When most people think of Halloween today, they imagine carved pumpkins, spooky costumes, and trick-or-treating. Yet beneath these modern trappings lies a much older tradition – a distinctly British story rooted in medieval faith, folklore, and seasonal ritual. Known once as All Hallow’s Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day (1 November) was steeped in spiritual meaning and communal custom. To understand its true nature, we must peel back the layers of time and step into the mists of medieval England, where bonfires glowed on the hills, bells tolled in the churches, and prayers for the dead mingled with whispers of ghosts and fairies.
The Christian Calendar and the Eve of All Saints
All Hallow’s Eve entered the British calendar as part of a broader Christian festival cycle. All Saints’ Day (or All Hallows) was established by the early Church to commemorate the saints – not just the famous apostles and martyrs, but the countless unnamed faithful who had lived and died in Christ. By the ninth century, this feast was observed across Western Christendom on 1 November, following the decision of Pope Gregory IV. Scholars suggest this timing may have been intentional, allowing the Church to Christianise older harvest and year-end festivals that occurred around the same time.
In medieval England, the evening before a great feast was itself a holy time. Known as a vigil or eve, it was marked by prayer, fasting, and watchfulness. Thus, All Hallow’s Eve was not originally a night of mischief or fear, but of devotion. Bells were rung to call the faithful to prayer, candles were lit in remembrance of the dead, and families gathered to prepare for the solemn mass of the morrow. Churchyards were illuminated by flickering lights, and processions of clerics and lay-folk wound through villages chanting psalms for the departed. The English word Hallow itself derives from the Old English halga, meaning holy, reminding us that this was first and foremost a sacred time of reflection and intercession.
Medieval homilies and parish records show how deeply this feast was embedded in the rhythms of Christian life. The Hallowtide season – spanning from All Hallow’s Eve through to All Souls’ Day – was one of both solemnity and hope. For the faithful, it was an annual confrontation with mortality and an affirmation of eternal life. To pray for the dead was not to mourn without hope, but to affirm the communion of saints, the invisible fellowship of all believers across time and space.
Souling and the Commemoration of the Dead
By the later Middle Ages, All Hallow’s Eve had merged with All Souls’ Day (2 November), which honoured all departed Christians. The two feasts formed a powerful duo – a season of remembrance stretching over several days. Out of this fusion arose the custom of souling, first recorded in England during the fifteenth century and especially popular in Cheshire, Shropshire, and parts of Yorkshire.
Poor villagers, traveling minstrels, and children would go from house to house on All Hallow’s Eve or All Souls’ Day, offering to pray for the souls of the household’s departed in exchange for food, drink, or small cakes known as soul cakes. These were typically spiced buns marked with a cross and shared as tokens of charity and remembrance. Some households left them out overnight on the windowsill for wandering spirits who might be near, while others distributed them to beggars who represented the poor souls in purgatory.
Children and beggars alike would sing traditional souling songs, some of which survive in regional folklore today:
“A soul! a soul! for a soul-cake!
Pray you, good mistress, a soul-cake!
One for Peter, two for Paul,
Three for Him who made us all.”
This custom, a blend of Christian charity and folk belief, reflected a worldview in which the living and the dead were bound in prayer and community – a far cry from the candy-collecting of the modern age. In an age before clocks or calendars governed rural life, these annual cycles of feast and fast structured both time and theology. Even as the Reformation later sought to dismantle the doctrine of purgatory, the memory of souling endured as a poetic gesture of remembrance – a bridge between Heaven and earth, between doctrine and devotion.
Fires, Spirits, and the Old Year
While the Church sanctified All Hallow’s Eve, older traditions lingered beneath its surface. Britain’s Celtic-speaking regions – Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and parts of Cornwall – had long celebrated the festival of Samhain around this time, marking the end of the harvest and the turning of the year. The ancient Celts believed that on this night, the veil between worlds grew thin, allowing spirits to wander freely. The dead might visit their homes, fairies might play tricks on mortals, and omens of the coming winter could be divined by fire and smoke.
Though the Christian Church sought to replace such pagan observances with its own holy festivals, echoes of Samhain endured. Bonfires blazed on hilltops across the British Isles, symbolising light overcoming darkness and perhaps also serving as practical beacons for travelers in the long autumn night. People carved turnips into lanterns – known in parts of England as punkies or Hoberdy lanterns – to ward off malevolent spirits. The more recent pumpkin jack-o’-lantern is a late American adaptation of this older British tradition.
