It was pointed out as one of the distinctions between vowesses and members of the third orders of the Dominican and Franciscan brotherhoods that the latter were pledged to the observance of fasts from which the former were exempt. Tyndale complains of the "open idolatry" of abstinences undertaken in honour of St. Patrick, St. Brandan, and other holy men of old; and he lays special stress on "Our Lady Fast," which, he explains, was kept "either seven years the same day that her day falleth in March, and then begin, or one year with bread and water." Whatever fasts a vowess might neglect as non-obligatory, it seems probable that she would not willingly forgo any opportunity of showing reverence to the Blessed Virgin, who, in the belief of St. Augustine, had taken vows of chastity before the salutation of the Angel.

It is not a little curious that the Lady Fast, in the forms mentioned by Tyndale, was so far from being enjoined by the Church as to be actually opposed to the decree of the Roman Council of 1078, which indicated Saturday as the day of the week appropriated to the honour of the Blessed Virgin. This usage was as well understood in the British Isles as elsewhere. Thus, in "Piers Plowman":

Lechery said "Alas!" and on Our Lady he cried
To make mercy for his misdeeds between God and his soul,
With that he should the Saturday seven year thereafter
Drink but with the duck, and dine but once.

Bower, the continuator of Fordun's "Scotichronicon," makes it a reproach to lax prelates that they suffer the common people to vary after their own pleasure the days kept as fast days in honour of Mary. In doing so he recalls that on Saturday, the first Easter Eve, she abode unshakenly in the faith, when the apostles doubted. Good reason, therefore, why Saturday should be dedicated to her as a fast. "But now," he continues, "you will see both men and women on a Saturday morning make good dinners, who, on a Tuesday or a Thursday, would not touch a crust of bread, lest they should break the Lady Fast kept after their own fancy."

Tyndale seems to have erred in intimating that the Lady Fast, if of an annual character, was regulated of necessity by the feast of the Annunciation, or, in the happier, more affectionate phrase of our forefathers, "the Gretynge of Our Ladye." The Blessed Virgin had no fewer than six festivals—those of the Conception, Nativity, Annunciation, Visitation, Purification, and Assumption—any one of which might be made the starting-point of the fast either by the choice of the votary or by the cast of the die. A third method is instanced in the "Popish Kingdom" of Barnabe Googe (1570), actually an English metrical version of a truculent German satire by one Thomas Kirchmeyer, who was scholar enough to Latinize, or Gr?cize, his homely patronymic into the more imposing correlative "Naogeorgus." The passage is as follows:

Besides they keep Our Lady's fast at sundry solemn times,
Instructed by a turning wheel, or as the lot assigns.
For every sexton has a wheel that hangeth for the view,
Mark'd round about with certain days, unto the Virgin due,
Which holy through the year are kept, from whence hangs down a thread
Of length sufficient to be touched and to be handled.
Now when that any servant of Our Lady cometh here
And seeks to have some certain day by lot for to appear,
The sexton turns the wheel about, and bids the stander-by
To hold the thread whereby he doth the time and season try,
Wherein he ought to keep his fast and every other thing
That decent is and longing to Our Lady's worshipping.

Although, as has been said, the "Popish Kingdom" had a German original, it is an extraordinary fact that no Continental example of the Lady Fast wheel is known to exist. Two English wheels have been preserved—both of them in East Anglian churches: viz., those of Long Stratton, Norfolk, and Yaxley, Suffolk. Of the two the former is the more perfect. That at Yaxley consists of a pair of wheels, cut out of sheet iron, which measure a little over two feet in diameter, and are similar and concentric, but separate. The Long Stratton wheels, on the other hand, have a pin passing through the centre which holds them together, and around which they revolve, each of them independently. To the same pin is attached the forked end of a long pendent handle, which was held by the sexton. Each wheel is pierced with three holes through which strings were passed, the total number coinciding with that of the six feasts sacred to Mary, or possibly to the six days of the week excluding Sunday, which did not rank as a fast day.

The instrument was worked in the following manner. Should a devout person desire to keep a Lady Fast, he or she repaired to the church to determine by the aid of the wheel which of the days or anniversaries should be observed. Thereupon the sexton took the wheel, which he either hung up or held at arm's length by means of a ring at the termination of the handle. He then set the wheel in motion, and the votary, standing by, caught at the strings as they spun round. Whichever string was caught decided the question on what day the fast was to be begun, whether on the feast of the Annunciation or that of the Assumption, or any other of the six feasts, or days of the week, of which the several strings were emblematical. The feast of the Assumption was known as Lady Day in Harvest, being observed on the fifteenth of August.

The compromise, which we style the Reformation, at first inclined to the retention of the Saturday fast; and, indeed, the legislature interfered to enforce its more regular observance. In 1548 a remarkable measure was enacted with this object, not so much, it is to be feared, out of any genuine concern for religion as for the benefit of the fishing community, whose interests had been injuriously affected by recent ecclesiastical changes.

"Albeit," it recites, "the King's subjects now having a more perfect and clear light of the Gospel and true word of God, through the infinite cleansing and mercy of Almighty God, by the hand of the King's Majesty and his most noble father of famous memory, promulgate, shewed, declared and opened, and thereby perceiving that one day or one kind of meat of itself is not more holy, more pure, or more clean than another, for that all days and all meats be of their nature of one equal purity, cleanness, and holiness, and that all men should by them live to the glory of God, and at all times and for all meats give thanks unto Him, of which meats none can defile Christian men or make them unclean at any time, to whom all meats be lawful and pure, so that they be not used in disobedience or vice; yet forasmuch as divers of the King's subjects turning their knowledge therein to satisfy their sensuality, when they should thereby increase in virtue, have in late time more than in times past, broken and contemned such abstinence which hath been used in the Realm upon the Fridays and Saturdays, the Embering days, and other days commonly called Vigils, and in the time commonly called Lent and other accustomed times: the King's Majesty, considering that due and godly abstinence is a means to virtue, and to subdue men's bodies to their soul and spirit, and considering also especially that Fishers, and men using the trade of living by fishing in the sea, may thereby the rather be set on work, and that by eating of fish much flesh shall be saved and increased, and also for divers other considerations and commodities of this realm, doth ordain 'that all statutes and constitutions regarding fasting be repealed, but that all persons neglecting to observe the ordinary fast days—Fridays, Saturdays, Ember days, and Lent—be subject to a fine of ten shillings and ten days' imprisonment for the first offence.'"

This measure, so inconsistent with the spirit of the age and so contradictory in its terms, was re-enacted at various dates during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. It is perhaps the last "word" as regards the Lady Fast, but the legislature by no means suspended its vigilance in enforcing abstinence at the proper season. Discussion of post-Reformation fasting, however, or fasting in general, forms no part of our present undertaking.