the brides ballad Claire Evans the brides ballad Claire Evans

The Brides Ballad - White

Welcome to The Bride’s Ballad.

Brought to you by Lavender & Jude - the bridal boutique perched on some of the UK’s easternmost shores in Southwold, Suffolk - The Bride’s Ballad is a curious compendium of the legends, traditions, seasonal lore and superstitions that surround brides and weddings. Each month brings a new verse, using a different material, object or colour as our compass.

We hope that you will join us on a gentle amble through the folkloric and the fanciful, the traditional and the transgressive as we unpick the seams of the old ways and trace their echoes in the new.

Welcome to The Bride’s Ballad.

Brought to you by Lavender & Jude - the bridal boutique perched on some of the UK’s easternmost shores in Southwold, Suffolk - The Bride’s Ballad is a curious compendium of the legends, traditions, seasonal lore and superstitions that surround brides and weddings. Each month brings a new verse, using a different material, object or colour as our compass.

We hope that you will join us on a gentle amble through the folkloric and the fanciful, the traditional and the transgressive as we unpick the seams of the old ways and trace their echoes in the new.

If in October you do marry, love will come, but riches tarry.

-Traditional English folk rhyme

The Almanac

Winter is waxing as October wanes and once again, we find ourselves on the threshold. A pause, a held breath, a moment for reflection, remembrance. The light fades, the darkness crawls closer and the leaves surrender in pirouettes to the ground. It is Samhain night; the midpoint between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice of Yule, and a seminal moment in the ancient Celtic wheel of the year. Autumn’s rich, warming spectrum of russets, ambers and treacle-rich foliage, burnished by October sun is diminishing. The palette turns to white - the bleak white of the thick, clouded skies overhead, made all the clearer by the howling winds that strip the branches. Depending on where you might be in the world, white is the colour of innocence, purity; on the other, a colour for mourning, a shade for the dead. Spectral figures often haunt in white, and perhaps, most symbolically on these British Isles, it is the colour worn by a bride.

The veil between the living and the otherworld is thin and fragile as fine lace; ancestors, fairies, spirits and all manner of beings may wander astray. On this liminal night, our thoughts turn to the dead. The clocks have turned back, and we too, look behind us, over our shoulder to glimpse a figure in white, a woman perhaps, disappearing back into the shadows.

Women in white

Long before brides dressed in white, the colour came laden with folkloric significance of a different kind. Throughout Celtic lore and legend, white is a signifier of the supernatural and the otherworldly. In the Mabinogion - a fantastical compendium of the earliest Welsh folktales compiled from oral traditions in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries - we find the story of Blodeuwedd. When a man named Lleu is fated to never marry a human woman, the wizard Gwydion creates him a wife made of flowers. From the flowering meadowsweet, broom, and oak, Blodeuwedd is born. The two marry, but Blodeuwedd’s heart lies with another - a warrior and hunter called Gronw Pebr. The pair plot to murder Lleu so that their love might flourish, but Blodeuwedd’s husband can only be killed under extremely particular and seemingly impossible circumstances. The pair are hopeless until the cunning Blodeuwedd succeeds in outwitting Lleu, leaving him open to the fatal blow from Gronw. Stabbed, Lleu transforms to an eagle, soon to return with the assistance of Gwydion to seek vengeance on the couple. Gronw is killed, but the unhappy bride Blodeuwedd is transformed into a haunting white owl, condemned to never show her face in daylight again.

Y Ladi Wen or Dynes Mewn Gwyn (white ladies or women in white respectively) haunt the annals of Welsh folklore. Meaning ‘the first day of winter’, the ancient Welsh festival of Calan Gaeaf falls on 1 November, signalling the end of the harvest and the start of the dark half of the year. The night before - Nos Galan Gaeaf -is the spirit’s night and a particularly fertile time for sightings of Y Ladi Wen. These white ladies might chastise, warn and scare, guarding hidden treasures or appearing as pleading lost souls, often tricking the unsuspecting by first asking for help.

Similarly, few figures in British tales of the supernatural are as ubiquitous as the white lady. ‘A lady dressed in white fabled in popular mediæval legend to appear by day as well as at night in a house before the death of some member of the family; was regarded as the ghost of some deceased ancestress,’ writes the Reverend James Wood in the Nuttall Encyclopedia, compiled in 1907. Often dwelling in rural areas, these spectral phenomena dance hand in hand with tragedy. Unrequited love, loss, an untimely end, murder, suicide or a betrayal by their betrothed are all typical hallmarks of her tale. She may be a silent omen, or someone who asks for help before she vanishes. You may glimpse her in a photograph of those who are about to pass on. It is through such tales that we find a fine web woven between the apparition and the figure of the bride, their legends interlaced to create an enduring archetype that still haunts our imagination today.

