Lammas meant loaf Mass: bread from the first wheat, blessed in church
On 1 August, English farmers once baked loaves from the season's first wheat and gave them to their parish as Communion bread. Lammas opened the harvest; months later, the last laden cart rolled home to shouts of hooky, hooky, with a costumed lord of the harvest begging onlookers for coins.
Harvest festivals turn up wherever crops are gathered, so their timing follows local climate rather than any shared calendar. What unites them is food from the fields, eaten at family tables and public feasts. In Britain people have given thanks for good harvests since pagan times, and the modern church version, held in September or October, brings hymns, prayers and churches heaped with fruit and produce. In British and English-Caribbean congregations and schools, and some Canadian ones, the gifts often go to poor or elderly neighbours or are sold for charity.
By the 16th century the end of the English harvest had a settled script. Reapers walked beside the final full cart, and a leading reaper dressed up grandly as lord of the harvest to collect money. Thomas Nashe captured the scene in his play Summer's Last Will and Testament, printed in London in 1600 but probably first staged at Croydon in October 1592: a figure called Harvest enters with men dressed as reapers, calls himself their master, leads a drinking song and asks the audience for largesse. In parts of England the shout gave the whole celebration its name, spelled Hockey or Horkey. A special cake for farmworkers was another custom, described in 1613 as older than the Reformation.
Elsewhere the forms differ. The Oromo people of Ethiopia hold Irreecha as the rains end and harvest begins. The Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival ranks among the most widespread harvest celebrations anywhere. In ancient Iran, Mehrgan at Persepolis doubled as tax season, with visitors from across the Persian Empire bringing gifts for the king.
India has a whole cycle, including Pongal and Lohri in January, Vaisakhi in April and Onam in August or September. Jews keep Sukkot for a week each autumn, living, eating and praying in a temporary hut, the sukkah, recalling shelters Israelite farmers used during harvest before carrying a share to the Temple in Jerusalem.
Source: Harvest festival
