Stormy days for a great goose feast
THE word ‘Michaelmas’ might not mean a lot to many these days apart from legal eagles in the Law Library at Dublin’s Four Courts.
The Feast of St Michael on September 29 is the start of a new term in the legal calendar and was once, and no doubt still is, a traditional quarter-day for settling rents and accounts.
In rural Ireland, it marked the end of harvest time, apart from apple picking and cider making, and farmers reckoned how many animals they could afford over winter; they would have done their sums by now.
The tail-end of the summer, swallows will have departed and on this last day of the month, tradition has the devil going about urinating on blackberries — the Archangel Michael had thrown him out of Paradise to land in thorny brambles. The now hardened and bitter berries are unpalatable — this caused by a saliva-dripping fly.
The folklorist Kevin Danaher says Michaelmas was of no significance in ancient Celtic Ireland but arrived with the Normans and their new legal practices in the 12th Century.
The rod-and-line fishing season ends and hunting begins when people and hounds gallop the countryside, with the landowner’s permission of course, but not approved, nor supported, by everybody.
In many parts of rural Ireland, a roast goose was traditionally eaten and farmers’ wives gave geese as gifts to the less well off, with the feathers and down being sold for mattress and pillow fillings.
Plump birds were sold, with wives in charge of flocks, at this time of Fomhar-na-ngean and portions of mutton, known as Cuid Mhichil, or St Michael’s Sheep, were “bestowed upon the relieving poor” according to the 17th Century historian Geoffrey Keating. (Some years ago, I mentioned that this kind tradition might well be still carried on but in an unobtrusive way by generous farming folk).
The goose feast probably arrived from our neighbouring isle where the custom may have been given fresh impetus by the first Queen Elizabeth during the time of the Spanish Armada.
There is an English saying: “He who eats goose on Michaelmas Day shan’t money back or debts to pay” but the queen made an order to her subjects to so dine when she received news of the Armada debacle.
Having addressed her troops at Tilbury in August 1588 (“Let tyrants fear”), a month later the storm of the century scattered the Armada which tried to struggle home via Scotland and down the Irish west coast.
The queen was dining on Michaelmas night, with a Sir Neville Umphreyville, on roast goose and raised her glass to ‘Death to that cursed Armada”, when, the story goes, a messenger arrived with the news that Spanish ships had foundered in a storm in the Blasket Sound.
Elizabeth, calling for a “bumper of Burgundy”, proclaimed that “henceforth shall a goose commemorate this famous victory”.
This historic event may no longer be commemorated in Britain, let alone in this country, but the truth is that the weather was the real victor over the Spanish rather than a battle in the Channel.