Mothering Sunday in the chalk villages: the old customs

The first time I heard someone in Offley call it Mothering Sunday rather than Mother's Day, I assumed it was a politeness, the way some people still say "wireless". It took me a while to learn that the two names describe two different things that happen to share a weekend in most people's diaries. One is an old English custom tied to the middle of Lent. The other arrived from America in the twentieth century. The card shops have blended them, but the older one is still there if you know where to look, and a walk round these villages in late Lent is a good place to start.

A Sunday in the middle of Lent

Mothering Sunday falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent, three weeks before Easter. Because Easter moves, so does Mothering Sunday: it can come as early as the first day of March or as late as the first week of April. That is why the date never seems to settle in anyone's memory.

The day had other names long before "Mothering" stuck. It was Mid-Lent Sunday, because it sits roughly halfway through the forty days. It was Refreshment Sunday, a small easing of the Lenten fast. And in the old Latin calendar it was Laetare Sunday, from the first word of the chant sung at the start of the Mass that day, "Laetare Jerusalem", "Rejoice, Jerusalem". The readings set for the day included a passage that speaks of Jerusalem as a mother, and these readings appear in service books as early as the eighth century. The Book of Common Prayer kept the same readings after the Reformation, so the idea of a "mother" on this Sunday ran on without a break.

Going a-mothering

The phrase that gives the day its name is "going a-mothering". In the medieval period, the custom seems to have been a visit to the mother church of a district, often the cathedral, rather than the small local church. People went in procession, and the outing was as much a social event as a religious one.

By the seventeenth century the word had shifted towards something more domestic. The term "mothering" is on record by 1644, when the Royalist soldier Richard Symonds noted "Mothering-day" in his diary while in Worcester. Four years later the poet Robert Herrick published Hesperides, which includes a short piece headed "A Ceremonie in Glocester". In it the speaker promises to bring a simnel to a girl ahead of her going a-mothering. That couplet is one of the earliest places the cake and the custom appear side by side. The historian Ronald Hutton places the custom of young servants visiting their mothers in seventeenth-century Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, which fits both of those records.

By the early eighteenth century Charles Wheatly, in his commentary on the Prayer Book, could describe "Mothering" or "Midlenting" as a very old custom. The details varied from county to county, but the core was simple. Young people who had gone out to work, often as farm hands or in domestic service in bigger houses, were given the day off to go home. They walked, sometimes a long way, and they carried something with them: a cake, a few flowers picked on the road, or a small gift bought from their wages.

I have not found a record that names a-mothering walks in King's Walden, Offley or Lilley in particular, so I will not claim one. The custom is described as widespread rather than tied to any one parish.

Simnel cake

The food most people link with the day is simnel cake. It is old. A reference from 1226 to bread "made into a simnel" seems to mean a fine white loaf, and the word is often traced to the Latin simila, fine flour. Medieval bread rules suggest an early simnel was boiled and then baked. From the 1740s onwards a story went round about a couple called Simon and Nelly who argued over whether to boil the cake or bake it and settled on both. That tale is folklore, and good fun, but it is not history.

Different towns had their own versions. Shrewsbury and Bury were both known for simnels, and an 1869 description of the Shrewsbury kind has a stiff crust coloured with saffron around a rich plum filling. The cake most of us know now is gentler: a light fruit cake with a layer of marzipan or almond paste baked into the middle and another laid over the top, often toasted until the edges turn golden.

On top sit the balls. The usual number is eleven, said to stand for the twelve apostles without Judas. Some bakers add a twelfth for Christ. That explanation is a later gloss: one of the early written references to marzipan balls on a simnel, in May Byron's Pot-Luck Cookery of 1926, gives no meaning for them at all, and some older simnels were finished with a crenellated edge instead. Over the twentieth century the cake drifted towards Easter, and many families now bake it for Easter Sunday rather than mid-Lent. Mothering Sunday was once also called Simnel Sunday, which shows how close the two used to be.

Making one in outline

You do not need a family recipe to make a respectable simnel. The outline is the same in most cookery books:

• Make a light fruit cake batter with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, dried fruit and mixed peel, often with a little spice and lemon zest.
• Roll out a disc of marzipan and lay it in the middle of the tin between two layers of batter, then bake slowly.
• When the cake is cool, brush the top with a little apricot jam, lay a second disc of marzipan over it and roll eleven small balls from the trimmings.
• Set the balls round the edge and brown the top briefly under a hot grill or with a kitchen torch. Watch it closely, because marzipan goes from golden to black very quickly.

