Fasten's Eve (aka pancake day)

Happy Pancake Day C4Lferati,

Or as we in Cheshire call it – Fasten’s Eve. This day is now largely known because of the catchy Pancake Day song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj_aHCpZl4k

But it was once one of the most important days of the year in the Cheshire Calendar.

On Fasten’s Eve (also known as Shrove Tuesday) AD 905 an army of Vikings sailed from Dublin and travelled up the Dee to rape and pillage the City of Chester. However, when the Norsemen tried to pillage and rape the shrine of our blessed St Weburgh ‘The Goose Healer’ the Vikings were driven insane by here mystical saintly powers. The people of Chester then poured boiling water, ale (!) and finally beehives from the Chester city walls onto their besiegers. When the Viking Thane in charge of the attack was beheaded, his head was kicked around the large area of flat silted flood plain outside the Chester City walls known as the Roodee.

Every year from then on this momentous occasion was re-enacted by the Guilds of Chester who played a wild and unruly game of football on the Roodee on Fasten’s Eve to celebrate the defeat of the Danes and the kicking about of their leader’s head. This is one of the oldest football games on record but it’s not like the football you or I know. No one refused to celebrate when they scored against a Guild they’d formerly played for, or built a shark pool in the floor of the kitchen of their barn conversion, or tried to pass the ball. It was proper football before formations and any kind of rules ruined the game for ever. Up yours prawn sandwich eaters.

Anyway, the Shoemaker’s Guild donated a wooden football for the game, while the Drapers brought a silver arrow which was used as a prize for which the Chester’s famous archers competed. The Saddlers gave a ball of silk which was thrown to the crowd, causing many of the local WAGs to be hurt as they desperately scrambled for it. Many people were injured playing the game and the silk ball freeforall as the monk Henry Bradshaw comments: ‘Much harm was done, some having their bodies bruised and crushed, some their armes, heads, legges broken, some otherwise maimed and in peril of their life’. The Mayor eventually banned the Fasten’s Eve football game and replaced it in 1539 with the Chester Races on the Roodee, making it the oldest races in the country. Rather than a silver arrow “one faire silver cupp”, valued at eight Cheshire pooonds, was offered to the winner.

The race was held every Fasten’s Eve but as people in Cheshire at the moment will testify, early to mid-February can be a snowy time in the North West and as a result it was not uncommon for many a horse and jockey to slip to their icey deaths on the frosty track. As a result the race was eventually moved to St George’s Day (23^rd April).

Fasten’s Eve was so called because it was the day before Lent when people fasted. The faithful were expected to abstain from eating meat during the whole forty days, and butter and eggs were also forbidden. Consequently, if the housewife (or house husband as they used to have in those days) had any of these things left in the house they had to be used up before Ash Wednesday, and from this comes our modern tradition of pancake day.

Fasten’s Eve was one of the few days of the year that the agricultural worker had off. A bell was rung in the morning, at some places at eleven in others much earlier. The people were then free to enjoy themselves until the ringing of a second bell at night. The main forms of enjoyment tend to be chicken based. There was the obligatory cock fighting, but also more unusual games like Shying the Cock and Thrashing the Hen. While Shying the Cock was like a rooster-based form of the still popular coconut shy, Thrashing the Hen more-closely resembled a Cheshire version of the Mexican Piniata. In a typical Thrashing the Hen session a man with bells on his clothes would have a live hen attached to his back. Then two blind-folded men would try and thrash the hen to death with sticks but would inevitably sometimes hit the bell-wearing man and from thence the hilarity arose. Why there should be so much chicken-based violence on Fasten’s Eve remains a matter of conjecture. It might be because the eating of meat and eggs were banned during Lent this was the last opportunity you’d have to take out your Feudal-system induced rage on poultry for 40 days. Which would have required an incredible amount of willpower for even the most god fearing Christian.

Thankfully we live in more humane enlightened times, and the practice of Thrashing the Hen has not occurred in Cheshire for nigh on 50 years. However, research suggests that a version of Thrashing the Hen did continue as late as the mid-2000s in the Wimbledon area of South London. This cruel spectacle, usually conducted by an athletic Spanish or Swiss man, would be carried out with almost ritualistic repetition in late June or early July and was greeted with much mourning/schaden freude from the British public.

As for Shying the Cock, we encourage C4Lf members to keep this grand Cheshire tradition alive by starting a conversation about the urethra-dwelling Amazonian catfish the Candiru with the next bloke who comes to stand beside you at the urinal.