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Lammas (from Old English hlāfmæsse, "loaf-mass"), also known as Loaf Mass Day, is a Christian holiday celebrated in some English-speaking countries on 1 August. The name originates from the word "loaf" in reference to bread and "Mass" in reference to the Eucharist. It is a festival in the liturgical year to mark the blessing of the First Fruits of harvest, with a loaf of bread being brought to the church for this purpose. Lammastide falls at the halfway point between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. Christians also have church processions to bakeries, where those working therein are blessed by Christian clergy.
While Lammas is traditionally a Christian holy day, some Modern paganism have adopted the name and date for one of their harvest festivals in their Wheel of the Year. It is also the same date as the Gaels harvest festival Lughnasadh.
Several antiquarians suggested that the name 'Lammas' came from 'Sheep mass'. John BradyBrady, Clavis Calendaris, 1812, etc. s.v. "Lammas-Day". supposed that tenants of the Cathedral of York, dedicated to St Peter in Chains, of which this is the feast, were required to bring a live lamb to the church.Reported without comment in John Brand, Henry Ellis, J.O. Halliwell-Phillips, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, new ed. 1899: vol. I, s.v. "Lammas".
Another name for the feast in the Middle Ages was the 'Gule of August'.J. P. Bacon Phillips, inquiring the significance of " gule", "Lammas-Day and the Gule of August", Notes and Queries, 2 August 1930:83. It has been suggested, following the 18th-century Welsh clerical antiquary John Pettingall,Pettingall, in Archaeologia or, Miscellaneous tracts, relating to antiquity... (Society of Antiquaries of London), 2:67. that this is an English language of Gŵyl Awst, Welsh language for "feast of August".
In Anglo-Saxon England Lammas was the name for the first day of August and was described in Old English literature as "the feast of first fruits", being mentioned often in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It was probably the day when loaves baked from the first of the wheat harvest were blessed at church. The loaves might then have been used in Apotropaic magic:Homans, George (1961). English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, 2nd ed. 1991. p.371. a book of Anglo-Saxon Incantation directed that the Lammas loaf be broken into four parts, which were to be placed at the four corners of the barn, to protect the grain.
For many , the wheat must have run low in the days before Lammas, and the new harvest began a season of plenty, of hard work and company in the fields, reaping in teams. In the medieval agricultural year, Lammas also marked the end of the hay harvest that had begun after Midsummer. At the end of hay-making a sheep would be loosed in the meadow among the mowers, for him to keep who could catch it.
Historian Ronald Hutton writes "the time that the first of the harvest could be gathered would have been a natural point for celebration in an agrarian society". He says it is likely "that a pre-Christian festival had existed among the Anglo-Saxons on that date". Folklorist Máire MacNeill linked Lammas with the Insular Celtic harvest festival Lughnasadh, held on the same date, and suggested the Anglo-Saxons adopted it from the Celtic Britons. She highlighted the apparent lack of a Continental Germanic festival on 1 August, and the apparent borrowing of the Welsh name Gŵyl Awst, 'Gule of August'. However, Hutton says that "MacNeill's thesis of a pan-Celtic seasonal ritual, like her reconstruction of pagan rites, is so far un-proven" and to prove it "would involve a detailed knowledge of the religious calendar of the Anglo-Saxons before they arrived in England, which is impossible".
Lammas Day was one of the traditional Scottish quarter days before 1886. Lammas also coincided with the feast of St Peter in Chains, commemorating Saint Peter's miraculous deliverance from prison, but in the liturgical reform of 1969 the feast of St Alphonsus Liguori was transferred to this day.
Ann Lewin explains the Christian feast of Lammas (Loaf Mass Day) and its importance in the liturgical year:
Today, in the Church of England, the mother church of the Anglican Communion, during the celebration of Holy Communion, "The Lammas loaf, or part of it, may be used as the bread of the Eucharist, or the Lammas loaf and the eucharistic bread may be kept separate." Common Worship specifies:
Christians also have church processions to bakeries, where those working therein are blessed by Christian clergy.
In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1.3.19) it is observed of Juliet, "Come Lammas Eve at night shall she Juliet be fourteen." Another well-known cultural reference is the opening of The Battle of Otterburn: "It fell about the Lammas tide when the muir-men win their hay."
Exeter in Devon is one of the few towns in England that still celebrates its Lammas Fair and has a processional custom which stretches back over 900 years, led by the Lord Mayor. During the fair a white glove on a pole decorated with garlands is raised above the Exeter Guildhall. The fair now takes place on the first Thursday in July.
A low-impact development project at Tir y Gafel, Glandwr, Pembrokeshire, Lammas Ecovillage, is a collective initiative for nine self-built homes. It was the first such project to obtain planning permission based on a predecessor of what is now the sixth national planning guidance for sustainable rural communities originally proposed by the One Planet Council.
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