A good thrashing to end winter

The origins of this curious custom have been lost in the proverbial mists of time but it is known that, for many centuries past, the lads of Lanark ran around the church three times, and then did battle with a rival group of youths. The weapons were their caps, and these were used to thrash the opposition.

Inevitably, matters got somewhat out of hand and developed into something rather too boisterous when the lads filled their caps with stones and used this reinforced headgear to beat the opposition. Equally inevitably, the stones were then thrown at one another, resulting in damage to the church and injury to participants and spectators.

Rather than halt this ancient ritual, the authorities decided to arm the lads with balls of paper, and later these were replaced by paper batons. Now, so I am told, the lads run around St Nicholas' Church three times as a special peal of bells rings out, and wallop one other with their paper sticks.

It sounds a wonderful way of chasing away the winter and we can be sure it is effective because it works every year. Spring arrives only three weeks later.

There is a lovely story of a Teesdale farmer and his wife who accommodated bed and breakfast guests to help eke out their modest income from sheep farming on the fells. The farm lay somewhere on the heights above Cotherstone and one morning a guest was admiring the stunning views.

"And look at all those sheep!" remarked the guest. "Tell me, how many sheep do you have per acre?"

"Thoo's gat it wrang way roond, man," said the farmer. "It's hoo monny acres we have to a sheep."

It was this which reminded that, although we now measure the area of our land in hectares, there remains a fondness for the acre and the term continues to feature in descriptions of houses for sale, the size of fields and so forth.

The acre was an ancient form of measurement and although Yorkshire was often called the County of Broad Acres - and we tended to think there was only one official acre - there were in fact several different sizes which were known as an acre.

The standard English acre, which was defined in 1878 to be used in legal documents like wills and deeds, comprised 4,840 square yards, and there were 640 acres to a square mile. If you have been brought up to understand metric measurements, the following will baffle you, but the size of an acre was arrived at because there were four roods per acre, each rood containing 40 poles and each pole containing 272 square feet; from these calculations, the standard English acre was determined as 4,840 square yards. Earlier, the Statutum de Admensuratione Terre of 1305 declared an acre contained 160 square perches, a perch then being 5 yards.

The need for the law to produce a standard acre arose because parts of the country used their own acres, some large and some small. The Welsh acre, for example, measured 9,680 square yards while the Irish one was 7,840, and the Scottish one a mere 6,150. The Westmorland acre was 6,760 square yards while Cheshire boasted a huge one of 10,240 square yards. By comparison, the Leicestershire acre was a tiny 2,308 square yards.

So far as I know, Yorkshire did not have its own special acre, its size being popularly described merely as "broad" although there used to be a French area known as the arpent which was the size of one and a quarter English acres (somewhere around half a modern hectare).

A hectare is equivalent to 2.471 acres while the very old term of hide was a large slice of land, probably in the region of 120 acres, which in turn was very similar to a caracute which might be anything from 60 acres to 120 - usually the area which could be ploughed by husbandry in one year.

A yardland was about 20 acres and this was sometimes divided into quarters, known as fardels, or some authorities argued that a fardel was an eighth of a yardland because two fardels made a nook, and four nooks made a yardland. It is all so very simple!

Oxgang was another measurement, this being about 12 or 15 acres which was reckoned to be the amount that a single ox could plough in one year. In fact, an ox never ploughed alone, they were always in teams usually of eight, and so that measurement was somewhat fictitious. This word has come down to us in place names such as oxgate or even osken.

There was also another term for a portion of land. This was called a dole but its size appears to have been immaterial. The term was used when an area of land was divided into smaller pieces, perhaps for use as allotments. There was also a dole meadow, this term referring to a large meadow divided into smaller parts for use by individual smallholders.

The word also appeared in mining areas where a dole was a piece of land worked by a separate miner, e.g. a dole of lead, or dole of tin, and yet a further use of this word referred to the untilled ridge left between two pieces of land which had been ploughed; these often comprised an unploughed strip of pasture which separated two areas of a ploughed field.

I reckon we'll just get used to thinking in hectares, when the authorities will find another name for these patches of England.

A correspondent from Keldholm near Kirkbymoorside has referred to my notes about the pagan celebration of Imbolc - held around the time which is now our Candlemas - when cockerels were sacrificed to herald the return of the sun and lighter days. He links this to the period around Candlemas when the days grow longer, and he reminds me that countryfolk used to say the days were lengthening by a cockstride.

So what is a cockstride? In this instance, it clearly refers to time rather than distance and in the absence of any formal definition, it seems to indicate a very small or short period. There may be links to a couple of Yorkshire dialect terms, i.e. cocklight and cockshut.

Coclight, or cockleet, refers to dawn or daybreak which is also called cockcrow but this has little or nothing to do with Imbolc! It is quite simply when the cockerel announces to the world, in his own particular way, that a new day has begun.

Cockshut is therefore at the other end of the day when night falls, while the old phrase "From cockleet to cockshut" means the whole of the light part of the day.

Oddly enough, there is a location called Cockshots which is to the northern end of Ness Hag Wood near Loftus (the latter coincidentally mentioned in my column on February 8) and this name is probably a corruption of cockshut. The name was sometimes given to very shaded areas which seldom saw the sunshine and which were always gloomy and dark. Although local people may refer to them as cockshuts, it seems the map-makers have made a tiny alteration.

After an absence of a few weeks, goldfinches have returned to our bird-feeding station in the garden. There is a small flock of these remarkably beautiful birds known as a charm and they seem to spend time in some nearby trees, awaiting our absence before they join the bluetits, great tits and greenfinches which make regular use of our feeders.

Goldfinches spend the winter in this country but if conditions are very severe, they may head south for a time. As this winter has (up to the time of writing these notes!) been rather mild with very few frosts and not much snow, it seems the goldfinches have remained in our vicinity, perhaps moving away only when a sudden chill persuaded them to seek warmer climes. It's nice to see them back.