Folklore 129 (December 2018):331–352

https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2018.1510651

THE THIRTY-SEVENTH KATHARINE BRIGGS MEMORIAL LECTURE, NOVEMBER 2017

Hallowe’en and Valentine: The Culture of Saints’

Days in the English-Speaking World
Nick Groom
Abstract
The early modern history of the festivities associated with Hallowe’en and St
Valentine’s Day reveals a significant overlap in early forms of celebration and
customary practices. In the eighteenth century, however, each day developed its own
distinctive traditional identity. This article argues that this was a result of mass print
culture and the spread of literature: primarily in popular verses, the poetry of Robert
Burns, and the influence of William Shakespeare.

Introduction
About 145 million Valentine’s Day cards are bought each year in America out of a
population of about 323 million, only slightly fewer than Christmas cards, and there
are no less than 1,400 different varieties of Valentine cards available from the card
manufacturer Hallmark (Lewis 2016). In the United Kingdom, 25 million cards are
sent annually between a population of about 65 million, £1.3 billion is spent on gifts,
seventy-five per cent of partners buy flowers, and two-thirds of couples eat out;
moreover, two-thirds of women now celebrate being single on the day (Sian 2016).
Meanwhile, party retailers in the USA expect some sixteen per cent of their annual
sales to be made in the run-up to Hallowe’en; in the United Kingdom, supermarkets
have cashed in on the event, making it now the second biggest commercial season of
the year after Christmas (Rosenblum 2013; McDonagh 2016). A short while ago the
only things on sale at Hallowe’en were glow-in-the-dark knick-knacks, and a few
years before that there was nothing of Hallowe’en in the shops (the first hint of
commercialization in Britain came in the 1970s with gruesome sweets and topical
stories in comics for that week). Now Hallowe’en has become an outlandish and crazy
carnival: the online retailer Horror-Shop.com, for example, carries a range of some
sixty different Hallowe’en costumes for dogs, including witch, zombie, turtle, hot-
dog, shark, and the Star Wars Bantha outfit (rider included).
The commodification and indeed exploitation of seasonal festivals has been
exhaustively analysed by researchers such as Leigh Eric Schmidt. Schmidt focuses on
commodification: in the case of Valentine’s Day, he argues that the word ‘valentine’
itself shifted in meaning from a person or relationship to a card or sheet that was

ß 2018 Nick Groom

332 Nick Groom

made or purchased (OED s.v. ‘valentine’; Hales 1882; Schmidt 1991, 1993).1 These paper
valentines could be intricate cut-outs, elaborately decorated and folded. The fashion
for valentines prompted an increase in both handmade and bought cards, although
after the 1860s printed cards almost completely replaced homemade items. St
Valentine’s Day was a marketing and promotion opportunity, and Schmidt
accordingly also focuses on advertising as a way of popularizing the festival, fostered
by the outrageous claims made for the magical powers of valentines (Schmidt 1993,
218 and 223). Full-page adverts in newspapers, window-dressing, special offers, and
so on effectively extended the valentine season into ‘Valentine week’ and ‘Valentine
month’ by encouraging ‘return Valentines’ responding to those received. Much the
same has happened with Hallowe’en, at least in London, which now extends for a
week. As Schmidt explains, ‘Perceiving the holiday more as a season than as a day
had little or no precedent in the folklore of the occasion: it was a commercial
contrivance—one that foreshadowed the eventual protraction of Christmas and
Easter into long shopping seasons’ (Schmidt 1993, 227). But whereas Schmidt focuses
on the second half of the nineteenth century, which saw an explosion of Valentine
merchandise, the following lecture focuses on an earlier period, and presents an
alternative to the attention given to material consumerism, while at the same time
offering a comparative approach to show how calendrical celebrations are mutually
entangled.2 The longer-term aim is that this may contribute to current
understanding and legislation surrounding our intangible cultural heritage.
My overall aim, then, is to treat the festive calendar as effectively a sequence of
what (after Michel Serres) could be called ‘memorial palimpsests’ (Serres and Latour
1995, 60; Harris 2009, 3–4).3 Dates are a form of ‘cultural marking’ that make certain
commodities and activities appear more significant both to individuals and in
communal ‘biographies’ (Kopytoff 1986, 64; Appadurai 2005). Consequently, this
article, as part of a larger project on British festivals, specifically responds to Pierre
Nora’s lieux de m
emoire thesis (Nora 1996–98; Huyssen 1995, 2003) by reworking Nora’s
emphasis on the physical situation of memory (‘realms’ or ‘sites’ of memory) by
adding a calendrical dimension. This in turn creates an opportunity to consider the
significance of anniversaries of remembrance and the role of commemoration in
public history and proverbial cultures (Rollison 1992, 67–82; cf. McIlhaney 2002 and
Whyte 2009). Cultural memory not only has a history; it is also crucially tied to
seasons, months, days, and dates (Anderson 1991; McCrone and McPherson 2009). But
as the following account demonstrates, festivals such as Hallowe’en and Valentine
are also intimately connected with each other and, at least for a time, were shared
forms of celebration with perhaps unexpected connections. It was only under the
influence of other cultural factors that they became distinctive occasions.

Hallowe’en
Hallowe’en is 31 October, the eve of All Saints’ Day. The Old English term ‘All-
Hallows’ appears in Aelfric’s Homilies as eallum halgum, is mentioned by Wulfstan
(another ecclesiastic), and occurs as an acknowledged date in the Anglo-Saxon
Hallowe’en and Valentine 333

