Six Excuses the English Calendar Gives You to Drink
Andi Healey
Web Manager
Six English Saints, Traditions and Folk Tales That End in a Drink
It starts with a furious dead bishop on 15 July, and goes downhill - into cellars, orchards and taverns - from there. A tour through the year's finest folklore, all of it somehow ending at the bottom of a glass.
- 15 July, St Swithun's Day: a 9th-century bishop's grudge is said to fix the weather for forty days.
- 29 September, Michaelmas: the Devil ruins the blackberries, which is your cue to go and pick sloes instead.
- Harvest time, John Barleycorn: the folk ballad where barley is "killed" every year to become beer and whisky.
- 11 November, Martinmas: the old date the new wine was declared ready to drink.
- 17 January, Wassailing: shouting at apple trees until they agree to behave.
- 22 January, St Vincent's Day: the actual patron saint of winemakers, named for a pun, with his own sunshine-means-good-vintage forecast.
Follow the English calendar for a full year and you'll notice a pattern: an alarming number of its saint's days, traditions and superstitions end up, one way or another, at a drink. Some are about wine, some about cider, one's about beer and whisky at the same time.
We'll start with next Wednesday, 15th July, with a bishop who took a house move very personally, and work our way round the rest of the year from there.
St Swithun's Day: the bishop with a grudge
15 JulySwithun was Bishop of Winchester in the ninth century, and by all accounts a genuinely good and humble man. His one wish was to be buried outside the cathedral, somewhere unglamorous, so that rain off the roof and the boots of ordinary passers-by would land on him, rather than some fancy indoor tomb.
For about a hundred years, everybody left him to it.
Then in 971 the monks decided their bishop deserved better and had him dug up and moved inside to a shinier shrine. According to legend, the sky responded with forty straight days of rain, taken at the time to mean exactly one thing: Swithun was furious, and wanted it known.
Out of that tantrum came the rhyme still chanted every July:
St Swithun's day if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain;
St Swithun's day if thou be fair,
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.
There's a bonus subplot involving apples: tradition says the fruit isn't fit to eat until St Swithin's rain has "christened" them. Anyone picking early was, technically, jumping the saint's queue. It's not just eating apples that benefit either: in cider country, the same rain that's supposedly proof of Swithun's temper is doing great work in the orchards, swelling the cider apples that won't be pressed for another two or three months. A wet fortnight around his feast day was traditionally read as a good early sign for the coming cider harvest, so the bishop's supposed sulk and the West Country's cider barrels have been quietly linked for centuries.
Michaelmas: the Devil's blackberries
29 SeptemberNot every legend ends in a drink directly, but this one has a useful side effect. Michaelmas marks the day tradition says the Devil was flung out of heaven, landed in a blackberry bush, and took it badly enough to spit, stamp or otherwise ruin the berries out of spite.
The upshot: nobody with any sense picks blackberries after Michaelmas.
Handily, this is right around when sloes start appearing in the hedgerows, and sloes are traditionally best picked after the first proper frost, usually a few weeks later. (Frost softens the fruit by breaking down some of its cell walls, although many modern gin makers simply freeze the berries instead).
So if you're out foraging this autumn: leave the blackberries to the Devil, and come back for the sloes to make your gin once the frost has done its job.
John Barleycorn: the ballad that kills its hero every harvest
Harvest timeIf Swithun's story is about a grudge, John Barleycorn's is about a murder, repeated annually, that everyone's rather pleased about.
The old ballad, sung in various forms for centuries and best known today from Robert Burns's version, personifies barley as a man who's ploughed under, left for dead, cut down at harvest, beaten, and finally has the life crushed out of him: which is to say, malted, threshed and brewed into beer and whisky.
He rises again every year, of course, because that's how barley works, but the song treats it as a small, cheerful resurrection myth, a reminder that everything you're drinking involved something being roughed up first.
Cheerier than it sounds, honestly.
Martinmas: the day the new wine was allowed out
11 NovemberMartinmas was one of the great turning points of the old agricultural year: livestock that couldn't be fed through winter were slaughtered, hence "Martinmas beef", and the wine pressed at harvest had usually finished its first fermentation and was declared fit to drink. English and European taverns alike used the date as an unofficial "new wine is ready" announcement, centuries before anyone thought to throw a marketing budget at Beaujolais Nouveau.