In the north of England and the Scottish Lowlands, guising emerged: children would disguise themselves in ragged clothes or masks, visiting homes to perform songs, poems, or jokes in exchange for food. The disguise was both entertainment and protection, a way to confuse wandering spirits or mischievous fairies thought to roam the night. In some regions, adults participated too – donning grotesque masks or animal hides and parading through villages in a mixture of mockery and reverence for the unseen world.
Folk superstitions abounded. Young women might peel apples in a single strip and toss the rind over their shoulder to reveal the initial of their future husband, or stare into a mirror by candlelight hoping to glimpse their destined beloved. Nuts were roasted in pairs on the hearth, their behaviour in the fire foretelling constancy or betrayal in love. Beneath the fun and folly was an ancient desire to seek meaning in mystery – to find order in the chaos of life and death, season and change.
Church Bells and Ghostly Processions
In some parts of medieval and early modern England, it was believed that the souls of the departed returned to visit their former homes on All Hallow’s Eve. Church bells were rung through the night to comfort the dead or to keep restless spirits at bay. Parish accounts from the sixteenth century record payments for the ringing of the soul bell or the Hallowmas watch. The sound of the bells was thought to remind the living to pray, and to assure the departed that they were not forgotten.
Ghostly processions also entered local lore. Folklorists of the Victorian era recorded tales from rural parishes of spectral monks or phantom processions passing along old paths to the churchyard. Some stories spoke of the Wild Hunt, a spectral cavalcade led by a ghostly lord or ancient deity, sweeping through the skies on All Hallow’s Eve. Others told of “corpse candles” or will-o’-the-wisps, flickering lights said to foretell a coming death. These stories, while embroidered by later imagination, reveal a culture in which the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds was deeply porous.
Reformation and Decline
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century dramatically reshaped the meaning of All Hallow’s Eve in Britain. Reformers rejected prayers for the dead and the doctrine of purgatory as unscriptural, dismantling the theological basis of souling and All Souls’ Day. The ringing of bells and the lighting of candles for souls were condemned as “popish superstition.” Yet, as so often in religious reform, the old ways proved hard to extinguish.
In some parts of the country, particularly the north and west, folk versions of souling and guising continued well into the nineteenth century. Even in Protestant England, the rhythm of the agricultural year ensured that All Hallows remained a time for communal festivity. The eve of All Hallows became a night of storytelling and gentle fear – a time for ghost tales by the hearth and games of divination, especially those concerning love and marriage. Such traditions persisted in rural communities long after their theological origins had faded.
By the seventeenth century, All Hallow’s Eve had also become associated with bonfire rituals that blended into those of Guy Fawkes Night (5 November). The two festivals – one sacred, one political – intermingled in practice, and in many regions the fires of autumn blurred their meanings. Yet beneath the changing customs, the ancient pattern remained: light against darkness, memory against oblivion.
From All Hallows to Halloween
It was through migration, particularly from Ireland and Scotland to North America in the nineteenth century, that the old British customs found new life. There they mingled with other cultural influences to produce the modern Halloween – with its pumpkins, costumes, and door-to-door collecting. The religious solemnity faded, but the underlying themes endured: remembrance, the thinness of the veil between worlds, and the mingled joy and unease of the darkening year.
In recent decades, Britain has re-imported Halloween in its American guise, yet the echoes of All Hallow’s Eve still sound faintly in church bells and in the stories of the countryside. Behind every trick-or-treater stands a long procession of monks, peasants, and villagers who once walked the same autumn lanes, carrying candles and cakes for the souls of the dead. In some rural parishes, churches have revived vigils and All Souls’ services, reminding the faithful that the heart of the festival was never fear, but remembrance and prayer.
Remembering the Roots
To understand All Hallow’s Eve is to glimpse a time when life and death, faith and folklore, community and cosmos were woven together. The night before All Saints’ Day was not merely a celebration of the macabre; it was a meditation on mortality, charity, and the hope of resurrection. Beneath the commercial glitter of modern Halloween lies a profound British tradition – a festival of memory and meaning, born of harvest fires, holy vigils, and the eternal longing to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead.
To rediscover that heritage is to recover something essential about the human condition: our need to remember, to celebrate, and to hope. All Hallow’s Eve, in its truest form, was never about horror or fright. It was about belonging – to one another, to the generations that came before, and to the greater story of redemption that spans the ages. In the flicker of a candle and the toll of a bell, we hear the same ancient message that once echoed through every English village: light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
At the Museum, we strive to keep these traditions alive, offering our visitors a glimpse into the past and a chance to participate in the customs that have shaped our rural heritage. Come visit and be part of something historic.
