from a neighbour’s fire, saying as they did so, “We have the flower (or flour) of the wake."[502] At Sandhill bonfires were kindled on the Eve of St. Peter as well as on Midsummer Eve; the custom is attested for the year 1575, when it was described as ancient.[503] We are told that “on Midsummer’s eve, reckoned according to the old style, it was formerly the custom of the inhabitants, young and old, not only of Whalton, but of most of the adjacent villages, to collect a large cartload of whins and other combustible materials, which was dragged by them with great rejoicing (a fiddler being seated on the top of the cart) into the village and erected into a pile.  The people from the surrounding country assembled towards evening, when it was set on fire; and whilst the young danced around it, the elders looked on smoking their pipes and drinking their beer, until it was consumed.  There can be little doubt that this curious old custom dates from a very remote antiquity.”  In a law-suit, which was tried in 1878, the rector of Whalton gave evidence of the constant use of the village green for the ceremony since 1843.  “The bonfire,” he said, “was lighted a little to the north-east of the well at Whalton, and partly on the footpath, and people danced round it and jumped through it.  That was never interrupted.”  The Rev. G.R.  Hall, writing in 1879, says that “the fire festivals or bonfires of the summer solstice at the Old Midsummer until recently were commemorated on Christenburg Crags and elsewhere by leaping through and dancing round the fires, as those who have been present have told me."[504] Down to the early part of the nineteenth century bonfires called Beal-fires used to be lit on Midsummer Eve all over the wolds in the East Riding of Yorkshire.[505]

[The Midsummer fires in Herefordshire, Somersetshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall; the Cornish fires on Midsummer Eve and St. Peter’s Eve.]

In Herefordshire and Somersetshire the peasants used to make fires in the fields on Midsummer Eve “to bless the apples."[506] In Devonshire the custom of leaping over the midsummer fires was also observed.[507] “In Cornwall, the festival fires, called bonfires, are kindled on the Eves of St. John Baptist and St. Peter’s day; and Midsummer is thence, in the Cornish tongue, called Goluan, which signifies both light and rejoicing.  At these fires the Cornish attend with lighted torches, tarred and pitched at the end, and make their perambulations round their fires, going from village to village and carrying their torches before them; this is certainly the remains of Druid superstition; for, Faces praeferre, to carry lighted torches was reckoned a kind of gentilism, and as such particularly prohibited by the Gallick Councils."[508] At Penzance and elsewhere in the county the people danced and sang about the bonfires on Midsummer Eve.  On Whiteborough, a large tumulus near Launceston, a huge bonfire used to be kindled on Midsummer Eve;