Today, dear reader, as no doubt you have been dwelling on since rising from your bed, is the feast of St Bartholomew. It is a day with strong historical associations, remembered chiefly for the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, when Catherine de Medici was presented with what she saw as the ideal solution to the problem of the Huguenots.
Her opportunity arose because all the nobility of France of that persuasion had assembled in Paris for the wedding on August 24th of Queen Catherine's daughter, Margaret, to Prince Henry of Navarre. Catherine spread the word among the populace, and when the bells of the church of St Germain l'Auxerrois rang out, the volatile Parisians obliged and slaughtered many thousand Huguenots throughout the city. The Seine was red with Huguenot blood before the day was done.
St Bartholomew's Day, however, is also one of some importance in the calendar of meteorology in western Europe. In Italy, for example, the saint performs the same function as St Swithin does in England, it being believed that if it rains on his feast day, further rain is guaranteed on each of the succeeding 40 days.
In England itself, however, Bartholomew is viewed as something of an antidote to Swithin, doing his best to remedy any troublesome work and pomps the latter may have engineered; St Swithin's 40 days expire today, and according to the English proverb:
St Bartlemy's dusty
mantle dries
All the tears that Swithin
cries.
In Germany, the weather on St Bartholomew's day is seen as an important pointer to the character of the coming winter. According to the old saying,
Bartholomaus
hat's Wetter parat,
Fur den Herbst bis zur
Saat.
(Bartholomew has the weather ready from the harvest until the time to sow.) And a stork or two in evidence in Germany today is also a good omen for the winter:
Bleiben die Storche nach
Bartholoma
Kommt ein Winter, der tut
nicht weh.
(When the storks remain for Bartholomew's Day, expect a winter that will bring no sorrow.)
In medieval times, on the other hand, today was regarded as the first day of autumn, a theory summed up by the Latin inscription: Dat Clemens hiemem, dat Petrus ver Cathedratus, aesuat Urbanus et autumnnat Bartholomaeus
Loosely translated, it tells us that winter lasts from the feast of St Clement until February 21st, spring from St Peter's Day until the feast of St Urban, and summer from then until August 23rd; autumn, finally, begins today, the feast of St Bartholomew.