In many English manors it was also rent day, with tenants expected to settle accounts before winter. Apparently landlords have always known that when people are a bit "merry" they are less inclined to argue.
The date also gave its name to St Martin's summer, a spell of unseasonably mild, bright weather that sometimes arrives in November, the autumn equivalent of an Indian summer.
A saint who apparently controls both wine and weather; Swithun's not the only overachiever in the calendar.
Wassailing: shouting at trees until they behave
17 JanuaryEvery January, in orchards up and down the West Country, small crowds gather round the oldest apple tree, sing at it, bang pots and pans, and pour cider over its roots. This is wassailing, traditionally held on Old Twelfth Night (17 January, if you're working to the pre 1752 calendar), and the entire point is to frighten off evil spirits and bully the tree into a decent harvest.
The word itself comes from the Old English "wass hail", meaning "be well" or "good health", which is either a toast or a threat depending on how the tree's been performing. Indoors, the same spirit produced the wassail bowl: mulled ale or cider, spiced and sweetened, with roasted apples bobbing on top in a version called lambswool. Basically the medieval ancestor of mulled wine.
St Vincent's Day: the patron saint of a pun
22 JanuaryOf everyone on this list, Vincent of Saragossa has the most direct claim to the job. He's the patron saint of winemakers, one long-standing tradition claims it's because his name sounds enough like "vin" for medieval wine-growers to decide that was good enough for them. Not the most rigorous appointment process, but it stuck.
His feast day carries its own weather rhyme, versions of which turn up across England and France: clear sun on 22 January was taken as a sign of a good vintage to come, cloud or rain rather less so. It's the same species of logic as Swithun's rhyme, just aimed five months further ahead and with rather higher stakes.
Whatever the calendar's telling you
None of these six agree on much.
A bishop makes it rain because he's grumpy about a house move, the Devil takes his bad mood out on blackberries, a ballad turns barley into a murder victim, one saint gets both good wine and good weather named after him, an entire tree species gets shouted at until it cooperates, and another saint got the job purely because his name sounded right.
What they do agree on is the underlying logic that whatever the year throws at you, there's a drink for it, and a good excuse to drink it.
Whether you believe any of it is entirely up to you. The saints probably won't mind. The wine (or beer, or cider, or whisky) certainly won't.
Cheers!
| Occasion | Drink |
|---|---|
| St Swithun - Sun | English Sparkling Wine |
| St Swithun - Rain | Rioja Reserva |
| Michaelmas | Sloe gin |
| John Barleycorn | English bitter or single malt |
| Martinmas | Young Beaujolais or fresh red |
| Wassailing | Mulled cider |
| St Vincent | Burgundy or English Pinot Noir |
Frequently asked questions
Is there any real science behind the St Swithin's Day forecast?
None whatsoever. Meteorologists have looked into it more than once, purely out of professional curiosity, and the "forty days" rule performs about as well as flipping a coin. Charming folklore. Terrible weather forecasting method.
Who was St Swithun, and why is he still grumpy?
A 9th-century Bishop of Winchester, humble in life, and, if the legend's to be believed, still holding a grudge over his own funeral arrangements a millennium later.
What's the deal with Michaelmas and blackberries?
Legend says the Devil landed in a blackberry bush when he was cast out of heaven and spitefully ruined the fruit, so nobody picks blackberries after 29 September. Sloes for sloe gin are safe a little later, once the first frost has softened them.
Is John Barleycorn a real person?
No. He's the folk-song personification of barley itself, ploughed, cut down and "killed" through malting and brewing, only to return again next harvest.
What is wassailing, exactly?
An old midwinter custom of singing to apple trees, banging pots, and pouring cider over their roots to ward off bad spirits and encourage a good harvest. Usually followed by drinking whatever's left in the wassail bowl indoors.
Why is St Vincent the patron saint of winemakers?
Mostly wordplay: his name sounds close enough to "vin" that medieval wine-growers adopted him. His feast day, 22 January, carries its own folk forecast, with a sunny day taken as a good omen for that year's vintage.
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