Chronicle (OED s.v. ‘All-Hallows’), with ‘Hallows’ meaning ‘Saints’, although it was
sometimes corrupted into ‘Holies’. It seems that in the reign of Henry VI (1422–61)
there were four annual revels licensed at the Inns of Court: Candlemas (2 February,
the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, also known as ‘Our Lady’),
Midsummer Day (24 June, the Feast of St John the Baptist), Feast of St Erkenwald (14
November, St Erconwald of London, a major English saint before the Reformation),
and All-Hallows. The seventeenth-century antiquary William Dugdale also states that
at the Inns of Court, ‘The three grand days are All-hallown, Candlemass, and Ascension
day; whereof All-hallown and Candlemass are the chief’ (Dugdale 1666, 246 and 161).
The term ‘Hollantide’ dates from the mid sixteenth century, and really refers to
the period from the Eve of All Saints to the Morrow of All Souls: 31 October–3
November. The word Hallowmas dates from the end of the fourteenth century and
also appears in Shakespeare’s Richard II (act 5, scene 1, line 80); indeed, by 1590 it was
being celebrated as a ‘solempne and double’ feast alongside Christmas and Candlemas
(Barrow and Greenwood 2005, 137). By the eighteenth century, the word ‘Hollantide’
or ‘Hallontide’ was used as a rather dated way of describing periods of time (such as
‘Michaelmas to Hollantide’—effectively the month of October), or for carrying lore
indicating when certain jobs pertaining to livestock or planning should be done
(Evelyn 1729, 17).
The word ‘Hallowe’en’ itself also dates from the mid sixteenth century as
‘Halhalon eve’ or ‘Alhallow euen’, mentioned c. 1583 in a printed version of The
Flyting betwixt Montgomery and Polwart (Montgomerie 1621, B1v; Bond 2017, 111–12).
In 1598, John Stow recorded that the Lords of Misrule who were appointed to
arrange Christmas celebrations began their festivities on Alhollon Eve and presided
over Christmas games until Candlemas; that is, 31 October–2 February (Stow 1603,
98). There is a passing reference to ‘All Hallow Eve’ in Shakespeare’s Measure for
Measure (act 2, scene 1, line 121), but it was probably Robert Fergusson who first
used the specific form ‘Hallow-e’en’ in one of his collections of Scottish vernacular
verses in his Poems of 1773. In ‘An Eclogue’, a dialogue between two male friends
bemoaning love and marriage, he notes of a courtship ‘Nae langer bygane than sin
Hallow-e’en’ (Fergusson 1773, 86). The word is later glossed in Walter Scott’s
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, but by the time of John Jamieson’s Etymological
Dictionary of the Scottish Language, ‘To haud Halloween’ is dismissed as ‘to observe
the childish or superstitious rites appropriated to this evening’ (Scott 1803, 3:
220–22; Jamieson 1808).

Valentine
St Valentine’s Day is first recorded by Chaucer in the Parlement of Foules (c. 1381) as
the day on which birds choose their mates (lines 386–89)—a piece of folklore that
was taken up by Gower, Lydgate, Surrey, Donne, Herrick, and other writers, and
‘valentine’ appears in the Paston letters (1477) as a synonym for a sweetheart
(Wiles 1993, 105–106). F. G. Holweck notes that ‘S. Valentine’s day is especially
consecrated to lovers, because, according to a belief generally received in England
334 Nick Groom

and France during the Middle Ages, the birds began to pair on the 14th of
February’ (Holweck 1924, 1002; Godfrey 1765, 83). Such symbolism was not lost on
the Stuart dynasty. The wedding of Princess Elizabeth, James VI and I’s only
surviving daughter, and Frederick V, Elector Palatine took place on St Valentine’s
Day 1613. As with Hollantide there are various sayings for flowers and gardening
for St Valentine’s Day, such as the crocus traditionally flowering on this day
(Wright and Lones 1936–40, 2: 155; ‘W. W. N.’ 1898, 243). Despite his popularity,
there is no record of any churches being dedicated to St Valentine in England
(although of course not all records have survived), and although it was not a feast
day sanctioned by the church, by the seventeenth century St Valentine’s Day had
become a popular annual event (Butler 1990, 1: 332–34). According to David Cressy,
it particularly appealed to Anglican ceremonialists who observed the day by
playing courtship games, and it is also noted in recusant Catholic commonplace
books at the beginning of seventeenth century: in his ‘Hold Fast Sermon’ of 1624,
the Catholic sympathizer and possible convert John Gee claimed that some Jesuits
would on the day choose a female saint for intercessions (Cressy 2004, 17; Jensen
2008, 16 and 43–44). On another tack, the antiquary John Brand also suggested an
ancient link with All Fools’ Day: ‘The Feast of old Fools is removed to this Day’
(Brand 1777, 343); and over a century later the Knoxville Journal newspaper reported
on 14 February 1893 that the fashion for sending comic valentines was
still prevalent.4
Eighteenth-century theologians such as Charles Wheatly described St Valentine as
‘a man of most admirable parts, and so famous for his love and charity, that the
custom of chusing Valentines upon his festival . . . took its rise from thence’ (Wheatley
1722, 61), and John Brady, author of Clavis Calendria (1813), claimed that
‘To abolish the heathen, lewd, superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls, in
honours of their goddess Februata, or Juno, on the 15th of February, several zealous pastors
substituted the names of saints in billets given on that day,’ says a respectable writer; and
Valentine is alleged to have been conspicuous in overthrowing this custom. (Brady 1813, 1: 223)

Brady also links St Valentine’s Day with the Roman festival of Lupercalia (15
February): the feast of purging, sacrifice, and naked flaying—a favourite claim (Brady
1813, 1: 224).
A. R. Wright and T. E. Lones devote some twenty pages of their seminal study
British Calendar Customs to St Valentine’s Eve and Day (Wright and Lones 1936–40, 2:
136–56). It was a time of gift-giving: indeed, the Opies claimed in 1959 that the time
when more presents were given on St Valentine’s Day than at Christmas was still
within living memory (Opie and Opie 1959, 236). In mid-nineteenth-century Norwich,
for instance, gifts were given anonymously on Valentine’s Eve—they were labelled
simply ‘St. Valentine’s Love’ or ‘Good Morrow, Valentine’ (the traditional salutation).
Some multi-wrapped their gifts with more mottoes and gentle teasing; other presents
were left on doorsteps and the doorbell rung, after which the secret admirer ran
away (Wright and Lones 1936–40, 2: 137–38). By the seventeenth century, gifts had
become quite elaborate and costly. Samuel Pepys, for instance, mentions them in
most years of his diary-keeping, although oddly John Evelyn does not mention the
Hallowe’en and Valentine 335

