Category Archives: St. Distaff’s Day

Jan 07 2016
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St. Distaff's Day

Partly Work and Partly Play

YoungGirlwithDistaff

Christmas is past and now it is back to the ordinary workaday world. In older times, folks would cease most all work during the Christmas season, days considered outside of ordinary time. And here, on the heels of Epiphany, would come a number of traditional back-to-work holidays. The first comes today, and it is named for a saint who never did exist; rather, St. Distaff’s Day is named for a tool––one of those implements of the ordinary workaday world. Robert Herrick, one of our old favorite poets, wrote about St. Distaff’s Day in his 1648 book Hesperides:

Partly worke and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaff’s Day:
From the Plough soone free your team;
Then come home and fother them.
If the Maides a-spinning goe,
Burne the flax, and fire the tow:
Scorch their plackets, but beware
That ye singe no maiden-haire.
Let the maides bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good night;
And next morrow, every one
To his owne vocation.

The distaff and the spindle were the common tools of spinning flax into cloth (the spinning wheel came much later), and with St. Distaff’s Day this day after Epiphany, the women were back at their spinning. There was a more common division of labor back then, of course. Any woman who spun thread (and that would have been most women in earlier times) would know the distaff well. Some trivia for you to impress people at parties: Spinning was so associated with women’s work that the word spinster, which is happily not much used these days, once was a recognized legal term in England to describe an unmarried woman, and the terms spear side and distaff side were also legal terms to distinguish the inheritances of male and female children.

The men were not back at work in the fields until Plough Monday, which always falls on the Monday after Epiphany. And with the men still underfoot in the house, their job on St. Distaff’s Day seemed to be a mischievous one: their goal usually was to set fire to the flax the women were spinning. The women were wise to this custom, though, and typically kept several buckets of water nearby. Very often, it was the men who got the worst of it: to have a bucket of water dumped on you in the cold of January… for sure, St. Distaff’s Day lent a bit of excitement to the idea of returning to ordinary time. But this is the whole point of both St. Distaff’s Day and Plough Monday: yes, we may have to get back to work, but why not do it with a bit of ceremony and fun?

 

Image: “Young Girl with Distaff” by Pietro Rotari. Oil on canvas, early 18th century [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

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Jan 11 2015
Christmas, Copperman's Day, Epiphany, Plough Monday, St. Distaff's Day

Plough Monday & Copperman’s Day

PloughMonday

With the Christmas season’s end last week, the women had their “official” and traditional Back to Work day last Wednesday, on the 7th of January, with St. Distaff’s Day. But tomorrow, the first Monday after Epiphany, it’s time for the men to have their own version of this. It’s Plough Monday, and there may be some ceremonial ploughing of the frozen ground on this day, but mostly it is the last of the Christmas ceremonies in this period of shifting out of Christmastide and into ordinary time.

Of course today we welcome a more egalitarian approach: why shouldn’t the men be at the spindle and distaff, if they so wish, and the women at the plough? Nonetheless, these are traditions that come out of a time of more traditional division of labor between the sexes, and we heartily encourage you to mix things up to your liking. Our goal, simply, is to help you be aware of days worth celebrating, of course.

And so on Plough Monday it would be not at all unusual to see a gaggle of men parading through the village with a plough, finely decorated. The men themselves would be finely decorated, too, in all manner of foolish costumes, hearkening the Feast of Fools aspect of the Twelve Days of Christmas that have just passed. One man will be dressed as the Bessy, an old woman, and whether he realizes it or not, she is the personification of the old hag of winter or the goddess in her crone stage. And the ploughmen may perform an old mummers play, filled with images of death and rebirth. Soon, of course, winter will pass and it will be time to plough the earth in earnest and these things all relate to each other. With the spring, the young goddess will be born again. Though all seems cold now, and dead, life will return.

There will be mysterious old dances and a good deal of noise in the banging of drums and the blowing of horns, and there will most likely be a collection box passed around to help pay for the sport (as well as a few rounds at the tavern).

A lesser known celebration on this same day is Copperman’s Day, particular to Holland, and known especially in the print trade. And since Convivio Bookworks is a place that is a printshop at heart, it is a day we hold in high esteem. On the first Monday after Epiphany each year, print apprentices would be given the day off to work on their own projects, which they would later sell for a copper.

Last year, we printed an inaugural Convivio Bookworks Copperman’s Day print, and we’re planning one for this year, too. This year’s is a continuation of last year’s theme, inspired by a Christmas Revels reading first penned by Fra Giovanni Giocondo. It is said to have been written on Christmas Eve, 1513, and in his letter, Fra Giovanni encourages us to take heaven, to take peace, and to take joy. Because when you get right down to it, life deals us what it will and it is up to each of us to decide how we respond. Even in times of darkness, we can choose to take joy, and so last year’s print was just that message: Take Joy. This year, we’re working on Take Peace. I’m working in historic wood type, though, and so far I’m having a devil of a time finding the two Es I need to spell “peace,” at least if I want to stick to my original design plan. On top of that, I do not have the day off from work tomorrow, as the old Dutch coppermen of yore did on the Monday after Epiphany.

So be patient, our annual Copperman’s Day print may take a few extra days this year. Be that as it may, we do encourage other letterpress printers around the globe to take part in this old tradition that we see fit for revival. It’s all about loving what you do, and sharing it with others. It’s all about taking joy.

 

Image: Procession of the Plough on Plough Monday, an engraving from The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities by the Chambers Bros., Edinburgh, 1869.

 

Jan 07 2015
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Christmas, Epiphany, St. Distaff's Day

St. Distaff’s Day

Distaff Women

Partly work and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaff’s Day.

The days of Christmastide stood outside of ordinary time, from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and clear through the Twelve Days of Christmas that followed, and now that Epiphany has passed, it is back to the humdrum workaday world. But we’ve been celebrating for two weeks now, and it’s not easy to shift gears so rapidly. This is where St. Distaff comes in.

Back when spinning occupied a great deal of time for most women, the distaff was no stranger to any of them. The distaff is a tool that is part of the process of spinning wool or flax into thread, and that is the first step toward weaving cloth and making clothing for the family. We tend to think of spinning wheels when we picture someone spinning, but the spinning wheel was a later invention; it is the distaff and spindle that were the necessary tools prior to the spinning wheel.

As for St. Distaff? Well, the odd thing about St. Distaff’s Day is that saints are people but there is no St. Distaff. The day’s name just comes out of centuries of tradition, and it has one purpose: to mark the beginning of getting back to work after Christmas. Not that much work got done on St. Distaff’s Day. Quite the contrary. What typically happened was this: Women would get to work at their spindle and distaff, and the men would sneak up and make a valiant attempt at lighting the flax on fire. But the women were smart and kept buckets of water nearby. The flax set aflame was usually quickly extinguished (and more often than not, the men got a good soaking, too). This was the fun and mischief of St. Distaff’s Day.

If it seems unfair that the women had to get to work the day after Epiphany but not the men, worry not, for the men have their time with the first Monday after Epiphany, for then comes Plough Monday, their traditional return to work and to ordinary time. Plough Monday has its own fun and traditions.

And so let this day mark your return to ordinary time now that Christmastide has passed. If you can do something silly alongside the serious business of the day, all the better.

 

Image: Two fine women with distaffs in hand. A lithograph by Edouard Pingret from the book Pyrénées: Paysannes de la Vallé de Campan by René Ancely, 1834. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

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