#midsummershack

Midsummer Fairs provided a time and place for the community to gather together in celebration, so must have been a good time to meet young and single people and perhaps to fall in love. Not everyone was that lucky though:

‘He lit of them at Midsummer-Fair, and so came to see them, on the Foot of Courtship to Mrs. Ann ; but she made a Rejectment, and said she would never have any thing to say to him that way; and to my Knowledge, she continu'd in the same Mind all along, from his first coming to his last’

That was the testimony of Elizabeth Gowers on the 10th of October 1731 about her employer, a widow called Ann Shelley, and a man called Edmond Bourk. Ann accused him of defrauding her because he moved in with her and her daughter only to apparently seduce both of them before making false documents under their names. Ann claimed that she was in love with Edmond until the moment that she found he was forging cheques, but Elizabeth does not seem convinced by this. The jury agreed and declared him not guilty at the end of a highly complex case; he was freed from Newgate prison to celebrate future Midsummers. 

Bascot de Mauleon was extremely determined to capture the town and castle of Thurie.

At about midnight I laid an ambush quite close to Thurie and went on myself with just five others. Dressed in women’s clothing with jugs in our hands we reached a meadow just outside the town and hid ourselves in a haystack, for it was around St John the Baptist’s Day in midsummer and the hay had been cut and dried. When the time came for the gate to be opened and the women were beginning to make their way down to the spring, each of us took our jugs and filled them. Then we started back towards the town, our faces covered with headscarves so that nobody would have recognised us. The women whom we met on our way exclaimed, “Holy Mary! You must have risen early!” We replied in the local and in falsetto, “Yes indeed!” and passed on, all six of us arriving at the gate. When we got there we found that there was no other sentry apart from a cobbler who was setting up his lasts and rivets. One of us blew a horn to summon our companions hidden in ambush. The cobbler paid no attention to us but when he heard the horn he asked us, “Cooee, girls! Who sounded that horn?” One of us replied, “It is a priest going out to the fields. I do not know if it is the parish priest or the town chaplain.” “Oh yes of course,” he said. “It is our priest,Master Francis. He is fond of going out in the fields in the morning to hunt hares.” Immediately after this, when our companions had arrived, we entered the town where we found not a single man ready to put hand to sword in its defence.’

“Travelling by sea begins at midsummer before the dogstar rises or immediately after its rising, and it takes about thirty days to reach the Arabian port of Cell a or Caned in the frankincense-produeing district. There is also a third port named Mokha, which is not called at on the voyage to India, and is only used by merchants trading, in frankincense and Arabian perfumes.”