Tag Archives: pagan

Every August, as summer began to tip toward autumn, Elizabethans marked a feast that was older than Christianity itself: Lammas, or in Old English “hlāf-mæsse” meaning “Loaf-Mass.” By the 1560s, England was a Protestant nation under Elizabeth I, yet villagers still carried echoes of pagan and Celtic ritual into their daily lives. Lammas was oneContinue reading “Lammas in Elizabethan England: Harvest, Magic, and Memory”