Telling the Bees and Other Customs E-Book

Mark Norman

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 228

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

As featured in The New York Times... Throughout the history of civilisation, traditional crafts have been passed down from hand to skilled hand. Blacksmithing, brewing, beekeeping, baking, milling, spinning, knitting and weaving: these skills held societies together, and so too shaped their folklore and mythology. Exploring the folklore connected with these rural crafts, Telling the Bees examines the customs, superstitions and stories woven into some of the world's oldest trades. From the spinning of the Fates to the blacksmith's relationship with the devil, and the symbolism of John Barleycorn to a ritual to create bees from the corpse of a cow – these are the traditions upon which our modern world was built.

Leseprobe

For Alyssa, who might read it one day

Front cover artwork and internal chapter headings: Tiina LiljaBack cover photography: Cat Burton

First published 2020

This paperback edition published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Mark Norman, 2020, 2023

The right of Mark Norman to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9533 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

About the Author

Introduction

1  Wool, Thread and Cloth

2  Bees and Beekeeping

3  Blacksmiths and Metalworking

4  Beer and Brewing

5  Milling and Baking

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Norman is a folklore author, researcher and the creator and host of The Folklore Podcast. Since its launch in July 2016, the internet-based show has grown to sit within the top 10 per cent of its subject area worldwide, having been downloaded over three-quarters of a million times by its listeners.

Mark’s aim, with the podcast and his writing, is to try and present a fascinating social history – the beliefs, traditions and customs of our communities and cultures – in an accessible and enjoyable way to a wide audience. He hopes that everyone will come to realise that there are many parts of what we do, think and say that have far more meaning that we might imagine … until we pause for a moment to consider them.

His wide areas of interest are in these old stories of superstitions and folk practices, but he also holds the UK’s largest archive of sightings, traditions and eyewitness accounts relating to apparitions of ghostly black dogs, the folklore of which inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write arguably his most famous Sherlock Holmes novel.

Mark lives in Mid Devon with his daughter, who is at one with the horses, and his wife Tracey: a historian, author and actor (and awesome manuscript proof reader) who researches witch trials, and as a result knows far too much about the unpleasant things you can do with earthworms. Together, they all share their space with an insane hamster and a feline trip hazard.

INTRODUCTION

Look around you. What do you see? Furniture, perhaps. Clothes, tools or maybe some food and drink. How many of these things were made by hand? Were they crafted by an expert in the field? Or were they mass produced to a formula, in order to satisfy economies of scale: high demand and the need to keep prices low?

Supply and demand have always been with us, but the fast turnaround mass manufacture that we see today has not. Our ancestors worked in a completely different way. They raised animals using traditional methods. Artisan workmen and women would fashion clothes, tools and the like by hand. Their skills were often such that they were revered in the community. Indeed, some thought that their abilities must have come about through a form of supernatural intervention. Maybe from above – or possibly from below.

These were the people involved in rural crafts. Today, there is a distinction between crafts such as these and handicrafts, or crafts undertaken as hobbies or for artistic purposes. For our forebears, what we now call traditional crafts were simply skills needed to live and survive – to clothe and feed a community. When a set of practices such as those covered in this book – knitting, spinning and weaving, beekeeping, blacksmithing, brewing, milling and baking – are central to a community and viewed with such importance, it is natural that over time a number of beliefs, superstitions and customs will form around them. Looking at them from the outside, this lore can tell us much about the past.

What is folklore? The dictionary would tell you that it is a collection of traditional beliefs, stories or customs, which are passed from person to person in an oral fashion by retelling. The term was first used in 1846, by the English writer William John Thoms, as a replacement for the more cumbersome ‘popular antiquities’. Broken down into its simplest form, it is the traditional knowledge (lore) of a group of people (folk). These two components were originally split: folk-lore. Over time, the hyphen was lost and the word became one.

Folklore is a shared culture within a group of people. This is why it still resonates with us so strongly today. The hypothesis that we have some kind of collective folk memory in our subconscious, which draws on the beliefs of the past, certainly goes a long way to explaining why we often seem to just ‘know’ things. It probably also goes a long way to explain why, outside of academia, folklore has seen something of a resurgence recently.

