Martinmas Martyrs - Frank McNally on an ominous legend of November 10th

There is an old tradition in Wexford, still observed by some, that fishermen should not go to sea on the night of November 10th, Martinmas Eve.

If they do, they risk seeing St Martin emerge from the waves on a white horse. This is not a good thing, apparently. In some versions of the legend, he warns them to turn back. In others, it’s already too late.

The Fishermen of Wexford, a poem by Meath Fenian John Boyle O’Reilly (1844-1890), describes what happened once when the prohibition went unheeded.

It was 1702, and a “wondrous shoal of herring” tempted the men to take their boats out on this date, ignoring the cries of their womenfolk.

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In the poem, they also ignore the saint’s hand, rising from the waters to point them back to land. By the closing verse, 70 bodies litter the shores of Wexford Bay.

I’m told there are local fishermen still who, while not quite believing any of this, tend to take the night off anyway. Happily for those sailing from Rosslare on Thursday, the legend does not apply to ferries.

I don’t know if there were any Wexford people involved, but one of the more famous shipping disasters in modern history happened on this date in 1975, in faraway Lake Superior.

That tragedy certainly featured several Irish names, most notably that of Edmund Fitzgerald, a Wisconsin insurance executive for whom the ill-fated ship was named.

Victims included Ernest McSorley, the vessel’s “captain, well-seasoned” as Gordon Lightfoot described him in the subsequent ballad, who went down with his ship.

Then there was Robert Rafferty, the “old cook”, who in Lightfoot’s imagination delivers the song’s most ominous line: “At seven PM, a main hatchway caved in/He said ‘Fellas, it’s been good to know you.’”

None of the dead were fishermen, of course. The ship was a freighter, carrying ore to a steel mill in Detroit (one of several details, including the hatchway incident, for which Lightfoot used poetic licence).

Also, the song’s inspiring legend had nothing to do with St Martin, but rather with an old Native American belief, summarised in the line: “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead/When the skies of November turn gloomy.”

Getting back to Wexford, there is a paradox in St Martin’s association with storms there because, elsewhere, insofar as the holy man is implicated in the weather, it is as the harbinger of unseasonable heat.

A sunny spell around his feast day is known throughout Europe as “St Martin’s Summer”. Ireland may be getting a modified one this week. Not much sunshine is expected, but forecast temperatures are balmy for mid-November.

The other tradition associated with the date arises from a story that the original Martin of Tours, a fourth-century Roman soldier who converted to Catholicism, tried to escape his promotion to bishop by hiding in a flock of geese.

After a goose turned informer by honking, the future saint had him for dinner. Hence the widespread celebrations of Martinmas involving not just roast goose, but also the sacrifice of larger animals, including sheep and cattle.

In a related ritual, the animal’s blood used to be sprinkled in the four corners of a house, and on the doorposts and threshold too, while a blood-soaked cloth was sometimes placed among the rafters for the year to come.

The great Monaghan historian and folklore collector Henry Morris (1874-1945) wrote that he had never seen any Martinmas Eve celebrations in Ulster during 40 years residence there.

It was not until he moved to Sligo he first encountered the cult. He later traced it “all down the west coast to Kerry”, and “across the midlands to Wexford”, but suggested that, as in Ulster, it was unknown in Cork or Dublin.

Celebrations of the feast day were not confined to eating. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable includes the expression “Martin Drunk”, in which the saint’s name signifies “very”.

If the seafaring songs associated with this date are gloomy, meanwhile, there is a welcome counterbalance on the classic 1976 album by Andy Irvine and Paul Brady.

“Martinmas Time” is a jaunty ballad about cross-dressing, no less. It tells the tale of a young woman, propositioned by soldiers on the way to camp.

After agreeing to visit their quarters after dark, for hire presumably, she instead gets a haircut, borrows a uniform and horse, and arrives at the camp posing as a soldier in need of a bed.

Confiding that female company is expected, the quartermaster gives this homeless comrade “eighteen pence” to book a room somewhere else.

At which point, the “soldier” pockets the money, throws off her disguise, and makes a high-speed equestrian getaway, laughing. Unusually for a folk song involving army life, nobody dies. Even more unusually, the heroine “galloped home a maiden”.