I.ITTLE HUCKLOW : ITS CUSTOMS AND OLD HOUSES. 49 



On Shrove Tuesday the one who remained last in bed was 

 called the "bed-churl," or "bed-chum,"* and was swept with 

 a broom. An old woman describing this custom to me said 

 that she was once a bed-churl, and " he kept sweeping me with 

 his broom, and I kept skriking " (shrieking). To avoid being 

 made bed-churls people have been known to stay up all night. 

 On this day the miner who came last to his work had a pole 

 or stake put under his legs, on which he was carried and 

 "tippled down th' hillock." A miner who was being treated 

 in this way once stabbed his persecutor with a knife. 



On New Year's Day a " barm-feast " was held in a barn. 



There is a spring on the hill to the east of the village called 

 Silver Well, into which, both on Easter Sunday and Easter Mon- 

 day, children threw pins, and then poured water from the well into 

 bottles containing broken sweetmeats, and shook the bottles. 

 A Methodist preacher who had asked a boy what happened on 

 Easter Sunday was told " we shakken." At Chapel-en-le-Frith 

 and at Doveholes, near Buxton, the process of filling the 

 bottles with water and shaking them is called "rinsing," and 

 Easter Sunday is called " Rinsing Day." This shows that the 

 putting of sweetmeats into bottles is a modern addition to the 

 rite, the object uf the shaking having been to cleanse or purify. 

 At Tideswell they call the practice " Sugar-cupping." ( On 

 Palm Sunday — the Sunday before Easter — they laid a ring of 

 " palms " — i.e., the buds or catkins of the common sallow 

 (salix cinerea) — round Silver Well, using no other flowers. | 

 There are other wells called pin wells in the neighbourhood. 



* Bed-churn is more frequently heard than bed-churl, but I think the 

 latter is right. 



t It is .so described in a letter from Tideswell, dated 1826, printed in 

 Hone's Every-day Book, ii., 451. 



:J: Horace mentions the custom of offering flowers to springs: — 



O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro, 

 Dulci digne mero non sine floribus. 



In Rochdale, Lancashire, Spaw Sunday was celebrated on the first that 

 fell in May, " when the devout, provided with what were called spa-wen- 

 bottles, betook themselves for the most part to a well called Brown Wardle." _ 

 — March's Nomenclature of East Lancashire, p. 27. Here spaw is the ' 

 O.N. s/>a, prophecy, divination, and a spaiven-bottle is a divining bottle. 