There are many groups on social media for people to share folklore beliefs and notes, one of the most well known now being Folklore Thursday on Twitter. We still employ many superstitions automatically. Some of us don’t walk under ladders. Some of our streets don’t have a house number 13, our hotels might go from floor 12 to 14.

At the same time as we find these common themes in our beliefs, we find interesting variations between one place and another geographically. Local variations on a broader theme are common. This happens both because of the natural migration of people, from town to town on the smaller scale and across countries on the larger, and also because these traditional practices and beliefs are so embedded in our surroundings. Folklore gives us a sense of place.

Because stories and beliefs were transmitted through word of mouth, they naturally changed and developed over time. It is kind of the ultimate game of Chinese Whispers. Also, the world around us changed and developed too. Even today, with information being transmitted in different ways, new beliefs emerge and old ones are re-moulded.

Through all of that, folklore – the beliefs of the people – is deep within us, whether we realise it or not. We interact with it every day. This is the reason that my podcast examining these subjects, The Folklore Podcast, (in its fourth year at the time of writing) bears the tag line, ‘recalling our forgotten history and recording the new’. The stories of today are shaped by those of yesterday and become the beliefs of tomorrow.

Each of the chapters in this book will give a brief overview of the older mythologies surrounding each of the crafts explored, looking at the patron saints or the gods associated with that profession, before moving on to examine the folk tales, superstitions and beliefs that grew up around them. Some you may know well. Many could surprise you. And just a few might seem a little odd now.

Folklore is such a rich and varied field that it would be impossible to cover every area of the main chapter subjects in one book. The chapter on brewing, for example, examines the process only in relation to beer and ale as a product of the trade. There is equally as much folklore about wines and spirits, but they are not included here. The chapter on milling and baking looks at bread but does not take in cakes. Especially in relation to the fairies, that would be a whole other book! So you will inevitably find that there are beliefs or customs missing that you thought would have been there. You may also have superstitions of your own that you don’t think are especially common. I would encourage everyone to try and find a way of recording these as best they can. Cultures are changing and developing all the time, and in the same way that the old beliefs in this book are fascinating to us now, so our beliefs in the modern day will be equally interesting in the future. And, of course, we can constantly build on the archives of beliefs that we already have.

To that end, I am always happy to receive people’s memories about the old customs, traditions and superstitions that they remember from their family, which I can add to the archives already existing. Simply look for The Folklore Podcast online and you will find plenty of ways to send them in.

I hope that you find much to interest you, whether you now follow one of these crafts as a profession, or a hobby, or are just fascinated by the way that we lived our lives in the (not so distant) past.

Mark Norman

September 2019

1

WOOL, THREAD AND CLOTH

Swiftly turn the murmuring wheel!

Night has brought the welcome hour,

When the weary fingers feel

Help, as if from faery power;

Dewy night o’ershades the ground;

Turn the swift wheel round and round!

Now, beneath the starry sky,

Couch the widely-scattered sheep;--

Ply the pleasant labour, ply!

For the spindle, while they sleep,

Runs with speed more smooth and fine,

Gathering up a trustier line.

Short-lived likings may be bred

By a glance from fickle eyes;

But true love is like the thread

Which the kindly wool supplies,

When the flocks are all at rest

Sleeping on the mountain’s breast

Those words were written by the poet William Wordsworth in his ‘Song for the Spinning Wheel’, and they represent both a trade and an art that goes way back into the history of peoples the world over. The skills of weaving, spinning and knitting were vital to clothe and keep warm members of every class, race, religion or social group from the poorest to the richest. And so, we find wool, yarn and thread and the working of those materials rooted very deeply in the folklore of countries around the globe.

MYTHOLOGY AND HISTORY

In the Norse myths, the World Tree Yggdrasil stood at the centre of the spiritual cosmos. It connected the Nine Worlds (and the rest of the cosmos) with its roots and branches, and the health of the Universe depended on the health of the tree.

