Uses for May-Dew, pulled from sixteenth and seventeenth-century sources.

May Day morn atop Arthur’s Seat

Before beginning, we need to know the proper way to gather and prepare May-Dew so that it works effectively. Fortunately, the German surgeon, botanist and alchemist Hieronymous Brunschwig lays this all out in detail in his Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, published in 1500 and translated into English in 1527 as The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes.

Hieronymous Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, 1500 (Wikimedia)

According to Brunschwig, one must rise before the dawn on a night in the ‘myddest of maye’ when the moon is almost full and it has not rained. You should find a pasture or field ‘where as growe many flowres’. It should be far from ‘watery places’, but the nearer to ‘the montaynes the better’. Once there, ‘drawe a great linyn clothe’ over the field, wringing the dew out into a glass until you have enough for your purposes. Then, ‘strayne the dew thrughe a fayre lynyn clowte [cloth]’ before distilling it in a glass and setting it out for 30 days in the sun. Now it’s ready to cure what ails you.

TOP TEN MEDICINAL USES FOR MAY-DEW

1. Acne

May-Dew’s curative properties are most often associated with the face and head, and this is evident from the earliest references. Brunschwig explains that May-Dew is useful ‘whan a body hath an unclene hede & spottes in the face’. Wash the face with distilled May-Dew at morning and night, let air dry, and ‘than it wyll go awaye’.

2. Rosacea

According to Brunschwig, the same May-Dew treatment could also cure ‘Guttam roseam’ – a skin condition involving red discoloration of the face, which seems to describe the modern rosacea. He explains that the condition could come from overheating, but also ‘frome hote blode and frome the lyuer’. Since it was sometimes associated with the onset of leprosy, it was not something to write off.

3. Wrinkles

The final use Brunschwig suggests for May-Dew is more cosmetic than strictly medicinal – ridding the face of wrinkles. Washing with the distilled liquid at morning and night should ’causeth a fayre & clene face’.

‘Water of the Maye dewe’ in Hieronymous Brunschwig, The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes, translated by Laurence Andrew, 1527 (Early English Books Online).

4. Small Pox Scars and Redness

Similar to the cures above, Simon Kellwaye wrote in A Short treatise of the small pockes (1593), that May-Dew could help with the ‘rednes of the face and hands after the pockes are gone’.

5. Sore Eyes

Hugh Plat’s Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, printed in 1602, recommends May-Dew for a variety of cosmetic and medicinal treatments. In a section on ‘How to gather and clarifie May-dewe’, which broadly repeats Brunschwig’s advice, he adds:

‘Some commend May-dew gathered from Fennell and Celandine, to be most excellent for sore-eyes’.

Plat_Hugh_Sir-Delightes_for_ladies_to_adorne-STC-19978-1733_06-p93 (4)

‘How to Gather and Clarifie May-dewe’ in Hugh Plat, Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories with beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters, 1602 (Early English Books Online)

6. Lesions

Printed in 1659, The Queens closet purportedly contains ‘incomparable secrets in physick, chyrurgery, preserving, and candying &c. which were presented unto the queen’, including a method ‘To take away Freckles or Morphew’. A morphew was a skin lesion, but it was nothing that a little May-Dew and tartar couldn’t fix!

Take four spoonfuls of May dew, and one spoonfull of the Oyl of Tartar, mingle them together, and wash the places where the freckles be, and let it dry of it self, it will clear the skin, and take away all foul spots.

7. Gout

In his Natural History of Wiltshire, published in 1691, antiquarian John Aubrey extolled the virtues of May-Dew for relief of gout, something corroborated in contemporary medical treatises.

Maydewe is a very great dissolvent of many things with the sunne that will not be dissolved any other way: which putts me in mind of the rationality of the method used by Wm. Gore, of Clapton, Esq., for his gout, which was to walke in the dewe with his shoes pounced; he found benefit by it.

Aubrey sought further confirmation by telling this story to a surgeon in Shoe Lane, London, who replied that it was indeed ‘the very method and way of curing’ used on Oliver Cromwell for the same ailment.

8. Tooth Ache

May-Dew was also an essential ingredient in Robert Boyle’s remedy ‘for the tooth ach’. Printed in his Medicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies (1693), it involved sprinkling the dew over a mixture of herbs before putting a few drops of the solution into the afflicted’s ear whilst they chewed some bread.

