In recent decades in the UK, Halloween has ballooned from a relatively low-key autumn event to a full-blown capitalist extravaganza - one of the scariest aspects nowadays being the amount of plastic tat and costumes spewing into landfill sites in the first week of November.
A more wholesome development in recent years is the emergence of pick-your-own pumpkin farms, where families can select a suitable gourd from the ground to take home and carve – Derbyshire examples being found at Ashover, Barlow, Osmaston and Morley.
It is not uncommon to hear people decry the commercial aspects of Halloween, complaining it is an invading American import which has crept in and established itself in our culture.
Do a little more research and the picture becomes a little more complex; as is usually the case with folklore matters, there are no concrete answers.
Folklorists and historians highlight the ancient practice of Irish and Scottish youth going ‘guising’.
This involved house visiting whilst dressed in scary disguises at a time of year when the dark nights draw in and it was believed the worlds of the living and the dead were in closest alignment – an idea dating back to the Celtic festival of Samhain.
So, is Halloween actually a tradition that was exported to the USA via Irish and Scottish immigrants and then re-packaged back to us?
In Derbyshire’s neighbouring county, Cheshire, at this time of year guising plays are performed in local pubs by a motley cast of characters including a ‘horse’ consisting of a painted horse’s skull on a pole operated by a performer crouching beneath a cloak.
Very similar to plays performed at Christmas time in Derbyshire by the likes of the Winster Guisers, in Cheshire the plays are known as Souling Plays as they occur around November 1, All Souls’ Day. Souling Cakes were also consumed on this date.
Another adjacent county, South Yorkshire, had a custom peculiar to the rural fringes of Sheffield, taking place in Dungworth, Stannington, Deepcar and Dore, called Caking Night. Here children visited houses in disguise and were given sweet treats if the householders could not successfully guess their identity.
Meanwhile the village pubs hosted costumed parades by adults who would enter the room and silently march around, inviting patrons to guess who was underneath the disguise.
Caking Night died out in the early 2000s, killed off by the globalised Halloween. Clearly though, these indigenous practices all have a significant degree of overlap with the traditions associated with 21st Century Halloween.
One well-known aspect of Halloween celebrations is ‘trick or treat’, where costumed children visit neighbourhood houses in anticipation of a donation of chocolate, money or sweets.
Cultural shifts in the past 50 years mean this practice has become sanitised, with children nowadays often accompanied by adults on their trick and treating rounds, making prearranged visits to houses whose occupants are known to their families, rather than visiting strangers.
Generally, children will be indulged with a treat for their buckets, with an unpleasant trick played on householders refusing to comply a less likely aspect of the custom nowadays.
This night, when it was (more-or-less) permissible for local youths to run riot playing (more-or-less) harmless pranks, was mainly confined to the Northern counties and North Midlands.
Peter and Iona Opie in their 1959 survey of British childlore The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren set the scene: ‘From coast to coast across northern England… a night of humour and hooliganism affecting most of Yorkshire, and parts of Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lincolnshire’.
The entry for Mischief Night in the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore compiled by Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud states that in Yorkshire it was traditionally celebrated on Halloween evening, but elsewhere its observance varied - often being connected with other significant calendar dates like Christmas, Shrovetide and May Day.
My own research into local folklore shows that Mischief Night was once a widespread tradition across Derbyshire – however the date on which the rules were temporarily upended varied from place to place.
Searching through old regional newspapers reveals Mischief Night occurred on Christmas Eve in Bradwell and Tideswell; the night before Shrove Tuesday in Great Longstone and Chapel-en-le-Frith; on the eve of the annual Wakes Week celebrations (falling during the second week of September) at Little Hucklow; during the ‘dark months’ in Hayfield, but in the early hours of May Day morning in nearby Mellor (part of Derbyshire until 1936, now transferred to Greater Manchester); and similarly, on May Day eve, April 30, at Glossop, Castleton and Alport near Youlgrave.
At Eyam too it fell on this date. The High Peak News of May 12 1883 reported, ‘“Mischief night” at Eyam, is rather a lively time, judging from what took place there on the 30th of April… the “Eyam Invincibles” turned out and made everything they met with a fit subject for “removal.” Gates and shutters were unhinged, a chimney-top was removed, and other depredations committed, while the people were asleep. They did not even spare the policeman, but lifted off the gate leading to his house, and also uprooted a few of his flowers in the garden’.
Whilst the date varies according to locality, the mischief practiced is more standardised. There are repeated references to gates being removed and subsequently hung in trees or thrown in a heap, carts rolled down hills, bricks thrown down chimneys and front doors tied together.
At Great Longstone, the stolen carts, gates, and ‘everything moveable’ were arranged around the ancient village cross ‘to the great annoyance as well as inconvenience of the owners’, according to an 1868 report in the Derbyshire Advertiser.
At Glossop they were piled up around the maypole which was the focal point of the following day’s celebrations, and a payment of a forfeit by the owners on May Day morning was expected before they were released.
Victorian folklorist S O Addy recorded the intriguing detail that in Derbyshire a brush, shovel or broom hung outside a house acted as a kind of talisman rendering the householders immune from any mischief being played on them.
Seth Evans in Bradwell: Ancient & Modern ascribes the demise of the custom to the advent of the police, highlighting the annual irritation caused to local farmers when their gates vanished and their stock consequently escaped.
In Tideswell, the practice was stamped out not by the police but a more localised body, the Tideswell and District Society For The Prosecution of Felons.
A newspaper report of the organisation's annual dinner in the Derbyshire Advertiser of January 27 1893 reported the group's finances were ‘at a low ebb’, largely a consequence of having had large amounts of warning notices printed up and displayed to alert villagers to the impending mischief.
However, Mr Field, honorary secretary of the society, ‘hoped a vast amount of good had been done by the posting of these printed notices’, and Police Constable Deakins publicly thanked the group ‘for taking the steps which they did with regards to "Mischief Night", in having bills printed and posted up’.
In Holmewood, a mining village near Chesterfield, Mischief Night was marked on November 4, and was still being celebrated in the late 1960s when University of Leeds student L. J. Rodgers wrote a thesis exploring the cultural life of the village.
Here the mischief included knocking on doors and running away and tying dustbins together. The proximity to Bonfire Night was a factor in other specific pranks at Holmewood, such as throwing bangers through letter-boxes and lighting people's carefully-prepared bonfires prematurely.
Whilst Mischief Night has, as far as I am aware, fallen by the wayside here in Derbyshire, a quick scour of the internet reveals that elsewhere in Northern England the custom persists, often to the dismay of local residents.
Teesside Live reported that Cleveland Police had to deal with over 300 incidents on Mischief Night in 2017, celebrated on the night before Halloween, with local shops temporarily banning the sale of flour and eggs to children in the build-up.
Meanwhile, in 2019, in the Liverpool suburb of Garston, children on a Mischief Night rampage caused £20,000-worth of damage to a construction site. Elsewhere in the city windows were smashed, cars damaged and dustbins set alight.
As Simpson and Roud observe in their folklore dictionary entry, ‘There is clearly a fine line, not always recognised by modern children, between naughty tricks and real vandalism’.
And not just ‘modern’ children if these historic reports from Derbyshire are anything to go by; oldsters bemoaning the antics of ‘the youth of today’ might possibly want to review their own mischievous youthful misdeeds before passing judgement…
