Palm Sunday brings some curious customs. At Roundway Hill, and at
Martinsall, near Marlborough, the people bear "palms," or branches of
willow and hazel, and the boys play a curious game of knocking a ball
with hockey-sticks up the hill; and in Buckinghamshire it is called
Fig Sunday, and also in Hertfordshire. Hertford, Kempton,
Edlesborough, Dunstable are homes of the custom, nor is the practice
of eating figs and figpies unknown in Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire,
Oxfordshire, Wilts, and North Wales. Possibly the custom is connected
with the withering of the barren fig-tree.
Good Friday brings hot-cross-buns with the well-known rhyme. Skipping
on that day at Brighton is, I expect, now extinct. Sussex boys play
marbles, Guildford folk climb St. Martha's Hill, and poor widows pick
up six-pences from a tomb in the churchyard of St. Bartholomew the
Great, London, on the same Holy Day.
Easter brings its Pace eggs, symbols of the Resurrection, and
Yorkshire children roll them against one another in fields and
gardens. The Biddenham cakes are distributed, and the Hallaton
hare-scramble and bottle-kicking provide a rough scramble and a
curious festival for Easter Monday. On St. Mark's Day the ghosts of
all who will die during the year in the villages of Yorkshire pass at
midnight before the waiting people, and Hock-tide brings its quaint
diversions to the little Berkshire town of Hungerford.
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