h on the first and on the second Sunday
in Lent; the first was called "the Great Torches" and the second "the
Little Torches." The torches were, as usual, bundles of straw wrapt
round poles. In the evening the village lads carried the burning brands
through the country, running about in disorder and singing,

"_Torches burn
At these vines, at this wheat_;
_Torches burn
For the maidens that shall wed_!"

From time to time the bearers would stand still and smite the earth all
together with the blazing straw of the torches, while they cried, "A
sheaf of a peck and a half!" (_Gearbe a boissiaux_). If two torchbearers
happened to meet each other on their rounds, they performed the same
ceremony and uttered the same words. When the straw was burnt out, the
poles were collected and a great bonfire made of them. Lads and lasses
danced round the flames, and the lads leaped over them. Afterwards it
was customary to eat a special sort of hasty-pudding made of wheaten
flour. These usages were still in vogue at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, but they have now almost disappeared. The peasants
believed that by carrying lighted torches through the fields they
protected the crops from field-mice, darnel, and smut.[281] "At Dijon,
in Burgundy, it is the custom upon the first Sunday in Lent to make
large fires in the streets, whence it is called Firebrand Sunday. This
practice originated in the processions formerly made on that day by the
peasants with lighted torches of straw, to drive away, as they called
it, the bad air from the earth."[282] In some parts of France, while the
people scoured the country with burning brands on the first Sunday in
Lent, they warned the fruit-trees that if they did not take heed and
bear fruit they would surely be cut down and cast into the fire.[283] On
the same day peasants in the department of Loiret used to run about the
sowed fields with burning torches in their hands, while they adjured the
field-mice to quit the wheat on pain of having their whiskers
burned.[284] In the department of Ain the great fires of straw and
faggots which are kindled in the fields at this time are or were
supposed to destroy the nests of the caterpillars.[285] At Verges, a
lonely village surrounded by forests between the Jura and the Combe
d'Ain, the torches used at this season were kindled in a peculiar
manner. The young people climbed to the top of a mountain, where they
placed three nests of stra