day at all (Pepys 1978, 1: 22, 138–39 and 232; 2: 222 and 408). It subsequently became
traditional for a man to offer a present of a pair of gloves to his valentine; at the
other end of the social scale, Valentine buns, money, apples, and oranges were given
to children and the needy. In Rutland and the surrounding area, lozenge-shaped St
Valentine buns variously flavoured with currants, caraways, and plums were called
‘Plum Shittles’.5 Perhaps surprisingly, Wright and Lones also record that the Wren
was hunted in Suffolk on Valentine’s Day (noted in 1838) (Wright and Lones 1936–40,
2: 145).
The question of who is selected as one’s Valentine was traditionally a matter of
chance, determined either by drawing lots the night before (as described by Pepys and
the French traveller Henri Misson) or being the first person of the opposite sex seen
that morning, as noted by John Gay in The Shepherd’s Week (Misson 1719, 330–31; Gay
1714, lines 37–44). Drawing lots may be suggested in a verse attributed to John Lydgate:
Seynte Valentyne, of custom yeere by yeere,
Men have an usaunce [convention, tradition] in this regioun
To loke & serche Cupides Kalendar,
And chose theyr choyse, by grete affeccioun;
Suche as ben prike with Cupides mocioun,
Takyng theyre choyse as theyr sort doth falle:
But I love oon whiche excellith alle.
(Strutt 1774–76, 3: 179; Holford-Strevens and Blackburn 1999, 78)

This is presumably in imitation of blind Cupid’s arrow. Drawing lots meant of course
that it was unlikely that two people would draw each other’s name, so that there was
ample opportunity for a train of unrequited sweethearts to indulge in good-natured
clowning. Henry Bourne, writing in 1725, describes drawing lots, and the practice
was still being observed in Lancashire in 1876 (Bourne 1725, 174–75; Porter 1876,
97–98). As for one’s truelove being the first seen in the morning, Brady points out
not only that ‘THE practice of “choosing a Valentine,” as it is called, on this day, is too
well known to need much explanation . . . ’, but also that the ‘first person of the
opposite sex who is seen’ may well be contrived to suit one’s own ends (Brady 1813,
1: 221–22). According to the artist Willem Schellinks:
The 14th February or 24th new style is St. Valentine’s Day, of which here in England much to-do
is made by high and low and rich and poor. So it is customary, alike for married as well as
unmarried people, that the first person one meets in the morning, that is, if one is a man, the
first woman or girl, becomes one’s Valentine. He asks her name which he takes down and carries
on a long strip of paper in his hat band, and in the same way the woman or girl wears his name
on her bodice; but it is the practice that they meet on the evening before and choose each other
for their Valentine, and, come Easter, they send each other gloves, silk stockings, or sometimes a
miniature portrait, which the ladies wear to foster the friendship. (Schellinks 1993, 73)

A simplified form of this custom was still prevalent in parts of Devon in the last
century: one’s Valentine would be the first person of the opposite sex seen in the
morning, addressed as follows:
Good morrow, Valentine, I go today
To wear for you what you must pay,
A pair of gloves next Easter day. (Devon Folklife Register 1980, 9)
336 Nick Groom

Lots were not only drawn on the Eve of St Valentine—it was also a customary time
for love prognostication. St Valentine’s Eve divinations usually involved a trip to the
churchyard at midnight and singing rhymes while running around the church
(Wright and Lones 1936–40, 2: 152). One way was to collect yarrow, a flowering weed,
from a grave, put it under one’s pillow, and chant:
Yarrow, sweet yarrow, the first that I have found,
And in the name of Jesus, I plucked it from the ground,
As Joseph loved sweet Mary, and took her for his dear,
So in a dream this night I hope my true love will appear. (Devon Folklife Register 1980, 9)

Other divination rituals involved hemp seed, or arranging shoes to form the letter ‘T’
(Wright and Lones 1936–40, 2: 153). Valentine’s Eve was not the only time to work
such magic: among other times of the year were the Eve of St Agnes (20 January), the
Eve of St Mark (24 April), St Luke’s Day (18 October), the Eve of St Thomas (20
December), and Christmas Eve. The journal Times Telescope (1823), moreover, gave
instructions for what to do on St David’s Day: ‘Early on the first of March, girls of
Steben Hethe, now called Stepney, used to go to Goodman’s Fields in search of a
blade of grass of a reddish tint’; if they found the grass they would find a husband
within a month (Rogers 2002, 44; Simpson and Roud 2000, 307). There is also another
night for love divination: in 1685 George Sincla(i)r wrote in Satans Invisible World
Discovered that ‘Some young Women . . . upon Allhallow even goe to bed without
speaking to any, . . . and . . . see in their sleep, the man that shall be their husband’
(Sinclar 1685, 215).

Eighteenth-Century Customs
Sinclair’s record is a reminder of just how different Hallowe’en was at the end of the
seventeenth century, and reveals how rapidly it would change in barely more than a
century. This Hallowe’en was the start of the four-month Christmas season, and so as
Richard Steele noted in the Tatler, ‘the Chaplain in her Family was always allow’d
Minc’d-Pyes from Allhallows to Candlemas’ (Steele, Addison et al. 1710–11, 4: 308
[no. 258]). Games were played: in Henry Brooke’s novel The Fool of Quality (1765–70)
there is an account of a seasonal game played at this time of the year—a game still
played today:
One Hollantide Eve, a Parcel of young Folk, of us, were diverting ourselves about the Fire with
several Pastimes; and, among the rest, the Play was introduced of, I love my Love with an A because
She’s amiable, and so on through the Alphabet.
When it came to my Peggy’s Turn, she said, I love my Love with an H, because he’s very honest,
and I never will hate him for his being Homely. And this might have passed without any
Observation, had she not cast a Glance at me and blushed exceedingly, which threw me also into
equal Confusion. (Brooke 1765–70, 4: 168)

Similarly, Betsy Sheridan (sister to the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan) recorded
in her journal in 1789 that ‘All Hallows Eve we spent with Mrs Leigh who had a
parcel of young People to burn nuts and we play’d cards at a comfortable low rate’
(Sheridan 1960, 187).
Hallowe’en and Valentine 337

Here is Hallowe’en as ‘Nutcrack-Night’, as described by John Brand in 1777:

