Martinmas in Ireland and its geese, blood rites and old customs

Martinmas falls each year on November 11 and honours St. Martin of Tours, a fourth century soldier turned bishop whose cloak-splitting charity became the seed of many later customs. In Ireland the Christian feast folded into older seasonal practices so that the day marked the close of the harvest, the slaughter of store animals and a cluster of folk observances intended to protect households through winter.

St Martin’s story explains much of the symbolism. He is the Roman soldier who famously “sliced his cloak in two” to clothe a freezing beggar and later left the army for the church, a life recounted in standard biographies of the saint.

On the eve of Martinmas rural households carried out striking rituals with direct, visceral meaning for survival. In some places the woman of the house would kill a fowl at the door and “spill the blood on the threshold” while drops were let fall in the four corners of the dwelling as a safeguard against disease and otherworldly harm. These blood rites were recorded in folklore sources and noted by scholars who say the practice persisted well into living memory in parts of Ireland. 

Geese and winter lore came to dominate public memory of the day. The noisy goose that once betrayed Martin when he hid from a bishopric produced both culinary custom and weather lore so that Martinmas became associated with eating goose and with a brief late autumn spell sometimes called St Martin’s Summer. Farmers and households also read the fate of winter in the Martinmas goose and in the first wines and fairs of the season. 

Martinmas also included social and communal elements that linked charity, economy and belief. Records show big farms and landlords were expected to kill a sheep, ox or pig and “share the meat with their poorer neighbours” while fairs and mumming kept communities connected as they stored food and fuel for winter. Restrictions on turning mill wheels and the proliferation of bonfires and lantern processions in some regions underline how the date served as a hinge between summer’s work and winter’s curtailment of activity. 

Today the blood rituals are mostly gone and Martinmas survives in scattered practices, foodways and stories.