Yggdrasil was watered and cared for by the three most important of the Norns – the female beings who controlled destiny. As they were responsible for the destiny not only of humans, but also of the gods, this made them naturally the most powerful beings in the mythos. Although the Norns also occur in stories drawing wooden lots or casting runes, they are most commonly portrayed seated at the base of Yggdrasil, spinning the threads of fate. The origin of the term ‘norn’, while not known for certain, is thought by some to derive from the verb ‘to twine’, which has obvious connotations to the image of the women as spinners of destiny.

What the physical material might be that they are spinning in the artistic renderings of the Norns is debatable. The only mention of the sheep as an animal within the Norse myths is in relation to the watcher god Heimdall, who was said to have hearing so keen that he could hear the wool growing on the sheep’s backs. In fact, the sheep is not common as an image in pre-Christian cultures, becoming more prevalent later in connection to terminology such as the ‘Lamb of God’, for example. The goat was spoken of far more often in the Norse mythos. The goat Heidrun eats the leaves that grow on Yggdrasil and, because of their magical properties, produces mead instead of milk. Thor’s chariot is pulled by two goats rather than horses. So perhaps the Norns are spinning goat hair rather than sheep fleece.

In many sources, the species of tree for Yggdrasil is not mentioned, but Old Norse literature often states that it was an ash. In the Norse creation myth, man and woman originate from the trees: Ask from the Ash and Embla from the Elm. In the Christian creation story, the first man and woman are Adam and Eve, which suggests an obvious parallel.

These two characters then appear in one of the oldest English rhymes. In 1381, English Lollard priest John Ball was imprisoned in Maidstone in the county of Kent. Not long after the start of the Peasants’ Revolt, he was freed by Kentish rebels, to whom he preached an open-air sermon at Blackheath. His sermon included the passage:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men.

In this quote, Ball is essentially gendering types of work. The word delved in this case is referring to the digging of the earth – in other words, when Adam farmed the land. This is a male-oriented description of work. So, in referring to Eve spinning, this is again representative of Ball describing work from a female perspective. Spinning (more so than weaving) was generally considered to be women’s work. And because so much thread was needed to make cloth, women spent a lot of time spinning. It did not, however, hold the same status as skilled work such as weaving did.

In modern times, gentleman is a term that can be applied to any male, whereas in Ball’s era it was very much a term used to imply a man of means who did not need to work. The word gentry comes from the same root. What John Ball was actually saying in his sermon, therefore, was that in earlier days when everyone worked to survive, no one person was better than another and there was no class divide. He was not suggesting in literal terms that Eve actually sat and span.

There is no evidence in the book of Genesis to suggest that Eve span. The iconography of Eve with a distaff and spindle is very much the creation of medieval-Christian visions of the Bible characters. We may not be able to pinpoint its precise origins, although illuminations as early as psalters in the thirteenth century depict Eve in this way. Spinning was often represented as a virtuous activity in illuminated manuscripts.1 Even the Virgin Mary is shown spinning in two fourteenth-century Italian examples. The same reading may similarly be given to representations of weaving. We can be certain that the skills of spinning and weaving hold such importance that deities who are revered for these skills occur in many early mythologies and beliefs.

The Goddess Weaver in ancient Chinese stories was the daughter of the Jade Emperor and the Celestial Queen Mother. She was said to have woven the stars and their light, which could be seen crossing the sky in the form of the Silver River. Today we call this the Milky Way. The Goddess Weaver was said (in a folk tale sometimes called the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd) to have descended to earth from the Celestial Court some 4,000 years ago. Here, she fell in love with a mortal man: a cowherd.

Niulang, the cowherd, was an orphan who was treated badly by his older brother and his wife. They sent him to live alone, giving him only an oxcart and an old buffalo. The buffalo and its master depended upon each other, but the cowherd was very lonely.

One day, the buffalo miraculously spoke to Niulang, telling him that a band of fairy women from heaven would be found swimming in the lake, and that if he took the red clothes from the bank then their owner would become his wife. He went to the lake and did so. Seeing him, all of the celestial women quickly dressed and flew to heaven except for Zhinu, the one whose clothes Niulang held. He asked her to marry him and she quickly agreed, and the couple fell very much in love.

