Peter’s Day is celebrated by bonfires and dances exactly like those which commemorate St. John’s Eve.  The ashes of the St. John’s fires are deemed by Belgian peasants an excellent remedy for consumption, if you take a spoonful or two of them, moistened with water, day by day.  People also burn vervain in the fires, and they say that in the ashes of the plant you may find, if you look for it, the “Fool’s Stone."[491] In many parts of Brabant St. Peter’s bonfire used to be much larger than that of his rival St. John.  When it had burned out, both sexes engaged in a game of ball, and the winner became the King of Summer or of the Ball and had the right to choose his Queen.  Sometimes the winner was a woman, and it was then her privilege to select her royal mate.  This pastime was well known at Louvain and it continued to be practised at Grammont and Mespelaer down to the second half of the nineteenth century.  At Mespelaer, which is a village near Termonde, a huge pile of eglantine, reeds, and straw was collected in a marshy meadow for the bonfire; and next evening after vespers the young folk who had lit it assembled at the “Good Life” tavern to play the game.  The winner was crowned with a wreath of roses, and the rest danced and sang in a ring about him.  At Grammont, while the bonfire was lit and the dances round it took place on St. Peter’s Eve, the festival of the “Crown of Roses” was deferred till the following Sunday.  The young folk arranged among themselves beforehand who should be King and Queen of the Roses:  the rosy wreaths were hung on cords across the street:  the dancers danced below them, and at a given moment the wreaths fell on the heads of the chosen King and Queen, who had to entertain their fellows at a feast.  According to some people the fires of St. Peter, like those of St. John, were lighted in order to drive away dragons.[492] In French Flanders down to 1789 a straw figure representing a man was always burned in the midsummer bonfire, and the figure of a woman was burned on St. Peter’s Day.[493] In Belgium people jump over the midsummer bonfires as a preventive of colic, and they keep the ashes at home to hinder fire from breaking out.[494]

[The Midsummer fires in England; Stow’s description of the Midsummer fires in London; the Midsummer fires at Eton.]

The custom of lighting bonfires at midsummer has been observed in many parts of our own country.  “On the Vigil of Saint John the Baptist, commonly called Midsummer Eve, it was usual in most country places, and also in towns and cities, for the inhabitants, both old and young, and of both sexes, to meet together, and make merry by the side of a large fire made in the middle of the street, or in some open and convenient place, over which the young men frequently leaped by way of frolic, and also exercised themselves with various sports and pastimes, more especially with running, wrestling, and dancing.  These diversions they continued till midnight, and sometimes till cock-crowing."[495]