Follow the quantities and oven temperature from a trusted book; the outline above is only the shape of the thing.

Violets and posies

Flowers belong to the day as much as cake. Children gathered violets and other spring flowers to give to their mothers, and in towns where wild flowers were harder to find, churches sometimes handed out small bunches. The twentieth-century revival made a great deal of posies, and that is the custom that has lasted best.

The violet fits for a practical reason. Sweet violets flower in late winter and early spring, so they are in bloom for a March Mothering Sunday in most years, and they are scented. In a late year they may be going over, and primroses do the job instead.

Constance Penswick Smith and the revival

By the end of the nineteenth century, Mothering Sunday had faded in much of England. The person usually credited with bringing it back is Constance Penswick Smith (1878 to 1938), a vicar's daughter whose father held the living of Coddington in Nottinghamshire. In 1913 she read a newspaper report about Anna Jarvis's plans to bring Mother's Day to the United States, and it struck her that England already had a day of its own, half forgotten.

With a colleague, Ellen Porter, she set about collecting what was known of the old customs, from simnels and wafer cakes to the mothering walks. She wrote a play, In Praise of Mother (1913), A Short History of Mothering Sunday (1915) and her most influential booklet, The Revival of Mothering Sunday (1921). Her idea of the day was broad: the mother church, mothers at home, Mary, and the natural world all had a place in it. By the 1950s the day was kept across the United Kingdom.

How it differs from Mother's Day

The American Mother's Day grew out of Anna Jarvis's campaign after her own mother's death. Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May as a national day for mothers in 1914. It is a fixed point in the calendar, it began as a tribute to individual mothers, and it has no link with Lent.

Mothering Sunday is older, moves with Easter and grew out of a place as much as a person: the mother church, the home parish, the house a servant walked back to. In practice most British families now keep the two together, and the cards on sale say "Mother's Day". The older name survives in church calendars, in some families, and in the simnel cake.

Late Lent in the villages

If you walk round King's Walden, Offley or Lilley in the second half of March, the season does most of the explaining for you. The chalk lanes are still muddy, the hedges are mostly bare, and blackthorn blossom starts to show white along the field edges before its leaves. Down in the hedge banks, on the sheltered side, you may find sweet violets in purple and sometimes white, along with the paler, scentless dog violets, which are easy to confuse with them. Primroses come through on the banks and in grassy corners, and lesser celandine lights up damp ground with its glossy yellow stars.

Old churchyards are often among the best places to see spring flowers in farmed country, because the grass has never been ploughed. The churchyards here are worth a slow look in late Lent. The building guides for St Mary's at King's Walden, St Mary Magdalene at Offley and St Peter's at Lilley describe the churches themselves. Keep to the paths, leave the flowers where they grow, and remember that the buildings may be locked; check locally before making a special trip to see inside. If the monuments interest you, the guide to the boards, brasses and inscriptions in the three churches explains what to look for.

A word on picking: a child's posy from a common garden plant is one thing, but wild flowers on a hedge bank are best left for the bees, which need early nectar. Primroses and violets grow easily in a cottage garden, and a few plants by the back door will give you a Mothering Sunday posy without touching the lanes.

Questions people ask about Mothering Sunday

Is Mothering Sunday the same as Mother's Day?

Not quite. Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday of Lent and comes from older English customs. Mother's Day is the American observance on the second Sunday in May. In Britain the two names are now used for the same March or early April Sunday.

Why does the date change every year?

Because it is fixed to Lent, and Lent is fixed to Easter, which moves. Mothering Sunday is always three weeks before Easter Sunday.

Why does a simnel cake have eleven balls?

The usual explanation is the twelve apostles minus Judas. It is a tradition rather than a documented origin, and some bakers use twelve.

Is simnel cake for Mothering Sunday or Easter?

Both, historically. It was strongly linked with Mothering Sunday and later became more of an Easter cake.

Did servants really get the day off?

Yes, the custom of young people in service going home for mid-Lent Sunday is recorded from the seventeenth century onwards, though how widely it was kept varied by region and by employer.