The cowherd and the Goddess weaver lived happily together. He tilled the land and she wove cloth. We may notice here the similarity to the thirteenth-century psalters and John Ball’s poem regarding Adam and Eve. This suggests that the gendering of these tasks is universal. One day, the buffalo warned his master that he was about to die, and instructed him to keep his hide for a later emergency. Niulang was very sad but did as he was instructed.

Shortly after this event, Zhinu’s grandmother in the heavens learned of the marriage to a mortal and was very angry. She was the queen of the emperor of the heavens, and as such sent down gods and soldiers who quickly reclaimed Zhinu. Seeing this happen as he returned from the fields, Niulang put their children into baskets, put on the buffalo hide and flew to the heavens in pursuit.

Here the versions of the tale vary. In one version, the grandmother separates the lovers and Zhinu threatens to stop weaving the Silver River, which would threaten heaven and earth with darkness. In the other version, the Silver River is used to keep the lovers apart.

Either way, as a concession, the cowherd and his children live on one side of the Silver River and his wife on the other. They are allowed to reunite once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh moon. Since ancient times, as this tale is one of the great Chinese love stories, this date has been the effective Chinese Valentine’s day.

Rather than being on a fixed date as it is in Western cultures, being related to the lunar cycle in this way means that the Chinese celebration has a variable date. Known formally in China as Qi-Xi (literally translating as seven night) the event sometimes goes by the name of the Double Seven Festival.

The weaver in this tale is associated with the star Vega (known as ‘Weaving Maid’) and the cowherd with Altair. These two stars sit on either side of the Milky Way and are easy to spot in the summer sky, being the fifth and eleventh brightest stars respectively. Altair is adjacent to two small bright stars, Alshain and Tarazed, which represent the children of the couple.

It is said that at this time you will not see magpies on earth, because they fly to the heavens to build a bridge between the lovers. By this method the weaver and the cowherd are able to meet. In some provinces of China, during the Dragon Boat Festival that is celebrated earlier in the year, five-colour silken ropes are woven. At Qi-Xi, girls throw these ropes onto the roofs of houses for the magpies to collect. The birds are then said to carry these ropes off to build the bridge.

As you would expect, there are a number of traditions associated with the festival of Qi-Xi. Some Chinese people believe that adorning an ox’s horn with flowers, in honour of the ox in the legend, will prevent bad luck. It is traditional on the night of Qi-Xi for women to wash their hair. The following morning, children use water left overnight in the back yard to ensure a beautiful appearance.

Chinese Valentine’s Day is also sometimes called ‘The Daughter’s Festival’, because it is a day for unmarried girls to seek love. Traditionally, Chinese girls desired to develop good needlecraft skills like the Goddess Weaver. These skills were considered to be vitally important for family life, and so on Valentine’s Night in China, unmarried girls would pray to the weaver’s star, Vega, to be granted good handicrafts. When the star was high in the sky, the girls would place a needle on the surface of some water. If the needle floated then the girl’s skills were thought to be sufficient and she was ready to marry. Contests would also be held where girls would try to be the best at threading needles in low lights.

In the Tang Dynasty in China, the weaver goddess was said to have come to earth with her two attendants, whereupon she showed a court official that the robe of a goddess has no seams, because it is created on a loom rather than by needle and thread. The phrase ‘a goddess’s robe is seamless’ became embedded in the language of the culture, representative of an example of perfect workmanship.

We may also find a weaving theme in a tragic Japanese folk tale, Tsuru Nyobo, translating as ‘Crane Wife’. Again there is more than one version of this.

One day, while working on his farm, a white crane falls from the sky in the fields where a young man is working. He notices that it has been hit by an arrow. He cares for the bird and cleans its wound before returning it to the skies. Later that day, when he arrives home, he finds a beautiful girl at his hut, whom he has never seen before. She says that she is his wife and, despite protestations that he cannot support her, she insists that she has plenty of rice and prepares dinner. They continue to live together and the sack is always full of rice.

One day, the woman asks her husband to build her a weaving room, but instructs him that he must never look inside. She shuts herself away and emerges seven days later, very thin but with a beautiful piece of cloth, which she says will fetch a good price at market. The man sells it and indeed it does make a lot of money.

