Give me a
soul cake, and I will pray for your dead . . .
Soul
Cakes: The Holy Inspiration For Trick-Or-Treating
By Ryan Scheel -
October 31, 2015
The old English custom of “soul-caking,” or “souling,” originated in
pre-Reformation days, when singers went about on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’
Day, November 1 and 2, to beg for cakes in remembrance of the dead.
The “soulers,” as the singers were called, droned out their
ditties repeatedly, tonelessly, without pause or variation. Doubtless
Shakespeare was familiar with the whining songs because Speed, in Two Gentlemen
of Verona, observes tartly that one of the “special marks” of a man in love is “to
speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas.”
All hallows e’en, or eve, a night of
pranks and fun in North Country homes, was celebrated with many wholesome
games. Young people, for example, read future events from the way roasting
chestnuts sputtered and jumped next to the red-hot coals. They bobbed for
apples and flung snakelike apple parings behind themselves, to learn the
initials of future mates. Our British ancestors brought these old folk
practices to the New World, where generations of adolescents have observed them
on the night that witches traditionally ride broomsticks and hobgoblins venture
abroad.
Soul cakes and souling customs vary
from county to county, but souling practices always flourished best along the
Welsh border. Even there, the custom is rapidly dying out. In hamlets of
Shropshire and Cheshire, in parts of the Midlands, and Lancashire one sometimes
hears the soulers chanting old rhymes such as:
“Soul! Soul! for an apple or two! If
you have no apples, pears will do. If you have no pears, money will do. If you
have no money, God bless you!”
“A soul cake, a soul cake Please,
good missus, a soul cake; One for Peter, two for Paul And three for
Him that made us all”
In olden times “soul papers,” with
solicitations of prayers for the deceased, accompanied the cakes which were
given to the parish poor. Householders, as well as churches, bestowed soul
cakes as a charity in behalf of the departed.
An arrangement of a traditional “souling
song”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_LjZVCfoeI&list=RDm_LjZVCfoeI#t=270
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