Today it is Bank Holiday Monday and also my birthday and I am at work.<\/p>\n
Therefore it seems appropriate to share with you the history of the great British bank holiday.<\/p>\n
The term “Bank Holiday” is a corrupted form of the olde English “barn collar day”, an event that happened once or twice a year in the summer. Hundreds of medieval folk would take a break from toiling in the fields, put on their smartest clothes – the only ones they owned that had a collar – and danced around a ceremonial barn, usually for upwards of sixteen hours at a time. A hog was roasted and there would also usually be vegetarian lasagne, Wotsits and Tizer.<\/p>\n
As the tradition grew older, large communal barns were set up on beaches around the country, allowing as many as 50,000 medieval serfs to revel at once. On the Saturday before Barn Collar Day, thousands of them would get stuck in traffic jams on the motorway trying to get to the seaside for the party.<\/p>\n
The practice was outlawed by the Victorians as part of the wide-ranging Enjoyment Prevention Act (1838)<\/em> and Barn Collar Days were replaced by days off in which the public was expected to sit at home and give thanks to god by being quiet.<\/p>\n The modern idea of a Bank Holiday began in 1859, when those who were unhappy with staying indoors decided to use the day to have a holiday in a bank’s foyer, filling in forms and queueing to speak to cashiers through those little perforated windows. The intention was to get out and have a change of scenery, but by doing it in a bank they could be sure that they didn’t actually enjoy themselves. The practice spread and by 1886, every single person in Britain could be found in a bank every Bank Holiday.<\/p>\n In 1957 Cliff Richard sang a special concert to celebrate the demolition of the Enjoyment Prevention Act<\/em>, and it is now commemorated every Bank Holiday when millions of people try to get to the seaside on what is guaranteed to be the most miserable day of the summer and have no fun whatsoever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today it is Bank Holiday Monday and also my birthday and I am at work. Therefore it seems appropriate to share with you the history of the great British bank holiday. The term “Bank Holiday” is a corrupted form of the olde English “barn collar day”, an event that happened once or twice a year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,24,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chris","category-great","category-random-thought"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}