Michaelmas Daisy

The Michaelmas daisy is so named because it blooms in late September and through much of October in moderate climates, adding color to gardens when many  other perennials  are well past  their prime.  Michaelmas falls on Sept. 29. The plant is also known as aster.
     John Tradescant the Younger, the 17th-century Englishman and botany enthusiast for whom Agecroft’s Tradescant Garden is named, brought samples of the Virginia aster (aster lateriflorus) back to England from America in 1633, later returning again with the New England aster (aster nova angliae) and a sample of the New York aster (aster nova belgii).
     

     September  29: The Feast Day of St. Michael and All Angels, observed and celebrated as one of the Quarter Days on Tudor England’s calendar.
     Rents got paid. Reeves got elected (the shire reeves, from which we derive the word “sheriff”).
     Geese got nervous, and for good reason: the traditional meal at Michaelmas was roast goose.
     Christian tradition holds that St. Michael the Archangel (whose name in Hebrew translates, “Who is like God?”) was the leader of the angelic army of God that threw Satan out of Heaven after a considerable row.  A more earthly tradition holds that when Satan fell to earth, he landed amidst prickly  blackberry bushes, and he cursed them as he did so, stomping on them in retaliation.
     As a result, the admonition to refrain from picking blackberries after September 29 became part of the lore of Michaelmas (pronounced MICKel-mus).  The fact that the berries generally didn’t taste so good  after late September made the stricture more convenient. Sept. 29 falls near the autumnal equinox, and so became one of the four “Quarter Days” of the year, in which outstanding debts were traditionally settled and a variety of legal matters might be attended to in Tudor England..  These days were mentioned  in a 1575 poem by George Gascoigne:

    And when the tenants come to pay their quarter’s rent,
     They bring some fowl at Midsummer, a dish of fish in Lent,
     At Christmas a capon, at Michaelmas a goose,
     And somewhat else at New Year’s tide, for fear their lease fly loose.

Apparently a little extra greasing of the landlord’s palm was never a bad idea, just to stay on his good side.
    

  The other quarter days were March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation or “Lady Day;” June 24th, the Feast of St. John, and Christmas. The various feast days helped give the year a certain seasonal rhythm.
     If the harvest was plentiful (always a big “if ,” particularly in an age of rudimentary farming methods}, Michaelmas was traditionally a day in which generous portions of food were consumed, if available.  A goose became the customary main course, owing to an apocryphal story that Queen Elizabeth I  happened to be eating a meal of roast goose when she heard about the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which had been scattered by both naval intervention and by storms, the latter proving  far more destructive as the Spanish ships tried to limp around the British Isles and back home.
     “Henceforth shall a goose commemorate this great victory!’ Elizabeth is said to have exclaimed. One eyebrow-raising problem with the tale is that the Armada’s defeat was fairly apparent before Sept. 29. Regardless of the story’s accuracy, far be it from the English to stand in the way of a tasty tradition and a good excuse for a bit of indulgence. Pass the sauce.
      Before English rural folk pushed themselves away from the remnants of the goose, another Michaelmas tradition called for the bird’s breastbone to be held up to the light of a window: the relative opaqueness of the bone would indicate the severity of the coming winter: the darker the bone, the harder the winter.    
In medieval England and later, Michaelmas was believed to mark the end of the most productive part of the year for the cows and the sustaining milk they provided. “It was usually estimated that four-fifths of a cow’s annual milk yield was obtained during the twenty-four weeks from the middle of April to Michaelmas” noted P.W. Hammond in Food and Feast in Medieval England (Sutton Publishing, 1993) adding that the scarcity of winter feed contributed to the disparity in milk output during the course of a typical year. It should always be borne in mind that bounteous surpluses were by far the exception rather than the rule.
     Traditional English proverbs regarding Michaelmas abounded. “If you eat goose on Michaelmas Day, you will not be short of money all year round.” “If St. Michael brings many acorns, Christmas will cover the fields with snow.” “A Michaelmas rot stays ne’er in the pot.” Whether life’s experiences taught English peasants otherwise is anyone’s guess, but it would hardly be surprising.
     Quite a few English cooking terms haven’t survived the seventeenth century.  Frederick Hackwood points out in Good Cheer (T.Fisher Unwin, 1911) that  “In bread they used to make ‘cheat-loaves,’ ‘manchets’  and ‘cracknels’ (crisp cakes). Cakes and puddings used to be baked in ‘coffins.’ Sugar and spices were ‘searsed.’ (sifted); to “coddle” was to ‘warm up.’”
     It was also traditional for the Michaelmas feast to include a special cake called St. Michael’s bannock., which included barley flour, oat and rye meal, buttermilk, honey, eggs and cream, among other ingredients. Of course, all of this might not have been available if the agricultural year had proven  less than satisfactory. 

     Even before the Tudor era, it had already become customary for English communities to elect reeves and other magistrates on Sept. 29; popular sentiment held that since St. Michael was a protective angel, helping to enforce the rule of good over evil and maintain heavenly order, it seemed only appropriate that mortal, earth-bound “protectors” of the public welfare should also be elected at that time.
     The Tudor-era equivalent of “job fairs” were also commonly conducted at Michaelmas, as the farm laborers of the summer were frequently looking for more work to do by late September. The welfare safety nets of the 20th and 21st centuries didn’t exist. Going without work frequently meant going without food, so Michaelmas Day must have been a day of both expectation and apprehension for some. The hardships of dearth during the course of English history should never be understated.