Nuts and Apples chiefly compose the Entertainment, and from the Custom of flinging the former
into the Fire, it has doubtless had its vulgar Name of Nutcrack-Night. The catching at the Apple and
Candle at least puts one in mind of the antient English Game of the Quintain, which is now almost
forgotten, and of which a Description may be found in Stow’s Survey of London. (Brand
1777, 343–44)

In a footnote he explains that newly married couples in Rome threw nuts to children,
thus linking the custom to matrimony—so this is a variation of the love
prognostication logged by Sinclair, and Brand also comments that a similar practice
is common in Scotland.6 He points out that
This last Custom is beautifully described by [John] Gay in his Spell [The Shepherd’s Week
IV. Thursday]:
Two hazel Nuts I threw into the Flame,
And to each Nut I gave a Sweetheart’s Name:
This with the loudest Bounce me sore amaz’d,
That in a Flame of brightest Colour blaz’d;
As blaz’d the Nut so may thy Passion grow, &c. (Brand 1777, 344)

Incidentally, Gay also records propitious days for love divination being, for
example, at the coming of the cuckoo (traditionally 3 April, OS [Old Style, i.e. the
Julian calendar]), Midsummer Eve (23 June), Valentine’s Day (of course), May Day,
and when crops such as peas ripen; moreover, he does not stipulate that nut-
cracking should be confined to All Hallows’ Eve. Brand himself provides a footnote
on Gay’s other devices for love divination such as peas, ladybirds, apple parings
and cores, and snails. This was by no means all: among the love charms described
by George Colman and Bonnell Thornton in their periodical The Connoisseur
(1755–56) are reading coffee grounds and tea-leaves, and even the hairs in a shoe,
fashioning little midsummer dolls that corresponded to a preferred union, and
tying knots in a garter and sleeping with wedding cake under the pillow. For St
Valentine’s Eve, Colman and Thornton document mini-rituals of pinning five bay-
leaves to a pillow, eating a boiled egg full of salt before bedtime (not
recommended!), taking a vow of silence, and writing the beloved’s name on a
billet, rolling this into a clay ball, and suspending it in water (Groom 2014, 296;
Colman and Thornton 1755–56, 1: 331–36).7
There is also mention of nut-cracking in Oliver Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of
Wakefield (1766). Goldsmith writes, that the family
observed festivals as intervals of idleness and pleasure. They kept up the Christmas carol, sent
true love-knots on Valentine morning, eat pancakes on Shrovetide, shewed their wit on the first
of April, and religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas eve. (Goldsmith 1766, 1: 33–34)

This is clearly a mistake—Michaelmas Eve being 28 September—but it was not until

the first American edition of the novel, published in Philadelphia in 1772, that
‘Michaelmas eve’ was silently replaced with ‘Allhollow eve’—both here and for the
opening of Chapter 11, which originally began ‘MICHAELMAS eve happening to be on
the next day, we were invited to burn nuts and play tricks at neighbour
338 Nick Groom

Flamborough’s’ (altered to ‘ALLHALOWS eve’ in the later edition) (Goldsmith 1766,

1: 34 and 99; 1772, 1: 8 and 46). Both revisions were eventually adopted for John
Murray’s new London edition (the sixth) in 1775, the first English edition published
after Goldsmith’s death in 1774 (Goldsmith 1775, 1: 18 and 53). It is telling that the
mistake was not rectified sooner—perhaps the practice was not really that
widespread. But it does bring me to my central point: the role that printed literature
played in disseminating and categorizing folklore in this period. The Vicar of Wakefield
(which was reprinted five times in its first year of publication) bought attention to
the custom.
Brand also describes some other Hallowe’en games, one of which remains
familiar today:
It is customary on this Night with young People in the North to dive for Apples, catch at them
when stuck on at one End of a Kind of hanging Beam, at the other Extremity of which is fixed a
lighted Candle, and that with their Mouths only, having their Hands tied behind their Backs; with
many other Fooleries. (Brand 1777, 343)

There is little of the uncanniness of the later Hallowe’en here, although Goldsmith
did record a bizarre natural history anecdote derived from the Comte de Buffon:
‘In the year 1580,’ says an old writer, ‘at Hallontide, an army of mice so over-run the marshes
near Southminster, that they eat up the grass to the very roots. But at length a great number of
strange painted owls came and devoured all the mice. The like happened again in Essex about
sixty years after.’ (Goldsmith 1774, 5: 148)

But conventional love forecasting apart, the annals of Hallowe’en are surprisingly
devoid of mystery at this stage, and a popular song of the time with the title
‘Hallowe’en’ was a plaintive love ditty rather than a Gothic dirge.8
There was also a fashionable Valentine’s Day song sung at Vauxhall Gardens, which
abandoned the saint’s title and simply referred to ‘Valentine’ and ‘day of Valentine’,
and there is a rich oral tradition of begging or ‘Valentining’ ditties, as recorded by
Wright and Lones (The Billington 1790, 76–77). The penchant of children for going
from house to house asking for handouts also happened at other times of the year,
such as Shrove Tuesday, Gunpowder Treason Day, St Stephen’s Day (‘Stephening’),
and also, of course, souling at Hollantide. It seems to have been common from the
central Midlands to the south-east: children singing rhymes cadging food, money, or
favours. In Suffolk it was even recorded of Valentining children that they carried a
hollowed-out turnip carved with a face suspended from a pole and lit with a candle
while singing:
Good Morrow, Valentine,
Change your luck an’ I’ll change mine,
We are ragetty, you are fine,
So prar gon us a Valentine.
Good Morrow, Valentine,
Curl your hair as I curl mine,
One before and two behind,
An’ prar gon us a Valentine. (Wright and Lones 1936–40, 2: 147)
Hallowe’en and Valentine 339

This is uncannily similar to Punky Night (being the last Thursday in October at
Hinton St George, Somerset) and later Hallowe’en customs. More usually, however,
the claims were more straightforward, as recorded in Northamptonshire:
Good morrow, Valentine!
First its yours and then its mine.
So please give me a valentine. (Wright and Lones 1936–40, 2: 148)

Some were even more to the point:

Morrow, morrow, Valentine,
Empty your purse and fill mine. (Wright and Lones 1936–40, 2: 149)

