St Piran’s Day 5th of Lide (March 5th)

St Piran’s Oratory at Trézilidé, Finistère (wikipedia)

This year March 5th was Ash Wednesday. So I did not have time to repost my Lide – March 5th post. Here it is:

The Cornish named the first Friday in March ‘Friday in Lide’. March is named after the Roman War God Mars, whose Month it was. But in England it had, until recent times, a dialect name which survived in the South west of England. This was ‘Lide’. The name was still used in the 17th Century, and then survived into the 19th Century only in Cornwall, which had a proverb.

Ducks won’t lay till they’ve drunk Lide water’.

Daffodils were called Lide-lillies. Eleanor Parker, who is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford, wrote an interesting article in History Today. She called March the loudest month of the year. The early English names for March were Hlyda or Lide monath meaning stormy or loud month. Other names include Hraed monath (rugged month) and Lentmonath (month of lent).

The ‘loudness’ comes from the March winds, which were noisy – as described in this rhyme. (thanks to Millie Thom for the rhyme and all things March. )

March brings breezes loud and shrill,
Stirs the dancing daffodil.
~Sara Coleridge (1802–1852), “The Months,” Pretty Lessons In Verse, For Good Children; With Some Lessons in Latin, In Easy Rhyme, 1834

There are many references to the changeable weather in March. Sometimes lovely spring days, and at others raging storms, and frosts. Parker quotes a proverb which says that March comes in:

like a lion and goes out like a lamb’.

Lide 5th was a holiday for Miners, probably because it was St Piran’s Day. Very little is clear about St Piran. But he is thought to have been an Irish Missionary who founded an Abbey in Cornwall in the 5th Century. His legend says he was tied to a millstone by the Irish, who rolled the stone over a cliff. The sea was stormy, but calmed as soon as he fell into it. He floated on his stone to Perranzabuloe in Cornwall. Here he landed and got his first converts: a badger, a fox, and a bear. Then, he founded the Abbey of Llanpirran.

He is said to have reintroduced smelting to Cornwall, hence his attribution as patron Saint of Miners. Piran was martyred by Theodoric or Tador, King of Cornwall in 480. His bones scattered in reliquaries in the South West and in Brittany. He is the patron saint of Cornwall, so the week before the 5th of March is known as Pirrantide. And there are events and parades to commemorate him. People dress in black white and gold, carrying daffodils and walk across the dunes to St Piran’s Cross.

Screenshot from the Cornish Guide showing St Piran’s Cross. https://www.cornwalls.co.uk/history/sites/st_pirrans_cross.htm

For more about March look at my post https://www.chr.org.uk/anddidthosefeet/march-1st-the-month-of-new-life/

First published in 2024, rewritten March 2025

Mothering Sunday & Simnel Cake March 30th

Strangely, very little to do with Mothers! Mothering Sunday is the 4th Sunday in Lent and is a day in which we are enjoined to visit our Mother Churches. It, therefore, became a day when people made processions to their Churches.  Servants and workers could go to their home parishes, and not only go to the Mother Church but also to say hello to their mothers.

It was called Mothering Sunday when I was little but since then has morphed into the Americanism that is Mother’s Day.

In Church the Reading is often Isaiah 66:10–11

‘Rejoice ye with Jerusalem; and be ye glad for her, all ye that delight in her: exult and sing for joy with her, all ye that in sadness mourn for her; that ye may suck, and be satisfied with the breasts of her consolations.

Jerusalem is personified, here, as the Mother. Further associations with motherhood came from the Gospel for the day which is John 6:1–14, the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, which led to associations with the bounty of Mother Earth.

In the medieval period visits to the Mother Church seem to have become fiercely competitive. The Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste decreed:

In each and every church you should strictly prohibit one parish from fighting with another over whose banners should come first in processions at the time of the annual visitation and veneration of the mother church. […] Those who dishonour their spiritual mother should not at all escape punishment, when those who dishonour their fleshly mothers are, in accordance with God’s law, cursed and punished with death.

(Letter 22.7 – Wikipedia)

Simnel Cake

It was also the Sunday in the fasting period of Lent in which the restrictions were relaxed, so you could eat what is called Simnel Cake.

I’ll to thee a Simnel bring
‘Gainst thou goest a-Mothering
So that, when she blesseth thee
Half that blessing thou’lt give me.

Herrick Hesperides 1647

Photo: James Petts from London, England – Simnel cake (wikipedia
Easter 2012

The Simnel cake is a fine flour light fruit cake (Latin simila, fine flour), with layers of marzipan in it. It often has 11 balls of marzipan on the top, representing the 11 (not Judas) apostles. The cake is first boiled for two hours and then baked.

Now, I know 95% of my American readers hate fruit cake, but believe me when I tell you – you are completely wrong! Its delicious, and here is the BBC’s recipe for you to try:

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/easter-simnel-cake

And I’m beginning to see that cake is an emerging theme of this Almanac of the Past.

Written in March 23, slightly revised in March 24, and 25