Who will be your first foot? (From Darlington and Stockton Times)

Who will be your first foot?

12:09pm Thursday 31st December 2009

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IN parts of this region, some ancient New Year’s Day customs continue to be honoured and, perhaps the most popular, is the lucky bird, otherwise known as the first foot.

Some of us place a great deal of importance upon this practice, even though it is rooted in ancient superstition and perhaps descended from some bygone pagan belief.

The emphasis is upon the family household because, in order to welcome the New Year in the best possible manner to ensure good fortune throughout the coming months, certain rituals must be followed.

It was – and perhaps still is – essential that the very first person to enter the house in the New Year, the first foot, has certain qualifications. He has to be a man or youth with dark hair. He must not be flat-footed, his eyebrows must not meet in the middle and he should be unmarried.

I believe that in some parts of the north, a fair-haired man is acceptable provided he fulfils the other criteria.

His duty, apart from being the first person to enter the house, is to carry into the building a sprig of evergreen such as holly, a piece of coal, a portion of bread, some cash and a pinch of salt. The evergreen signifies the continuity of life while the other emblems symbolise the necessities for living such as money, food and fire, the latter providing both light and heat.

Once inside the home, he has to place these items on the hearth that has long been considered the focal point of the household because, in the past, a fire was essential for survival, providing light, heat and the means for cooking.

His reward is and was to be offered a drink and perhaps a slice of ginger cake. Within my own lifetime, I can recall villagers locking their doors against all visitors on New Year’s Day until the arrival of the anticipated lucky bird (known as the Lucky Bod in some parts of Yorkshire, bod being a dialect word for bird.) Clearly, not every household could ask a lucky bird to visit them, so consequently groups of children would tour the district offering their services.

In the North Yorkshire Dales and Moors, they would go around the houses knocking on doors early in the morning on January 1 while shouting this verse:

Lucky Bod, Lucky Bod, chuck, chuck, chuck,

Maister and missus, it’s tahme ti git up;

If thoo dissn’t git up, thoo’ll have nea luck,

Lucky Bod, Lucky Bod, chuck, chuck, chuck.

It was then hoped that the householders would be impressed by this effort and offer the children a treat of some kind, perhaps a gift of money, sweets or cakes.

There were other customs not connected with the lucky bird. In some northern villages, women would tour the houses offering gifts of God cakes, these being small pies filled with mincemeat. At Hutton Conyers near Ripon on New Year’s Day, local shepherds would organise a meal consisting of frummety, apple pies and cake.

Strictly speaking, this was not a New Year celebration, but one to mark the allocation of sheep grazing rights by the manorial court.

Apple wassailing was another custom on New Year’s Day, one that was widespread throughout England’s apple orchards. It was a celebration that was believed to ensure a good crop in the coming autumn.

It involved the use of a wassail bowl, sometimes called a vessel bowl, that was filled with hot liquor of some kind with an apple floating in it.

It was passed among the crowd, all of whom took a sip, while more hot liquor, probably ale, was thrown upon the trees as a means of encouraging them to produce a good crop. During this ceremony, the people would be singing, dancing, feasting and drinking, thus ensuring that a good time was had by all, including the trees.

In some areas, wassailing occurred in the autumn or perhaps on important feast days of the Church such as Christmas Day, the Epiphany (January 6) or even during Advent which begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day.

The word wassail comes from the Anglo-Saxon wes hal that means to be of good health and in some parts of Yorkshire, teams of wassailers would tour the villages carrying a wassail bowl filled with ale and apples while singing this verse:

Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green,

Here we come a-wandering, so fair to be seen,

Love and joy comes to you,x and to your wassail too,

And God bless you, and send you a Happy New Year.

EACH year at this time, I review a selection of the topics featured during the past year in this column, highlighting those that produced the most correspondence.

It has long been one of the assets of this weekly budget that it attracts letters, emails and phone calls from readers and I thank all correspondents for making the effort to contact me. This active and very positive interest helps enormously in maintaining the column’s broad appeal – it would be very difficult to achieve this without such help from our well-informed readers. So please continue writing those letters.

It was the sighting or hearing of cuckoos locally last spring that drew the most correspondence. With this notorious, but enigmatic, bird under threat from various sources, it is interesting to realise that no-one wants it to disappear completely. There is no doubt that fewer cuckoos are now being recorded in this country and, while some people might say that was a good thing owing to the havoc it plays with the eggs and chicks whose nests it plunders, it is clear that others do not want its distinctive call to disappear from our landscape.

The plight of honey bees, bumble bees and other species was also highlighted with a reduction in their numbers being a serious threat to our crops and thus to our vital food supplies. Without the bees, we could lose our source of food. Their decline is largely due to the Varroa mite, an external parasite but our bees are also affected by changes in the weather such as wet summers and also the careless use of pesticides.

One reader told me that after watching a farmer spray his huge crop of oil seed rape, the lane running beside the field was littered with the corpses of thousands of bumble bees. Quite literally, it was a serious local disaster.

My notes about the legendary Paddy Waddell railway that never succeeded in running across the North York Moors provoked a great deal of interest, as did the remarkable rood screen in Leyburn church. Some of us recalled the stench of middens outside farmhouse living rooms, while the use of dialect always prompts interest as do the antics of our wild creatures.

Strange noises made by some squirrels, the cleverness of crows making their own tools, the arrival of the first swallows and the behaviour of March hares – or marsh hares – produced a few letters and, as always, so did some local methods of forecasting the weather such as noting the cat sitting with its back to the fire.

With our countryside allegedly under threat from, or being ignored by, politicians it is gratifying that there is such local interest in our splendid northern landscape with all its marvellous diversity. And finally, I wish all readers a truly happy New Year.

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