Roddy Lumsden Reviews Scottish Customs

It's a wonder that so many Scottish babies of yesteryear made it into adulthood, when one considers the many threatening things which happened to them in the name of custom and tradition: they were wrapped inside various outsized garments, shaken three times head down, had their navels smeared with various noxious substances and their heads anointed with others. Meanwhile, 'hanselling' the baby meant waiting till the mother wasn't looking and shoving coins (dirty, gob-stopping ones, no doubt) into the baby's balled fists.

Most of this I gleaned from Margaret Bennett's Scottish Customs, recently reissued by Birlinn (£10.99). Originally published in the early 90s, this is a major contribution to Scotland's ethnology, by one of its leading folklorists and makes great use of the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, as well as the works of pioneering C19 ethnologists like Gregor and Napier and more recent scholars such as the late Herbert Halpert and Hamish Henderson, the two 'HH's to whom the book is dedicated.

This is not a definitive or catch-all book on Scottish customs: the book's subtitle is From the Cradle to the Grave, and the focus is on aspects of tradition around rites of passage, being divided into three lengthy chapters (Childbirth and Infancy, Love, Courtship and Marriage and Death and Burial). Given that most books on customs take the alphabetical route, this volume's format is pleasing, comprising of many short articles and interviews, broken up with Bennett's warm and pithy commentary. The range of informants is impressive, from Victorian worthies to recent newspaper reports.

As Margaret Bennett points out in her original introduction, changes in society have, for better and worse, robbed of us many of the traditions which used to surround 'hatches, matches and dispatches': birthing is now done as near to the book as parents' can manage, with the expertise of the hospital maternity team replacing the howdie who was pulling out bairns in rooms to dark to stitch in; weddings these days are handled by planners or informed by the fashions of bridal magazines; when relatives die, their bodies are removed by undertakers and we don't keep the corpses around to drink and keen over.

These days, it's cynical but probably fair to note that many of the most stalwart remaining life-event customs are also excuses for imbibing, from the wetting of the baby's head, to the stag and hen nights (now often a wallet-sapping and liver-sousing trip abroad), to the 'send-off' where the tears are diluted with more potent liquids.

The middle section was to me the most fascinating, the whole bizarre business of courtship in past times is fascinating, with its rituals of divination, handfasting (a declaration which allowed a sort of trial marriage) and bundling (a strange chastity ritual involving wrapping up or a body stocking, which differed from place to place). A sizeable portion of the book is given over to descriptions of weddings, past and more recent, in various parts of the country. Another subject well covered is the death omen (these include a bird hitting the window, a crowing hen and a mirror falling off a wall).

A report from the North of Scotland on a character named James the Fairy reminds us that until surprisingly recently, children with certain disabilities (such as cerebral palsy and Down's syndrome) were considered changelings placed in cots by fairies who had stolen the 'real' child, or at least, there was a collective agreement to accept such a story. The book is laden with such curious information, by turns charming and sinister.