There is also a link to Lent here. Lent could start as early as 4 February or as late as
11 March; so if St Valentine’s Day fell before Lent (as it more often did), children
would sometimes beg for apples that would be made into apple fritters on Shrove
Tuesday. As the historian Ronald Hutton points out, Lent can have several feast-days
‘trapped within it’—notably Lady Day, Matthias, many Celtic saints’ days, and those of
Saints David and Patrick (Hutton 1996, 173). St Valentine’s Day, too, could also be
trapped in the temperance of Lent. Feasting would therefore be limited and revels
could only begin after the sun had set, although alcohol was usually permitted.
With children roaming the streets, St Valentine’s Day could be another mildly
lawless and rowdy occasion with which the festive calendar is liberally peppered. In
1767 the Reverend William Cole complained of St Valentine’s Day customs: ‘All the
Children in the Parish hallooing under my Chamber Window before I was up’ (Cole
1935, 186). Meanwhile, Reverend James Woodforde recorded that in Weston
Longeville, Norfolk it was the tradition for children to be given small sums of money
if they knocked at the parsonage door on the morning of St Valentine’s Day. In 1777,
Woodforde noted, ‘To 36 children being Valentine’s day and what is customary for
them to go about in these parts this day gave 0. 3. 0 [3 shillings] being one penny
apiece to each of them’ (Woodforde 1978, 130; Bushaway 1982, 39).
Similarly, an unpublished letter of 26 April 1805 from a Mr Skinner to the
antiquary John Brand relates the practices in West Norton, also in Norfolk:
Sir
In regard to popular Customs in Norfolk, the only one almost which I find to prevail here [i.e. West
Norton], is that of the children of the Parish going round together to the principal houses, on
Valentine Day, making no little noise, and crying out, ‘Good morrow to you, Valentine’.—when it is
usual to give them cakes or money; & where the Boys and girls are above the ordinary size, to make
amusement by uniting them together. This custom does not prevail in every parish, tho’ apparently
in the greater number; & seems to afford pleasure to the old inhabitants, & best natured people, who
say it is a nice frolic for the children, a term much in use here for almost any amusement.
Children also go about at times, accompanied by some elderly person, singing a plaintive hymn,
suited to the Season, & wishing length of years and happiness to those whom they address.
(British Library, Add. MSS 41313, ff. 78–79 [at 78r–78v])

Again, this is strikingly similar to souling.

But it was really in doggerel verse that Valentine’s Day took off. Alexander Pope
was allegedly an early exponent, the lines ‘Written on St. Valentine’s Day, for a
340 Nick Groom

Gentleman to send his Mistress’ being attributed to him after his death (Pope 1748,
46–47).9 However, the laurels here must go to a group of male and female writers
from Middlesex, Norwich, Oxfordshire, Canterbury, York, and Bath who produced a
sixty-page vade-mecum entitled The Complete Valentine Writer: or, Young Men and
Maidens Best Assistant in about 1780. The authors (G. Browne, Miss Trueman, John
Atkinson, Miss Reynolds, Miss Peggy Collins, and Miss Long) claim that this is an
attempt to modernize old rhymes, and also include songs and dances. What they
produced was a remarkable book that crystallized a minor literary genre: the bespoke
Valentine verse. The Complete Valentine Writer is (in a sense) one of the unrecognized
classics of the age (Browne et al. c. 1780).
The verses are tailor-made for men with particular occupations to send to certain
women, as the following examples amply demonstrate:
‘DICK the Butcher, to DOLL the Dairy Maid’:
When I first saw those eyes of yours,
I felt my heart stuck full of skewers;
A breast of veal is not so fine,
As you my charming Valentine . . . (Browne et al. c. 1780, 32)

‘JOHN the Footman to MARY the Cook-maid’:

Mary your eyes still shine so bright,
They’re like dead whitings in the night . . . (34)

‘TOM to my LADY’s MAID’:

Your cheeks my sweet dear,
I to claret compare;
And your eyes are like sparkling champagne,
And your skin my dear Nabby,
Is softer than tabby;
Who does in the gutter complain.
While here I’m a dweller,
Not all in my cellar;
The richest and choicest of wine,
Can give me such pleasure,
Tho’ all is full measure;
As you my sweet Valentine,
To the pantry come down,
My wishes to crown;
I’ll give you a relish that’s fine;
I’ve a slice of rich gammon,
Brawn, sturgeon, and salmon;
For you my sweet Valentine.10 (41)

Various gifts (some comic) are proposed: a ring, garters, pincushion, a husswife (a
pouch of sewing items), gloves, ribbons, a thimble, a scrubbing brush (this being for
an accidental valentine—in other words, seeing the wrong person), a snuff-box, a
halter, rosebuds, cut paper patterns, a smelling bottle, ruffles, a watch, spectacles, a
book, a bow and arrows (alluding to Cupid), a doll, or a nosegay (‘Sweet is the rose,
and violet too’) (Browne et al. c. 1780, 36 and 40).
Hallowe’en and Valentine 341

The success of The Complete Valentine Writer prompted a follow-up from the
same publisher about four years later, with an apparently new stable of writers: the New
English Valentine Writer, or The High Road to Love; for Both Sexes (Turner, Rose et al.
c. 1784). Again the collection covers various trades such as the painter, brewer, cutler,
glazier, pin-maker, and bellows-maker, and also provides lines and responses for gifts,
such as the barbed rhymes accompanying a powder-puff sent to a gentleman for his
insistent puffery. In this collection we encounter the hatter, for example, who is
characteristically mad (a victim of erethism, poisoned by the mercuric nitrate used in
felt hats):
Was I a Beaver Hat for thee,
’Twould suit my wishes to a T;
When on your Head I then did shine,
How blest will be your Valentine.

The response to this encomium is singularly unimpressed:

Why now Hatter,
What’s the matter,
Have you broke from Bedlam late;
Thus to rave,
You saucy knave,
Pray leave off such idle prat[e].
Hat and Feather,
Take together,
Them and you I must decline;
So mind your trade,
You dirty blade,
I will not be your Valentine. (Turner, Rose et al. c. 1784, 10)

Some, such as the button-maker, are rather suggestive, wishing ‘That you, pretty
Nancy, was my button-hole’, which receives a saucy reply in the affirmative:
To my shop let your button be always inclin’d,
Or some other button perhaps I may find. (Turner, Rose et al. c. 1784, 15–16)

The stay-maker, however, remains remarkably tactful (for which he receives discreet
encouragement).
Following the success of the first collection there is a common currency in rhymes
and themes as well. In this second collection, the butcher now croons:
As white as any Breast of Veal,
Are all the charms you don’t conceal;
Was I a Sweetbread [pancreas] happy I,
Upon that tender breast to lie.
When first I saw those eyes of yours,
My heart I felt stuck full of skewers;
Think on the torments which I feel,
And be not hard as is my steel.
I’ll dress you up as nice as Lamb,
Believe I am not us’d to sham;
I know the nicest bit to chuse,
Which you I hope will not refuse. (Turner, Rose et al. c. 1784, 34)
342 Nick Groom

Again there are various gifts, a little more adventurous this time: from a nutmeg
grater to an ‘amorous Picture’ (Turner, Rose et al. c. 1784, 55). There is also a
substantial collection of general valentine entreaties, and the anthology again ends
with a few songs. Some of the gambits are quite robust in their assessments:
Your face is like a red brick wall,
Your person like a may-pole tall,
And then your teeth stand in and out,
As if they danc’d the Hays about.11 (Turner, Rose et al. c. 1784, 43)

One verse in particular offers an arresting association with Hallowe’en in the lines
from ‘An Undertaker, to a Lady’. Things start reasonably well before becoming
irresistibly grisly:
My charming fair, I love you well,
And words but faint my passion tell,
For when you die, all for your sake,
I will the nicest coffin make,
With such a shroud, so white and fine,
As none shall beat my Valentine. (Turner, Rose et al. c. 1784, 53)

That is all the unrequited undertaker has to say on the matter! There is some
cultural purchase here in that there is perhaps a nod towards the Death and the
Maiden motif as suggested by the ‘Answer’ to this dark wooing, which is rather arch
and with touches of the macabre:
’Tis pretty, sir, what you have said,
To bury me before I’m dead;
But yet I hope to live awhile,
That I may at your folly smile;
Make for thyself a coffin fine,
And be the worm thy Valentine. (Turner, Rose et al. c. 1784, 53)

The next follow-up volume was The Young Men and Maids Delight; or, The New
English Valentine Writer; containing a Variety of Verses calculated to Crown with Mirth
and Good Humour, the Happy Day which is called St. Valentine. This was produced by
the same crew and issued by the same publisher in about 1787. It provides yet
more of the same, although admittedly by this stage the poets are running out of
trades, so most of these are repeats (including renewed attempts by the button-
maker, stay-maker, and undertaker); there are also resorts to such ‘professions’ as
the Irishman and the Quaker (a somewhat po-faced exchange), and some material
in the latter part of the volume, such as ‘TOM to my LADY’s MAID’, is copied
straight from The Complete Valentine Writer, the first in the series (Turner, Rose, at
al. c. 1787, 52–53).
Scores of Valentine verses were now rolling off the press.12 Rhymes and
acronyms were written on envelopes to encourage speedy delivery, and the
inveterate prig William Tayler sourly complained on 14 February 1837 that, ‘This
is Valentines day but there have been none brought to this house. The poor
twopenny postmen has [sic] work enough his week without all this nonsence [sic]
but it is getting out of fashion’ (Opie and Opie 1959, 236; Tayler 1998, 23–25).
Hallowe’en and Valentine 343

Maybe, but today for many people perhaps the only poetry they might ever read
in a year consists of the rhymes in greetings cards, and Valentine cards and
doggerel go together like nothing else:
My love is like a cabbage
Divided into two.
The leaves I give to others
But the heart I give to you. (Opie and Opie 1959, 237)

Valentine cards became popular towards the end of eighteenth century—one of the
earliest cards dates from 1760 and is actually based on a ditty published in 1716—but
that story goes beyond the scope of this article. Instead, it is time to return to
Hallowe’en and suggest how the supernatural character of this festival emerged
(Wright and Lones 1936–40, 2: 141).13

The Division of the Days

At the end of the eighteenth century, Sir John Sinclair described the goings-on in his
renowned Statistical Account of Scotland:
On the evening of the 31st of October, O.S. among many others, one remarkable enough ceremony
is observed. Heath, broom, and dressings of flax, are tied upon a pole: This faggot is then kindled;
one takes it upon his shoulders, and running, bears it round the village; a crowd attend: When the
first faggot is burnt out, a second is bound to the pole, and kindled in the same manner as before.
Numbers of these blazing faggots are often carried about together, and when the night happens
to be dark, they form a splendid illumination. This is Halloween, and is a night of great festivity.
These several particulars, if considered separately, may appear trifling; but, taken all together,
they form no inconsiderable part of what, (with only some slight variations,) the religion of the
vulgar will always be, in every age, and in every stage of society, and indeed, whatever be the
religion which they profess, unless they are so grossly stupid, or so flagitiously immoral, as to be
incapable of feeing the restraints of any system of religion, whether rational or superstitious.
(Sinclair 1791, 5: 84–85)

Likewise, the author Robert Heron in his Observations made in . . . the Western Counties
of Scotland described the belief in ghosts, brownies, fairies, witches, and wraiths in
Kirkcudbrightshire. In particular, he explained when and to what end Fairies and
‘Gyar-Carlins’ go abroad:
On Hallowe’en and on some other evenings, they and the Gyar-Carlins are sure to be abroad, and to
stap those, they meet and are displeased with, full of butter and beare awns; In winter-nights, they
are heard curling on every sheet of ice; Having a septennial sacrifice of a human being, to make
to the devil, they sometimes carry away children, leaving little vixens of their own in the
cradle . . . .14 (Heron 1799, 2: 227–28)

These are among the earliest detailed accounts, and even such Celtic favourites as
Samhain are not part of the antiquarian or folkloric imagination or geography at this
time (the first mention in English of Samhain comes in 1778—perhaps surprisingly
late [O’Halloran 1778, 1: 113–14 and 221]).15 So the place of Hallowe’en—and indeed
Valentine’s Day—should perhaps be reassessed. What popularized both the word and
the festival of Hallowe’en was Robert Burns’s poem of the same name, published in
his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect of 1786 (Burns 1786, 101–17).
344 Nick Groom

As Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg point out in the Canongate Burns edition,
the poem is ‘unintelligible’ without Burns’s own notes, which although included in
the first (Kilmarnock) edition did not always accompany the text (Burns 2001, 83).
His antiquarian gloss was, however, popularized by folklorists such as William Hone
in the various editions of The Every-Day Book. The first footnote, to ‘Hallowe’en’ itself,
explains that it
Is thought to be a night when Witches, Devils, and other mischief-making beings, are all abroad
on their baneful, midnight errands: particularly, those aerial people, the Fairies, are said, on that
night to hold, a grand Anniversary. (Burns 1786, 101)

So it is comparable to, for example, English May Eve, which I have described
elsewhere as ‘a night for supernatural encounters, devilry, and beastly ritual: fairies
went about, witches were in the air, and goats held sabbaths until the Queen of May
finally appeared at midnight to banish winter’ (Groom 2014, 162–63).
Burns goes on to describe Hallowe’en rituals. Footnote 5, for instance, records that,
The first ceremony of Halloween, is pulling each a Stock, or plant of kail. They must go out,
hand in hand, with eyes shut, and pull the first they meet with: its being big or little, straight
or crooked, is prophetic of the size and shape of the grand object of all their Spells—the
husband or wife. If any yird, or earth, stick to the root, that is tocher, or fortune; and the taste
of the custoc, that is, the heart of the stem, is indicative of the natural temper and disposition.
Lastly, the stems, or, to give them their ordinary appellation, the runts, are placed somewhere
above the head of the door; and the christian names of the people whom chance brings into
the house, are, according to the priority of placing the runts, the names in question.16 (Burns
1786, 103)

Then, with the seventh stanza of Burns’s inimitable poem, we get to the details of
nut-cracking:
The auld Guidwife’s weel-hoordet nits
Are round an’ round divided,
An’ monie lads an’ lasses fates
Are there that night decided:
Some kindle, couthie, side by side,
An’ burn thegither trimly;
Some start awa, wi’ saucy pride,
An’ jump out owre the chimlie
Fu’ high that night. (Burns 1786, 102 and 105–106)

This in turn is glossed:

Burning the nuts is a favourite charm. They name the lad and lass to each particular nut, as they
lay them in the fire; and according as they burn quietly together, or start from beside one
another, the course and issue of the Courtship will be. (Burns 1786, 105–106)

There are also more sinister experiences. In a later footnote to the poem, Burns
recommends to
Take a candle, and go, alone, to a looking glass: eat an apple before it, and some traditions say you
should comb your hair all the time: the face of your conjugal companion, to be, will be seen in the
glass, as if peeping over your shoulder.17 (Burns 1786, 109)
Hallowe’en and Valentine 345

Anyway, for Burns, the customs of Hallowe’en are all connected with prognostication
and futurity rather than ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties and things
that go bump in the night. Also, he makes this explicit in the headnote to the third
edition of the Kilmarnock Poems (1787):
The passion of prying into Futurity makes a striking part of the history of Human Nature, in its
rude state, in all ages and nations; and it may be some entertainment to a philosophic mind, if
any such should honour the Author with a perusal, to see the remains of it, among the more
unenlightened in our own. (Burns 1787, 158)

This is what the reviewers picked up upon, one commenting, in somewhat bad faith,
that, ‘“Halloween,” or Even, gives a just and literal account of the principal spells and
charms that are practised, on that anniversary, among the peasants of Scotland, from
the desire of prying into futurity’. But the reviewer thought little of the poem: ‘A
mixture of the solemn and burlesque can never be agreeable’ (Anon. 1787).
Nevertheless, Burns’s ‘Hallowe’en’, underwritten by some of his later poems such as
‘Tam o’ Shanter’, would prove to be one of the most influential poems of the
eighteenth century: it manifested the supernaturalism of Hallowe’en in the popular
imagination.
Others soon followed suit. James Fisher also published a vernacular Scottish poem
‘On Halloween’ in 1790 that details the same courting spells and superstitions
described by Burns, but with Presbyterian scorn (Fisher 1790, 144–51). These verses
are not glossed; instead, a very bad-tempered footnote complains about the language
used by
young people when they convene on such a night, in order to celebrate those ludicrous customs,
which are nothing but the offspring of black popery and superstition. It is to be feared parents,
and masters who have the charge of servants, do not consider as they ought, the pernicious
effects of such conduct. (Fisher 1790, 147n.–148n.)

Janet Little, ‘The Scotch Milkmaid’, followed suit in 1792 (Little 1792, 167–70). The
opening lines of her Hallowe’en poem imitated generic English fairy songs, such as
those included in Percy’s Reliques (first published in 1765)—‘At Halloween, when fairy
sprites/Perform their mystic gambols’—but then became more vernacular with nuts
ending up in the grate again, apple-bobbing (the apple suspended in air), and the
‘cushion game’, which appears to be a kissing game (Percy 1996, 3: 207–12; Little
1792, 167). Not only has Valentine’s Eve horseplay apparently migrated to
Hallowe’en, there is not a witch in sight. However, in ‘An Address to the Devil’ (1799)
by the appropriately named Andrew McNight, an old crone does ride on a clowder of
cats to join the Devil on Hallowe’en (McNight 1799, 68–71). But Burns undoubtedly
made the most significant impact on Hallowe’en: there had already been twenty
editions of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect before the end of the century,
and after that it would be Sir Walter Scott who popularized further supernatural
elements by consolidating other traditions into the festival.
I am not, however, suggesting that the three slim volumes that effectively make up
The Complete Valentine Writer were as influential as Robert Burns, doing for St
Valentine’s Day what Burns had achieved for Hallowe’en, although these Valentine
verses certainly did spread widely through magazines and commonplace books. The
346 Nick Groom

contributors to The Complete Valentine Writer were already riding on a Valentine

revival, and that too had been inspired by literature. There is a clue to this in the
examination of the origins of St Valentine’s Day in Francis Douce’s Illustrations of
Shakespeare, and of Ancient Manners, first published in 1807. Following Alban Butler,
Douce suggests that the festival had its origins in Lupercalia, while also mentioning
the wooing birds described by Chaucer and Gower, and also Charles, Duke of Orl
eans,
who obsessively composed Valentine poetry while in captivity after the Battle of
Agincourt (Douce 1807, 2: 252–58). There is, then, a highly literary basis for
Valentines. And the reason why Douce goes into such detail is to explain Ophelia’s
request in Hamlet ‘To be your Valentine’. Her deranged singing includes the verse:
Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window
To be your Valentine.18 (Hamlet, act 4, scene 5, lines 47–50)

Hamlet inspires by far the most mentions of St Valentine’s Day in the eighteenth
century, and it would not be going too far to declare that the play revitalized the
entire festival as a side-effect of the wholesale reinvention of Shakespeare as the
national poet.
There are two points to draw out in conclusion. First, the role that printed
literature played in disseminating and categorizing folklore in this period. Without
Burns and Shakespeare, Hallowe’en and St Valentine’s Day might not have become
such established calendrical festivals. Linked to this is the manner in which they
were observed, which seems to split in the nineteenth century and become more
identified with single issues. There was less discrimination in earlier practices—
divination, cadging and/or exchanging gifts (even hunting the wren), as well as
communal games, merrymaking, and lawlessness characterized a whole host of
festivals. If these festivals were at one time habitually celebrated in similar ways, this
suggests that calendrical customs drew on the same stock or ‘kitty’ of activities and
superstitions: they were an assemblage. It was only later that St Valentine’s Day
would become solely associated with individuated courtship, and Hallowe’en the
predominant commemoration of the supernatural and conventionalized door-to-door
begging—just as All Fools’ Day is now reserved for playing pranks. The Opies did
record that pockets of Valentining and tomfoolery on St Valentine’s Day had
survived into the twentieth century, but during the nineteenth century it had
already been comprehensively overwhelmed by commercial interests, and more
generally fell prey to the taxonomic Victorian mind that endeavoured to codify and
categorize, disconnect and distinguish customs and calendars (Opie and Opie
1959, 235–37).
Interestingly, this striving for clarity also lies behind the 2003 UNESCO Convention
for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, undoubtedly admirable as it is.
This convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage undertakes to protect ‘the practices,
representations, expressions, memories, knowledge, skills . . . that communities,
groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage’
(UNESCO 2003, 2). While the UK Parliament certainly needs to ratify the convention,
Hallowe’en and Valentine 347

I would also be reluctant to define particular examples of Intangible Cultural

Heritage too strictly.19 ‘Public’ or ‘national’ folklore risks becoming too rigidly
demarcated or narrowly circumscribed. Why not celebrate more promiscuously—and
indeed innovatively? Traditional heritage is not about living in the past, but should
be inspiring the shared culture for the future and so contributing to sustainable
lifestyles and adaptive communities—in other words, promoting cultural well-being.
So what we can perhaps learn from comparing St Valentine’s Day with Hallowe’en is
that it is only relatively recently that traditions have become so fixed, and that
formerly they thrived in their mutual relationships, family resemblances, and
changeability.

Notes
1
Schmidt gives an example from 1810 held by Hallmark Design Collections, Hallmark Cards, Kansas
City; see also Schmidt (1995), Barth (1982), and McDannell (1995).
2
I have tried to avoid repeating material on St Valentine’s Day and Hallowe’en concerning St Valentine
himself, John Lydgate and Robert Herrick on birds, Charles Lamb on cards, Valentining, Samhain fires,
Punky Night, Mizzy Night, weather prognostication, souling and soulcakes, and so forth already
covered in my book The Seasons (Groom 2014, 294–97and 255–56).
3
Harris, for instance, proposes that practices (as well as objects and places) are ‘polychronic’, in which
earlier meanings and purposes co-exist with present ones.
4
See http://www.knoxlib.org/local-family-history/custom-house-chronicles/valentines-day-feast-fools
5
The term is used by Ben Jonson in his play Sejanus, but ‘Plum Shuttles’ appears to be the preferred
name today.
6
‘Mr. Pennant tells us in his Tour in Scotland, that the young Women there determine the Figure and
Size of their Husbands by drawing Cabbages blindfold on Allhallow Even, and like the English fling
Nuts into the Fire’ (Brand 1777, 344).
7
From 20 February 1755 (pages are wrongly numbered).
8
This is listed in several songsters from 1780: see, for example, The Chearful Companion (1780, 165).
9
See also the traditional ‘Come foul—come fair—come frost—come fine / Dear, will you be my
Valentine?’ quoted by Darling (1951, 47).
10
‘Tom’ was the generic name for a butler or pantryman.
11
‘DICK the Groom, to DOLL the Dairy-Maid’; the ‘hay’ is a weaving move common in English
country dancing.
12
See, for example, ‘Dr B–––y’, ‘Lines sent to a Young Lady, with a Pair of Gloves, on St. Valentine’s Day’,
in The Poetical Farrago (1794, 48).
13
For the ditty, see The Merry Musician (1716, 3: 18).
14
They also cast elf-shot at cattle or lay the evil-eye on them; ‘Gyar-Carlin’ is not glossed, but in
Scotland is a class of fairy folk, especially a witch or an ogress.
15
Here, Samhain is figured (fancifully) as the deity of the moon in whose honour fires are lit on the eve
of November. However, a subsequent wordlist does define the word as ‘all saints’, without reference
to a god (MacFarlan 1795, 133).
16
Kale or kail was a generic name for cabbage.
17
There is an unnerving inversion of this in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, when Jonathan Harker, gazing into a
mirror, fails to see the Count peering over his shoulder as he shaves (Stoker 2011, 27).
348 Nick Groom

18
There is very little glossing of this in either in the Johnson-Steevens-Malone edition of 1780–82 (vol.
10, 346), nor in Percy’s Reliques.
19
See http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-
question/Lords/2017-03-27/HL6360

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Biographical Note
Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter. Among his many books are
The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year (London: Atlantic, 2014), shortlisted for
the Katharine Briggs Folklore Prize, and The Vampire: A New History (Yale University
Press, 2018).