Saint Catherine: patron saint of lacemakers

 

Saint Catherine is the patron saint of spinners and the lacemakers affiliated themselves to her because of the similarities between their crafts. Her feast day is the 25th of November and it was a holiday known as Catterns in many English lacemaking districts, especially in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Villages celebrated the day in different ways. For example, in Bedfordshire, the people of Ampthill brewed special home-made drinks and baked Cattern cakes made of dough and caraway seeds, while those in Poddington ate their cakes with tea and then danced to fiddle music and ate a ‘great apple pie’. The lacemakers of Wendover in Buckinghamshire called the day Candle day because it was the first day of the autumn on which they started to make lace by candlelight. They also celebrated by cooking and eating ‘wigs’, which were round cakes containing caraway seeds that resembled gingerbread, and drank ‘hot pot’, which was made with warm beer and a splash of rum all thickened with beaten eggs.

As well as feasting and dancing to the music, the children played games such as apple bobbing and jumping the candlestick. There were different ways of jumping the candlestick but in one version the children danced in a circle around the lit candle singing ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick’. The name of each child was inserted in the rhyme, and when their name was used they had to jump over the candlestick without extinguishing the light. Many of the candlesticks would have been about 65 cm high and with girls wearing long petticoat dresses the potential for accidents seems very high, but I have not seen any reports of injuries or burns. In some places the festivities ended with the ringing of the church bells or lighting Catherine wheels but Thomas Wright, who recorded all this information, says that the custom of using the fireworks died out in the 1890s.