t perform them in separation from his rustic neighbours. Practices
domestic in their purpose may indeed be transferred to the modern city,
but it is the experience of folk-lorists that they seldom descend to the
second generation.

It is in regions like Bavaria, Tyrol, Styria, or the Slav parts of the
Austrian Empire, or Roumania and Servia, that the richest store of
festival customs is to be found nowadays. Here the old agricultural life
has been less interfered with, and at the same time the Church, whether
Roman or Greek, has succeeded in keeping modern ideas away from the
people and in maintaining a popular piety that is largely polytheistic in
its worship of the saints, and embodies a great amount of traditional
paganism. In our half-suburbanized England but little now remains of
these vestiges of primitive religion and magic whose interest and
importance were only realized by students in the later nineteenth
century, when the wave of "progress" was fast sweeping them away.

Old traditions have a way of turning up unexpectedly in remote corners,
and it is hard to say for certain that any custom is altogether extinct;
every year, however, does its work of destruction, and it may well be
that some of the practices here described in the present tense have
passed into the Limbo of discarded things.

|187| |188| |189|

CHAPTER VII

ALL HALLOW TIDE TO MARTINMAS

All Saints' and All Souls' Days, their Relation to a New Year
Festival--All Souls' Eve and Tendance of the Departed--Soul Cakes in
England and on the Continent--Pagan Parallels of All
Souls'--Hallowe'en Charms and Omens--Hallowe'en Fires--Guy Fawkes
Day--"Old Hob," the _Schimmelreiter_, and other Animal
Masks--Martinmas and its Slaughter--Martinmas Drinking--St. Martin's
Fires in Germany--Winter Visitors in the Low Countries and
Germany--St. Martin as Gift-bringer--St. Martin's Rod.

ALL SAINTS' AND ALL SOULS' DAYS.

In the reign of Charles I. the young gentlemen of the Middle Temple were
accustomed to reckon All Hallow Tide (November 1) the beginning of
Christmas.{1} We may here do likewise and start our survey of winter
festivals with November, in the earlier half of which, apparently, fell
the Celtic and Teutonic New Year's Days. It is impossible to fix precise
dates, but there is reason for thinking that the Celtic year began about
November 1,[86]{2} and the Teutonic about November 11.{3}

On November 1 fal