Michaelmas

Michaelmas, on 29 September, is the feast of Michael the Archangel, in the Western calendar now kept together with Gabriel and Raphael as the feast of the Holy Archangels. The date derives from the dedication of a basilica of Michael on the Salarian Way near Rome in late antiquity; Michael, the "prince" who in Daniel and Revelation leads the heavenly host against evil, became one of the most widely venerated of the angels, with great shrines at Monte Gargano in Italy and Mont-Saint-Michel in France.

In northern Europe the feast acquired a large secular life. As one of the English and Irish quarter days it was a date for settling rents, hiring servants, and holding fairs and courts, and it gives its name to the autumn Michaelmas term in universities and the law. Popular custom attached the goose to the day, and a folk taboo against eating blackberries after Michaelmas, tied to a legend of the devil's fall. The feast thus sits at the join of angelology and the agricultural calendar, a saint's day that also organised the ordinary business of the year.

The aster species that blooms in Britain each autumn around the end of September has long been popularly known as the Michaelmas daisy, one of a number of ordinary English plant names, alongside the Lent lily and the Candlemas bells, that fix a religious feast day permanently into everyday botanical vocabulary as a seasonal marker completely independent of any conscious religious meaning for the person using the name.

The quarter day system that made Michaelmas one of the four fixed dates for settling rents, wages and legal accounts in England and Ireland has faded from ordinary use, but its traces remain identifiable in specific surviving legal and academic contexts, most visibly the Michaelmas term that still opens the academic year at Oxford and Cambridge and the legal year at the English Inns of Court, so that a scheduling convention originally organised around a religious feast day continues to structure the practical calendar of some of England's oldest institutions long after the general public stopped reckoning ordinary financial business by the same quarter days.

Several of England's oldest chartered fairs, most famously Nottingham's Goose Fair, trace their origin to the Michaelmas period, when the feast's status as a quarter day made it a natural date for the periodic markets at which farmers sold produce, livestock and, especially, the geese that give Nottingham's fair its name, before winter set in; the fair has since moved to early October and long outlived the quarter day system that originally fixed its timing.