Folklore: All you ever wanted to know about St Agnes' Eve - and St Agnes!

Painting, inspired by the Keats poem The Eve of St Agnes, by Peter Alexander Hay (1905)

It's St Agnes' Eve tonight – 20th January – so here's a transcript from my latest digital radio show which featured a discussion of some of the folklore, traditions and legends associated with both St Agnes' Eve and the lady herself...

CHARLIE:         We also need to talk about the folklore and legends surrounding St Agnes Eve, which is the 20th of January.

JANIE:        Ooh, I remember reading that, how does the poem by Keats go…

St Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold

Bit like the temperature in this studio tonight!

CHARLIE:        Keats based his poem on an old folklore tradition that St Agnes Eve is one of the traditional times of the year for love divination rituals, when young women would try to discover if they were going to get married over the next 12 months and who their husbands might be.

JANIE:         Because young women in the 19th century didn’t get out much and didn’t have access to FaceBook! Although I recall reading that along with St Agnes Eve, other popular dates for conducting love divination were St Valentine’s Day, May Eve, Midsummer’s Eve, St Anne’s Eve - 26 July in case you were wondering - Halloween and New Year’s Eve. And not forgetting weddings, which had their own rituals including catching the bride’s bouquet and sleeping with a piece of wedding cake beneath your pillow. So what form did these rituals take?

CHARLIE:        There were a couple although it’s worth noting Keats rather sexed up the version in his poem by having his heroine take all her clothes off and lie naked on her bed.

JANIE:        Well Keats was a Romantic poet!

CHARLIE:        To get back to the story. There were two main forms of divination. 

In the first one, the young woman fasts all through St Agnes' Eve “eating only a little stale bread and drinking parsley tea.” Then goes to bed, pausing only to remake the bed with clean sheets and pillow cases, and, when she finally climbs into bed, repeats the following verse:

Agnes sweet, and Agnes fair, 
Hither, hither, now repair; 
Bonny Agnes, let me see 
The lad who is to marry me

If it works, she will then either see her lover in her dreams of see his image appear in her bedroom or dressing table mirror.

Alternative verses include:

St Agnes be a friend to me
In the gift I ask of thee
Let me this night
My future husband see

or even

St Agnes, I pray unto thee
I, a maid, would married be
So thou my husband show to me

JANIE:        While you’ve been saying this, I’ve been looking through the reference books and found another, rather more yucky version from as long ago as 1711. It goes like this… Take a sprig of Rosemary and another of thyme. Sprinkle them with urine thrice. Put one into one shoe and the other into another shoe. Then place the shoes at each side of the bed. Then, when you go to bed, say

St Agnes, that’s to Lovers kind
Come ease the trouble of my mind

and you will dream of your lover. 

Let’s just hope you lover is not a cobbler as he’ll be grossed out by your shoes! Anyway, you said there were two main forms of St Agnes' Eve rituals, what’s the other one?

CHARLIE:         The other one involves cake. Yay! It’s called Dumb Cake and apparently it was still being practiced in rural Lincolnshire and East Anglia until the Second World War when, presumably, the influx of unattached, young American airman and regular dances in the airfield hangers removed the need to resort to magic to find a husband.

OK, Dumb Cake - and the earliest recorded recipes for this go back to 1685. You make a cake - actually it sounds more like a savoury pancake or what the Scottish would call a bannock - made of flour, salt, water and egg - and cooked on a griddle, which you place beneath of your pillow - and then you’ll dream of your future beloved.

Unlike the other St Agnes rituals, Dumb Cakes will supposedly work for men and women. And, you can do it collectively with, say, four people all taking part in the preparation process - you’d divide the ingredients into four equal parts - and then each one takes a quarter of the cooked cake to place under their pillow.

However there is a catch - which is why it is called Dumb Cake - in that the whole preparation and cooking process must be carried out in absolute silence. No talking, no smiles, no laughing and no sniggering otherwise the magical spell will be broken. Oh, and you’ll like this, according to some versions of the ritual, once you’ve placed your slice of Dumb Cake beneath your pillow, you should walk backwards into your bed.

JANIE:        Perhaps if all these young maidens didn’t have shoes that smelled of wee and hair full of crumbs from the cakes they’d been sleeping on, they might have had more success with the boys? Just a thought. Anyway, just to neatly round off this piece, who was Saint Agnes? I’m guessing she was some poor Sheila from the Roman Empire era who was horribly martyred for her beliefs? Am I right?

CHARLIE:        Spot on Janie - as ever. She was apparently a beautiful young girl, about 12 or 13 years old, from a noble family who had many suitors from other wealthy patrician families. However when she turned them down, because of her, in quotes, “resolute devotion to religious purity” one of the young men reported her to the authorities for being a Christian. This was at a time in the Roman Empire when Christians were still being persecuted.

According to legend, she was sentenced to be dragged naked through the streets to a brothel, however she prayed to Heaven, whereupon her hair grew to cover her entire body and any men who tried to molest her were immediately struck blind. The Roman authorities then reverted to a Plan B of having her burned alive at a stake - but the bundles of wood and kindling would not catch fire - so finally a Roman soldier hacked off her head. Incidentally you can still see her head - well at least her skull - in a shrine at the church of Sant’ Agnese in the Piazza Navona in Rome.

Today St Agnes is the patron saint of chastity, girls, engaged couples, rape survivors, virgins, Girl Guides and gardeners.

JANIE:        Gardeners?