On Michaelmas

The Origin, History and Meaning of a Beloved Holiday

St. Michael, Morgan MS M.700 fol. 2r

Today is the feast day of St. Michael the Archangel in the liturgical calendar, more commonly known as Michaelmas. As anyone who lives with me can attest, I have been terribly excited about this holiday. I’ve spent much of the past week running through our house, from room to room, upstairs and down, crying, “It’s nearly Michaelmas! Where shall we find a goose for St. Michael’s Day?”

We were unable to procure a goose, alas, but that hasn’t prevented me from being festive. Over the weekend I raided the “folklore & customs” section of my personal library in the hopes of learning everything worth knowing about Michaelmas: its roots in the Middle Ages, the history of its celebration in England, strange local customs and superstitions that became attached to the holiday. And I wanted to share what I’ve learned, because there’s been much angst and confusion of late from Americans on social media over a passing mention of Michaelmas Term in the first line of Bleak House. I’ve even seen people say Bleak House is impossible to read because they’ve never heard of Michaelmas, as if this one cultural reference invalidates the whole novel. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to these people that they could simply look up unfamiliar things. And now they can read this post.

We begin with the Anglo-Saxons. Eleanor Parker, in her indispensable book Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year, writes that St. Michael was highly venerated in the early Middle Ages and held many roles. In medieval Christian lore he was given the task of guiding the newly dead, Charon-like, into the next world. In the Scottish Highlands, Ralph Whitlock tells us, he was the patron saint of the sea. Based on the scant information we’re given about him in scripture, he came to symbolize the struggle between good and evil, and was often visually depicted battling a great dragon, the devil. (“And there was war in heaven,” the Book of Revelation tells us: “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not.”) The Anglo-Saxons called his feast day—which took place in the second week of October in the old calendar—Michaeles maesse. And it was, says Parker, “a high point in the church year.”

In England Michaelmas was one of the four Quarter Days, the others being Lady Day (March 25), Midsummer (or the feast day of St. John the Baptist) and Christmas. (Scotland had a separate system of Quarter Days: Candlemas, Whitsunday, Lammas Day and Martinmas Day.) Legally these were known as “settling days,” a time for paying rents and settling accounts. Great hiring fairs were held around Michaelmas at which farm laborers sought new employers. Many of these laborers dwelt in lodgings which had to be vacated at Michaelmas when their terms of service ended. In Shakespeare’s Greenwood: The Customs of the County, Warwickshire folklorist George Morley quotes a spectator who witnessed these hired hands traveling from place to place:

“In the Vale of the Red Horse somewhere about Michaelmas Day sundry farm waggons may be seen at intervals piled high with articles of domestic furniture with the rustic children seated upon the top. These are the belongings of the hired labourer whose term of service being ended at one farm is removing to another.”

There is, by the way, a stealth mention of this account-settling in the wonderful late medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Early in the poem Sir Gawain beheads a mysterious green knight; the head then speaks and commands Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel a year and a day later to receive a return blow. Shortly before Gawain sets out, he sees the Michaelmas moon, or harvest moon:

“And thus yirnes the yere in yisterdayes mony,

And wynter wyndes ayayn, as the worlde askes,

no fage,

Til Meghelmas mone

Was cumen wyth wynter wage.

Then thenkkes Gawan ful sone

Of his anious vyage.”

Which Simon Armitage translates:

“Yesterday on yesterday the year dies away,

and winter returns, as is the way of the world

through time.

At Michaelmas the moon

stands like that season’s sign,

a warning to Gawain

to rouse himself and ride.”

Why is the Michaelmas moon a warning to Gawain? Because, George B. Pace has argued ingeniously in his essay “Gawain and Michaelmas,” now is the time for settling accounts, and Gawain has his own account to settle with the Green Knight.

It was also customary on this day for tenants to give their landlords a goose. In Thomas Blount’s Tenures of Land & Custom of Manors we read, for the year 1471, “A certain John de la Hay was bound to give William Barnaby, Lord of Lastres, Herefordshire, for a parcel of demesne lands, one goose fit for the lord’s dinner on the feast of St Michael.” Out of this emerged the tradition of eating a goose for Michaelmas, and in time the goose became as indelibly linked with the day as turkey now is with Christmas. (Indeed, Stephen Roud writes, “The Michaelmas goose tradition was once stronger than the modern traditions of eggs at Easter and turkey at Christmas combined.”) In the months preceding the holiday, geese had been allowed to graze on stubble in the harvest fields. This grazing (or “a-stubbling,” as some called it) made the geese uncommonly fat, and it was thought that they tasted best if killed and eaten around Michaelmas. “In Hertfordshire,” Whitlock informs us, “it was considered unlucky not to eat a ‘stubble goose’ at Michaelmas,” which may explain a line from a letter that Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra on 12 October, 1813: “I dined upon goose yesterday—which I hope will secure a good sale of my 2nd edition” of Pride and Prejudice—which, of course, takes place in Hertfordshire.

Michael depicted in the Yolande de Soissons Psalter-Hours (Morgan Library, M.729, fol. 404v).

The following are some of the lesser-known regional customs and superstitions that emerged from the holiday:

• “In Somerset,” Kingsley Palmer tells us in The Folklore of Somerset, “it was the time to go out after crab apples, which were inscribed with the initials of prospective lovers and then stored in a dark place. They were inspected again on Old Michaelmas Day (11 October) and the initials easiest to read after that time were those of your true love.”

• Stephen Roud writes, “A peculiar custom, which prevailed at Kingston-upon-Thames church in Surrey, until the early nineteenth century, involved the cracking of nuts” during the Sunday service preceding St. Michael’s Day. Goldsmith alludes to this custom in The Vicar of Wakefield: “They kept up the Christmas carol, sent true-love knots on Valentine morning, ate pan-cakes at Shrove-tide, shewed their wit on the first of April, and religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas Eve.”

• Whitlock adds, “At Wootton Bassett, in Wiltshire, the tenant of the lord of the manor met in secret to participate in a ‘Word Ale,’ the purpose of which was to perpetuate an exemption from tithes which was originally granted by a Cistercian abbot in the twelfth century. Prayers were said, hymns were sung, and much ale consumed. At Rochford, in Essex, a somewhat similar ceremony was held … at cock-crow on the Wednesday after Michaelmas and was carried out by the light of torches. As each tenant was dealt with, his torch was extinguished.”

• Virtually every authority on English festivals and customs mentions the tradition that blackberries must not be eaten after St. Michael’s Day because the devil landed in a blackberry bush when he was cast out of heaven by St. Michael. The politer versions of the legend say the devil spit on them, though the less polite versions say he did much worse things. This legend may have arisen to account for the fact that blackberries are generally sour and worm-eaten after mid-October.

• In some villages (and still today in London), Michaelmas was the date on which a new mayor was elected. In Kidderminster this gave rise to the Lawless Hour, an hour (between three and four) when the new bailiff and his attending dignitaries were pelted with apples, cabbage stalks and other refuse by the common folk. One witness to the pelting reported, “I have known forty pots of apples expended at one house.” In February 1910, Roud tells us, a woman was arrested for “throwing liquid over a man at Silverdale.” She claimed that because it was done on mayoral election day, she was absolved from guilt: “There is no law on election day; you may do whatever you like.”

All of which begs the question: how are you going to celebrate Michaelmas? Precedent gives us a range of options: feasting on geese, cracking nuts, drinking ale, lobbing refuse at government officials. Given the state of things, I might recommend all four. It would be fitting for the feast day of the archangel to whom it was once said, “Give ear to our voices … That the enemy with cunning craft shall not prevail / To do the hurt he craves / To weary men.”