The old English custom of “soul-caking,” or “souling,” originated in pre-Reformation days, when singers went about on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, November 1 and 2, to beg for cakes in remembrance of the dead. The “soulers,” as the singers were called, droned out their ditties repeatedly, tonelessly, without pause or variation. Doubtless Shakespeare was familiar with the whining songs because Speed, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, observes tartly that one of the “special marks” of a man in love is “to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas.”
Allhallows e’en, or eve, a night of pranks and fun in North Country homes, was celebrated with many wholesome games. Young people, for example, read future events from the way roasting chestnuts sputtered and jumped next to the red-hot coals. They bobbed for apples and flung snakelike apple parings behind themselves, to learn the initials of future mates. Our British ancestors brought these old folk practices to the New World, where generations of adolescents have observed them on the night that witches traditionally ride broomsticks and hobgoblins venture abroad.
But long before the last night of October was an acknowledged time for juvenile merrymaking, the Druids celebrated the festival of Samhain, or Summer’s End, to honor the dying sun. This was the season of prayer, augury, and human sacrifice, for evil spirits walked on earth and sought dominion over souls of men. It was not until the fourth century that Allhallows, the mass for Christian saints, supplanted these pagan ceremonies for the sun god. Another six hundred years elapsed before the Druid death-feast finally became All Souls’, the day of prayer for the departed.
Soul cakes and souling customs vary from county to county, but souling practices always flourished best along the Welsh border. Even there, the custom is rapidly dying out. In hamlets of Shropshire and Cheshire, in parts of the Midlands, and Lancashire one sometimes hears the soulers chanting old rhymes such as:
Soul! Soul! for an apple or two! If you have no apples, pears will do. If you have no pears, money will do. If you have no money, God bless you!
In olden times “soul papers,” with solicitations of prayers for the deceased, accompanied the cakes which were given to the parish poor. Householders, as well as churches, bestowed soul cakes as a charity in behalf of the departed.
For A Recipe For “Soul Cakes” Click Here
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I just read that there is no archaeological evidence of human sacrifice among the Druids.