Before Scotland by Alistair Moffatt;

Author:Alistair Moffatt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson Ltd.
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Stock-rearing and the nodal points of the stockman’s year inform the plot of the Tain Bo Cuailgne and they formed the basis for the ancient agricultural festivals which used to be celebrated throughout Britain. They require exposition and explanation here. The year was thought to begin not in the midst of winter, as it does nowadays, but with the feast of Samhuinn. The Gaelic word translates approximately as ‘the end of summer’, but it is now called Hallowe’en and seen as the start of winter, falling on 31 October. The remnants of old practices can still be recognized. Hallowe’en, and Samhuinn before it, was originally a fire festival and the ceremonies took place around as great a blaze as could be piled up. Guising involved taking ash from the fire and daubing it on faces as a symbolic disguise. This was a cue for all sorts of licence. In The First Statistical Account of 1796, ministers of the Kirk were busy doing their Christian utmost to suppress what they saw as persistent paganism: ‘A sort of secret society of Guisers made itself notorious in several of the neighbouring villages, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, dancing together in a very unseemly way.’

The last smiddy priest

An echo of the ancient pre-eminence of metalworkers could still be heard at Gretna Green until November 2003. Jim Jackson was the last in a long line of smiddy (smithy) priests to marry runaway couples over the anvil. A difference between the marriage laws of Scotland and England which arose in 1754 began a fashion for runaway marriage at Gretna, and also, incidentally, at the eastern end of the border, north of Berwick-upon-Tweed and at Coldstream on the Scots side of the Tweed Bridge. If English couples were under 21 and did not have the consent of their parents, they could not get married, so some eloped to Scotland. And the tradition of a blacksmith as a man of standing found a new expression. When couples were married by the smiddy priest, he clattered his hammer off the anvil and declared them to be man and wife. And if their parents were in hot pursuit, he bundled them into a handy double bed so that they could quickly consummate matters and thereby make the union indissoluble.

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