Shrove Tuesday

Pancakes for breakfast this morning. But not the standard British variety with lemon juice and sugar, which are frankly a bit dull. So we turned to the recipe from Nigella Lawson's Feast book for buttermilk and banana pancakes, smaller American-style numbers which turned out to be totally delicious with the quince and bramble jellies we made last Autumn and equally tasty with some maple syrup and my mum's blackcurrant jam. The four of us got through quite a number of them this morning.

The practice of making pancakes is well-known to have been a way to use up perishable foodstuffs before the onset of the fasting period of Lent, which begins tomorrow on Ash Wednesday. According to Simpson and Roud's Dictionary of English Folklore, the Monday before the beginning of Lent was known as 'Collop Monday', due to the practice of eating 'collops', fried or boiled cuts of meat. The eating of meat (as well as eggs and cheese) was then banned until communion had been taken on Easter Day, for most people in medieval England the only day on which they would take communion.

Back to pancakes, the first reference is from William Warner's Albion's England (1586), quoted by Ronald Hutton in Seasons of the Sun, as well as by Simpson and Roud, a description of 'Fast-eve pan-puffs'. Our pancakes this morning were certainly more like 'pan-puffs' than the thin versions we're mostly used to!

As well as the feasting, which eventually became this pancake tradition, there is a long-standing connection between violence, playful and serious, and Shrovetide. This violence is particularly expressed in the history of public ball games, a violence which also from the reign of James I onwards in certain places spilled over into rioting. From the very end of the sixteenth century, the City of London saw frequent riots for which apprentices appear to have been responsible. The growth in forces to keep the peace in London led to a decline. Other cities also saw carnival-esque misbehaviour, as in the following example from Bristol which Hutton describes:

Shrove Tuesday revelry by youth became an issue at the realm's second city, of Bristol, where annually during the Interregnum the magistrates (clearly without avail) forbade the apprentices to throw at cocks, play football, or (as another opportunity for cruelty) toss dogs in the air. The lads eventually wove these sports into a political protest, for on Shrove Tuesday 1660, when demonstrations against the tottering republic were breaking out all over southern England, they used the letter of the prohibition to insult the republicans who ran the city. Outside the mayor's house they threw at geese and hens and tossed up bitches and cats, and knocked down the sheriff who tried to prevent them. (Seasons of the Sun, p. 156.)

These kind of breakdowns of order, and their ritual aspect - which Hutton describes as 'licensed misrule', are reminiscent of continental celebrations and carnival at Shrovetide, like the German and Austrian Fasching. Tossing a few pancakes and thinking about whether to give up chocolate for Lent are the mild relics of our wilder history.