The Real History of Halloween
Long before pumpkins and trick-or-treating, All Hallows’ Eve in Britain was a night of church bells ringing until dawn, soul-cakes left out on farmhouse tables, and prayers for the dead of every parish. Then the Reformation tried to abolish it, Bonfire Night swallowed its fires, and the whole festival sailed to America, only to return centuries later in a costume almost nobody recognised.
In this video we trace the strange and tangled history of Halloween in Britain, from the debated origins of the Irish festival of Samhain and the Victorian scholars who built the myth of a “Celtic festival of the dead”, through medieval Hallowtide and Archbishop Cranmer’s campaign against the all-night bells, to the regional customs that survived in the shadows: souling in Shropshire and Cheshire, the tailless black sow of Welsh Nos Calan Gaeaf, Robert Burns’s Ayrshire fortune-telling, Somerset’s Punkie Night and the Manx Hop-tu-Naa. Along the way we ask what the evidence actually tells us, which “ancient traditions” are far younger than they look, and why a night once devoted to remembering the dead has refused to disappear.
Further reading
- Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996)
- Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (2002)
- Trefor M. Owen, Welsh Folk Customs (1959)
- Robert Burns, “Halloween” (1786)
Watch on YouTube (11 min)
