keeping Saint Monday

"Keeping Saint Monday"
is the title of the fifth chapter in the Witold Rybczynski book, Waiting for the Weekend.

[excerpt]------------------------------- Throughout the eighteenth century, the work-week ended on Saturday evening; Sunday was the weekly day off.  The Reformation and, later, Puritanism had made Sunday the weekly holy day in an attempt to displace the saints' days and religious festivals of Catholicism.  Although the taboo on work was more or less respected, the strictures of Sabbatarianism that prohibited merriment and levity on the Lord's Day were rejected by most Englishmen, who saw the holiday as a chance to drink, gamble, and generally have a good time.

Having only one official weekly holiday did not necessarily mean that the life of the average British worker was one of unremitting toil.  Far from it.  Work was always interrupted to commemorate the annual feasts of Christmas, New Year, and Whitsuntide (the days following the seventh Sunday after Easter).  These traditional holidays were universally observed, but the length of the breaks varied.  Depending on local convention, work stopped for anywhere from a few days to two weeks. 

In addition to the religious holidays, villages and rural parishes observed their own annual festivals or "wakes."  These celebratory rituals, which dated from medieval times, were mainly secular and involved sports, dancing, and other public amusements.

...There were also communal holidays associated with special, occasional events such as prize-fights, horse races, and other sporting competitions, as well as fairs, circuses, and traveling menageries.  When one of these attractions arrived in a village or town, regular work more or less stopped....

The idea of spontaneously closing up shop or leaving the workbench for the pursuit of pleasure strikes the modern reader as irresponsible, but for the eighteenth-century worker the line between work and play was blurred; work was engaged in with a certain amount of playfulness, and play was always given serious attention.  Moreover, many recreational activities were directly linked to the workplace, since trade guilds often organized their own outings, had their own singing and drinking clubs and their own preferred taverns.

...Whenever people had a choice in the matter...work was characterized by an irregular mixture of days on and days off, a pattern that the historian E.P. Thompson described as "alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness."  The irregularity was exacerbated by the way holidays were prolonged....It was not unusual for sporting events, fairs, and other celebrations to last several days.  Since Sunday was always the official holiday, it was usually the days following that were added on.  This produced a regular custom of staying away from work on Monday, frequently also on Tuesday, and then working long hours at the end of the week to catch up. 

Among some trades, the Monday holiday achieved what amounted to an official status.  Weavers and miners, for example, regularly took a holiday on the Monday after payday -- which occurred weekly, or biweekly.  This practice became so common that it was called "keeping Saint Monday."

The habit of keeping Saint Monday was not ancient -- it probably started at the end of the eighteenth century.  It was directly linked to industrialization, since it was a way for workers to redress the balance between their free time and the longer and longer workdays being demanded by factory owners.  This improvised temporal device also allowed the worker to thumb his nose at authority and assert his traditional freedom to come and go from the workplace as he willed. 

Once the practice of keeping Saint Monday took hold, it was hard to dislodge....Thomas Wright's well-known book on the habits and customs of the working classes, which appeared in 1867, describes Saint Monday as "the most noticeable holiday, the most thoroughly self-made and characteristic of them all. . . that greatest of small holidays." 

Wright described himself as a journeyman engineer, that is, a mechanic, and his views are therefore those of someone who was not unsympathetic to his subject.  On Monday, he wrote, "[the workers] are refreshed by the rest of the previous day; the money received on the Saturday is not all spent; and those among them who consign their best suits to the custody of the pawnbroker during the greatest part of each week are still in the possession of the suits which they have redeemed from limbo on Saturday night."  Dressed in his Sunday clothes, with a few shillings in his pocket, the idle worker could go out on the town and enjoy himself.  Not a small part of this enjoyment was meeting friends and fellow tradesmen who were engaged in the same recreation.

...[Saint Monday's] popularity during the 1850s and '60s was ensured by the enterprise of the leisure industry.  During that period, most sporting events such as horse races and cricket matches took place on Mondays, since their organizers knew that many of their working-class customers would be prepared to take the day off.
------------------------------ [end excerpt]

{Waiting for the Weekend, by Witold Rybczynski.
Copyright, 1991.  Pub. by the Penguin Group.  Viking
Penguin, a division of Penguin books USA Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York
10014, U.S.A.}

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