The woman again shuts herself away to weave, but the man cannot contain his curiosity as to how she weaves with no thread, and he looks inside the room. There he sees that the woman has gone and in her place is the crane, pulling out its feathers and using them as thread to weave. Having been seen in her true, pitiable state, the crane flies off leaving only the cloth to remember her by.

A second version of this tale is known as Tsuru no Ongaeshi or ‘The Crane’s Return of a Favour’. Here the role of the man is replaced by a poor elderly couple but the rest of the story remains very similar with the elderly man releasing the crane from a trap in which it has been caught. It is essentially a variant of the ‘curiosity killed the cat’ moral.

WEAVING

The character of a weaver is often found in folklore as a ghost within a community who needs to be removed. The reason for this is that, alongside other such skilled craftsmen as tailors or millers (as we shall see in a later chapter) the ability of the weaver made them stand out in a community. As with many folk tales of ghosts, characters such as these were seen to wield some power over their community. Sometimes this might be because they are rich due to their trade, or because of rumours that they made a deal with the Devil in order to obtain their skills. Inevitably, the people around them become mistrustful of them and hostile towards them because of their actions. However, because they are too formidable a character to tackle head-on in life, it is after they die that the community seeks vengeance against them.

By way of illustration, we might take the story of a weaver named Knowles, who lived in the hamlet of Dean Combe, situated in an area of the South West of the United Kingdom known for its cloth manufacture. Knowles was said to be one of the most skilled weavers in the area, consistently producing the finest knap. Because of his skills, Knowles became a rich man, but he was not very generous with his wealth. He was also hated by his neighbours, who said that he was an evil, selfish gossip.

Knowles worked from sunrise to sunset each day, eventually dying whilst sat at his loom in the loft. Despite being ill-liked in the parish, many local residents came to the man’s funeral. This was more to wish well to the weaver’s son Fernley than it was to honour the old man. Fernley was a much more pleasant and respected man in the parish and he knew that he would now have to prove that he had the skills that his father had taught him at the loom.

Some time passed and the funeral came and went. Fernley knew that he must start working, and so descended to the kitchen to light the fires and take some breakfast before he began. Whilst sitting at the table, Fernley was shocked to hear the familiar sound of the loom thumping upstairs in the loft. He crept up the stairs to investigate, thinking that perhaps someone had broken into the house. Easing the door slightly ajar and peering in, however, a rather different sight met his eyes. There at the loom sat the ghost of his father, the old weaver, working as ever he had done.

Egyptian mat loom in use. Source: ‘Yarn and Cloth Making: an economic study’, Kissell, M.L. 1918. (Public domain)

Alarmed and confused, Fernley could think of nothing to do but fetch the local vicar, who came to the house thinking that he would need to employ the traditional bell, book and candle. Arriving at the house, the vicar remained on the ground floor and shouted up to the weaver to leave the property and return to his proper place in his grave.

‘I will as soon as I have finished this quill,’ cried out the spirit of Knowles in an unearthly voice.

The priest again commanded the spirit to leave the house and return to the graveyard. This time the spirit came downstairs, at which point the priest threw holy water into its face whilst reciting a prayer. With a scream, the image of the weaver transformed into a ghostly black dog. Through use of the Bible the priest brought the dog to heel and commanded it to follow him, where he led it down the lane to the local woods. There the priest banished the spirit to a task. Picking up an acorn shell by an oak tree, the priest told the dog-form of Knowles that he would find eternal rest only when he had emptied the pool in the woods using the acorn shell.

Legend says that the local people will not visit the pool at either noon or midnight because they will see the image of the terrible black dog still trying desperately to empty the pool with the acorn shell so that it can find its rest.

SPINNING

Weaving, if you are not a bird like the Crane Wife was, usually begins with spinning. We have already seen that in the late Middle Ages, it was usually thought that spinning was a female role, whereas weaving was more of a male tradition. It is actually the case, however, that men have taken on what was once a more inherently female calling. Certainly, among the pantheons of the gods, only the goddess characters wove. In modern societies across the mid-parts of Asia, weaving is associated with women. In more ancient history there are more definite gender distinctions, and Herodotus noted that among the Egyptians, for example, it was the men who wove: