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Saint Bartholomew Brings the cold dew. Traditional English saying: chilly evenings start this time of year in the UK All the tears that St Swithin can cry, St Bartlemy's dusty mantle wipes them dry. English traditional proverb As St Bartholomew's Day, so the whole Autumn. English traditional proverb If St Barthlemy's day be fair and clear, Hope for a prosperous autumn that year. English traditional proverb (Alternatively) If the twenty-fourth of August be fair and clear, Then hope for a prosperous Autumn that year. English traditional proverb Bathe your eyes on Bartimy Day, You may throw your spectacles away. English traditional proverb If the winde change on St Bartholomew's day at night, The following year will not be good. English traditional proverb All thunderstorms after St Bartholomew's Day are more or less violent. English traditional proverb At St Bartholomew There comes cold dew. English traditional proverb |
Bartholomew Fair,
by Ackerman, 1808 |
Here's that will challenge all the fairs,
Come buy my nuts and damsons and Burgamy pears!
Here's the Woman of Babylon, the Devil and the Pope.
And here's the little girl just going on the rope!
Here's Dives and Lazarus, and the World's Creation;
Here's the Tall Dutchwoman, the like's not in the nation.
Here is the booths where the high Dutch maid is,
Here are the bears that dance like any ladies;
Tat, tat, tat, tat, says little penny trumpet;
Here's Jacob Hall, that does so jump it, jump it;
Sound trumpet, sound, for silver spoon and fork.
Come, here's your dainty pig and pork!
John
Phillips, on Bartholomew Fair; Wit and Drollery, 1682, in
William Hone,
The Every-Day Book, or a Guide to the Year,
William Tegg and Co., London, 1878;
1825-26 edition online
We are all guilty – we all ought to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others.
William
Wilberforce (1759 -
1833), English abolisher
of the British slave trade (among other great injustices), born on August 24, 1759; on Britain's slave trade
God Almighty has set before me two great objects:
the suppression of the slave trade, and reformation of manners.
William
Wilberforce; from his diary, October 28, 1787. (By "manners," Wilberforce
meant what we might call "morals" today.)
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
William
Blake, English visionary poet and artist; from 'The Chimney Sweeper'.
William Wilberforce campaigned against child labour in the chimneysweeping
industry.
We can no longer plead ignorance. We cannot evade it. We may spurn it. We may kick it out of the way. But we cannot turn aside so as to avoid seeing it. Let us make reparation to Africa, as far as we can …
William Wilberforce
… Let the policy be what it might, let the consequences be what they would, I am from this time determined that I would never rest until I have effected its
[the slave trade's] abolition.
William Wilberforce
God Almighty has set before me two great objects,
the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.
William Wilberforce
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than
mine.
Sir Max Beerbohm, British writer and caricaturist, born on August 24, 1872;
1880
You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life
itself.
Sir Max Beerbohm; Zuleiha Dobson, Ch. 7
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth
nothing.
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian author, born on August 24, 1899; 'Dead Men's Dialogue',
Dreamtigers (tr. Mildred Boyer)
There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth's wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we look at, and nothing more.
But there is also the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against endless wars, the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination ... There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of
color.
Howard Zinn; A People's History of the United States, 1999 edition,
p 661
More important, I think, than who sits in the White
House is who sits outside it. Whenever social injustices have had to be
rectified, they were rectified not at the initiative of the president or
Congress or the Supreme Court but because of social movements.
Howard Zinn; interview, The Boston Globe,
November 14, 2004
Source
The most beautiful people
we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known
struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These
persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life
that fills them with compassions, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.
Beautiful people do not just happen.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, psychiatrist and author who died on August 24,
2004
For years, I have been
stalked by a bad reputation. Actually, I have been pursued by people who
have regarded me as the Death and Dying Lady. They believe that having
spent more than three decades in research into death and life after death
qualifies me as an expert on the subject. I think they miss the point. The
only incontrovertible fact of my work is the importance of life.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross; The
Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying (her autobiography),
1997
August 24
is the 236th
day of the year in the
Gregorian
Calendar (237th in
leap years),
with
129
days remaining.
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Bartlemas
(Feast day of St Bartholomew)
(Sunflower,
Helianthus annuus, is
today's plant. It is dedicated to Saint Bartholomew
[Nathanael bar Tolomai], Apostle, whose feast day this is.)
The feast day of St Bartholomew
was so called in old England. This saint was one of the apostles of Jesus.
Not much is known about him, but he might be the same as Nathaniel:
45 Philip found Nathanael and said to him, "We have found Him of whom Moses in the law, and also the prophets, wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph."
46 And Nathanael said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
Philip said to him, "Come and see."
47 Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward Him, and said of him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!"
48 Nathanael said to Him, "How do You know me?"
Jesus answered and said to him, "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you."
49 Nathanael answered and said to Him, "Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"
50 Jesus answered and said to him, "Because I said to you, 'I saw you under the fig tree,' do you believe? You will see greater things than these.
51 And He said to him, "Most assuredly, I say to you, hereafter you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."
John 1:45-51 (New King James Version)
His symbol is a sickle, or a butcher's knife, in allusion to the knife with which he was flayed alive for his faith.
The Irish celebrated today by sharpening tools for threshing the harvest. A high wind that destroyed the harvest was called Beartlina Gaoithe, or 'Bartholomew of the Wind'.
Bartholomew's name comes from bar-Tholomeus, son of Ptolemy, an aristocratic name. His patronage includes Armenia, bookbinders, butchers, cobblers, neurological diseases, plasterers, shoemakers, tanners, trappers and twitching. According to Syrian tradition, Bartholomew's original name was Jesus, which caused him to adopt another name.
At England's Croyland Abbey, until the time of King Edward IV, the custom was to give knives to all visitors on this day. The holiday has a relatively bloody history, being the date of the impalement of 30,000 Transylvanians by Vlad the Impaler (Dracula) as well as that of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre (see This day in history, below, 1572). Bartholomew, along with Saint Jude Thaddeus is reputed to have brought the new religion of Christianity to Armenia in the 1st Century.
"The Roman Martyrology says that Bartholomew preached in India and Greater Armenia, where he was flayed alive and beheaded by King Astyages at Derbend on the Caspian Sea. Tradition has the place as Abanopolis on the west coast of the Caspian Sea and that he also preached in Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt. Pantenus of Alexandria (2nd century) is said by Eusebius to have found in 'India' a Gospel of Saint Matthew attributed to Bartholomew and written in Hebrew. The Gospel of Bartholomew is apocryphal and was condemned in the decree of Pseudo-Gelasius." Source
Bartholomew Fair
The play Bartholomew Fair (1614) by Ben Jonson (1572 - 1637), depicts the customs associated with the popular English fair held annually on St Bartholomew's day at Smithfield (home of two famed monasteries – St Bartholomew the Great and Charterhouse) in the north-western part of London. Jonson's play is peopled with balladeers, stall holders, prostitutes and cut-purses.
Bartholomew Fair began with a vision. Rahere, the jester of King Henry I, said he had seen the apostle Bartholomew in a vision and he had directed him to found a church and hospital in his honour. After the work was done, Rahere established a fair which was to begin on his patron's day, and go for three days. It lasted from 1133 to 1855.
Sideshows displayed such wonders as The Wild Indian Woman and Child and The Giant Emew, from Brazil. Many locals opposed the noisy, debauched fair, for many years.
See also September 3
Works
by Ben Jonson at Project
Gutenberg
Historic picture of Smithfield Market circa 1830 featuring St Bartholomew's Hospital (the centre building in the background) and the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral behind that
Engraved image of last day of Old Smithfield Fair, 1855
St Bart's knife
St Bartholomew was skinned alive for his faith, so his
symbol in art is a knife. An old English custom has it that when a knife
or a pair of scissors is given as a present, the receiver must give a coin
in return. The gift, having been 'bought', makes the user responsible for
any ensuing injury.
Bartholomew doll
This old English term refers to a tawdry, overdressed
woman. It comes from the cheap toys sold at the old Bartholomew Fair.
Blessing the Mead
In medieval times, St Bartholomew was the patron of the honey crop. At Gulval, Cornwall, UK, the Blessing of the Mead ceremony still takes place on St Bartholomew's Day. Mead is an ancient fermented drink made from herb-infused honey. In ancient Rome this sweet drink was offered to the gods of love and fertility.
Bartholomew's pig
It was the custom to eat roast pig at the famous St Bartholomew's Fair so the term Bartholomew pig denoted a fat person. (Thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig - Shakespeare, Henry IV, Pt II, II, iv.)
Chimney sweeps' feast
In the early 19th Century a man named Jem White held
on this day each year a feast for London's chimneysweeps, in Smithfield.
Cards were issued a week before to the master-sweeps, inviting only the
younger urchins. James (Jem) White himself was head waiter.
Printers' feast day, old England
The
Shepherds' Race, Markgröningen, Germany
In a delightful old (at least back to 1443) tradition from Markgröningen, today shepherds from the lowlands gather on a field for footraces. First the males, then the females race. The winners are crowned and lead their prize, a garlanded sheep, in procession. The day is filled with sack races, egg races, dancing and traditional games. One involves tipping a beaker of water with the head, without getting wet, in order to win a cockerel.
St Bart's Bun Race
This tradition takes place at St Bartholomew's Hospital,
near Sandwich, on England's
Kentish coast. On St Bartholomew's Day in 1217, the British ships of the Cinque Ports beat off a French invasion led
by a sorcerer and pirate named
Eustace the Monk. The importance of the
battle led to the naming of the hospital, and in modern times the
tradition has emerged of children winning currant buns after running
around the chapel once.
St Bart's dole
Fatten up
the fish
On St Bartholomew's Day in Germany, people with carp-ponds start fattening up the fish for the traditional carp meal on Christmas Day.
English surnames from Bartholomew
Badcock, Badman, Bartle*, Bartlet, Bartlett, Batcock,
Bate, Bates, Bateman, Bateson, Batkin, Batson, Batt, Batten, Batty, Tolly,
Barson, Batterson, Betterson and Bettison.
*Burning Bartle in effigy: See August 21
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