Boyle_Robert-Medicinal_experiments_or_A_collection-Wing-B3990-1479_14-p154

‘For the Tooth-ach’ in Robert Boyle, Medicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies for the most part simple and easily prepared, useful in families, and very serviceable to country people, 1693 (Early English Books Online).

9. Weak Back

Although there aren’t known records of this for the early modern period, by the nineteenth century some believed May Dew could strengthen weak backs, particularly those of sickly children. Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published 1808, put it this way:

Great virtue is ascribed to May-dew. Some, who have tender children, particularly on Rude-day [3 May], spread out a cloth to catch the dew, and wet them in it.

10. Pretty Much Anything

Beyond specific ailments, May-Dew was a key ingredient in many recipes, both medicinal and alchemical. For example, the Thesaurus & armamentarium medico-chymicum – written by Adrian von Mynsicht in the early seventeenth century and translated into English in 1682 – called for ‘water made of May-dew gathered from the standing Wheat’ to facilitate his recipe for ‘Pearls Trochiscated’. Apparently, this powerful concoction could cure just about any problem, psychological or physical:

It is a most excellent Comfortative in all affects of the Heart, as Pain, Sorrow, Trembling, Pulsation, Palpitation, defects of the Mind, &c. Also in pains of the Head, Vertigo, Epilepsie, Apoplexy, Palsie, Contractures, resolution of the Nerves, Convulsion, Phrensie, Melancholy, Madness, Gout, and Gouty pains in the Joynts, Consumption, Blasting, the numbness and decay by Age, Stone, Dropsie, Scurvy, French Pox, and Feavers, &c. It purifies the Blood; it comforts all the Senses, Brain, Memory, and Heart, and preserves the whole body sound….

Etc., etc., etc.

And there you have it. If you’ve got a problem, May-Dew’s probably got you covered.

MAY-DEW AND MANNA FROM HEAVEN

Early moderns clearly respected this liquid’s efficacy, and the power the festive year could give them to influence their own lives. It wasn’t just a superstitious practice of the ‘folk’, either. Hieronymous Brunschwig, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle – these were leading thinkers and experts of their respective days. Even the Royal Society commissioned Some observations and experiments upon May-dew in the 1660s. While the division between folklore and learned knowledge certainly increased in the eighteenth century, such a divide was not necessarily so pronounced before this: folk practices could often be grounded – at least in part – in the prevailing learned theories of the day.

Francis Bacon’s own theory about May-Dew, quoted at the top, connected the substance to contemporary discussions on ‘manna’, the Biblical food which nourished the Israelites during their forty years in the desert. At the end of the seventeenth century, Thomas Pope Blount compiled some of these theories, including Bacon’s, into a section called ‘Observations concerning manna’ in his Natural History (1693). Since manna was described in the Bible as arriving with the dew in the night, it was often called the ‘Dew of Heaven’. According to Blount, the substance still collected and congealed on plants and trees. It could be (and was) harvested and used for ‘physick’. Though more plentiful in hotter climes – where dew collected thick throughout the year – it could be found in England too: ‘In those hot Countries it Coagulates, with us it is liquid’.

Blount was building on the ideas of Bacon, who argued that the best manna could be found in Calabria, at the tip of Italy’s boot. Based on the harvesting practices there, where manna was gathered from trees in the mountains but not the valleys, Bacon thought that, in its descent from heaven, manna collected first in the highland areas, and dissipated before it could reach the plants of the valley. He drew the conclusion that it would ‘not be amiss to observe a little better the Dews that fall upon Trees, or Herbs, growing on Mountains’.

Echoing Brunschwig’s advice about collecting ‘nearer…the montaynes’, Bacon suggested the best May-Dew for medicinal purposes would come from the hills, presumably because it mingled with manna from heaven, or was perhaps manna itself. This may also explain the importance of May in this equation, at least in the minds of these thinkers. Since May is the month in northern climes when weather turns warm and dews increase (but do not evaporate too quickly), it would be the best opportunity to soak up powerful manna.

Theorizing aside, I can now say from experience that it was not easy to find and gather May-Dew at the top of Arthur’s Seat (there’s far more of it on the lowland Meadows). But perhaps this is really the point: the greater the challenge, the greater the reward, the more powerful the May-Dew.

Happy Maytide!

Searching for manna…

Easier said than done

Corner Craftsman

Historian Taylor Aucoin

Category Archives: Seasonal Festivity