August 1975, White Lady with Diane, photograph by Peter Berthelot

Local Legend


Like the mercurial apparitions themselves, the stories that surround these women shapeshift and change. Here in East Anglia, a host of white ladies walk our flat lands and winding lanes. Their names persist as waymarkers, evidence of their presence reflected in road signs.


White Woman Lane in Old Catton is the supposed domain of the daughter of a local squire who once fell in love with one of her father’s coachmen. At night she is seen crossing and recrossing the road between where her manor house once stood and his lodge on the other side- despite local sources dispelling any evidence of there ever having been either building on that particular road. Local lore holds that her father dismissed the coachman after discovering the illicit affair between him and his daughter. When the young woman ran out to stop the coach that would take her lover away, she slipped under the wheels and perished. Another version claims that she and the coachman had planned to marry but her father stopped the wedding, so she walks on in the dress that she never got to wear. Another, that the bride lived in Elizabethan times and was preparing to wed the lord but died the night before the ceremony. This retelling adds a wreath of herbs to the wedding gown that defines the lady’s apparition. In nearby Sprowston, the story extends alongside the lane itself. We hear tell of a young woman who wed the lord of Catton Old Hall but met her death at the hands of her husband not long after their wedding in Sprowston church. She wanders in her wedding dress from the hall, down the lane, following a path through the grounds of the lodge and on to the church. Traveller’s tales over the centuries tell of mists that appear and vanish with the power to stop a horse in its tracks, and corn in the fields that nods to her as she passes by.


Elsewhere, in the North Norfolk village of Worstead, The White Lady pub takes its name from a local haunting that occurs each Christmas Eve. While so many of these women are obscured through time, memory, and too many wagging tongues, this white lady was famously caught on camera. While holidaying in the area in 1975, Peter Berthelot snapped a picture of his wife Diane sitting in the pews of Worstead’s St Mary’s Church. As the couple later gathered to watch a slideshow of the developed pictures from their trip, they noticed an unmistakable woman in a white dress and bonnet sitting behind Diane when there had been no one else in the church. The couple returned to Worstead to show the vicar their photograph, and he told them of the White Lady who visits every Christmas Eve. On that fateful occasion in 1830, one man decided to investigate the church’s belfry after hearing of her fabled annual visitation. He was found by his friends later that night, ‘gibbering with fright’, claiming repeatedly ‘I have seen her’ according to a local newspaper clipping, before dying from the fright of it. The pub where he was staying now bears the name of The White Lady, and the original photograph taken by the Berthelots hangs behind the bar.


A Victorian phenomenon

This last story places us in an era that had a fascination with the supernatural and the macabre. The Mistletoe Bough is a defining tragic bridal legend, popularised in songs, poems, etchings and even a silent film made in 1904, but the most famous was penned in the 1830s by Thomas Haynes Bayly. With the usual nuances and disputes between the location of the gruesome tale - some claim Hampshire’s Bramshill House, others Brockdish Hall in Norfolk - the bride - some say an English woman named Anne Cope, others an Italian named Genevre Orsini - ultimately instigates an ill-fated game of hide and seek during her Christmas Day wedding celebrations. When none of the guests nor her husband can find her, panic instills. It is 50 years later when the ageing husband prizes open the lid of a large wooden chest, not dissimilar to the marriage chests, or cassones, that were traditionally offered as part of a dowry. Inside lie the skeletal remains of his trapped young bride, still clad in her wedding dress and clasping her bridal wreath, the lid above defaced with her desperate scratchings.

Most significantly, it is during this epoch that a 20-year-old Queen Victoria instigates the tradition of a bride wearing white. Prior to the 19th century, white was exclusively reserved for royal weddings. For the rest of us, your Sunday best - in all manner of prints and patterns, would be worn, and worn again and again. This practicality and repeated wear chimed with the longevity and functionality of a successful marriage. White is after all, extremely impractical, although it had its place as a symbol of purity and innocence. In Ireland, this same association applies to blue - the true colour of a traditional Irish bride. It is suggested that Victoria chose to wear white in her 1840 wedding to Prince Albert to highlight the fine Honiton lace detailing on the gown against Spitalfields silk, at a time when the British lace industry was struggling. The fashion for a white wedding gown spread first to the wealthiest brides, then slowly trickled down the economic ladder but it was still several decades before wearing white became widespread. In 1889, lady's maid Harriett Joyce married one Percy Raven Sams at Earlsfield, Middlesex. At 35, Harriet felt she was just too old to wear white, and so sewed herself a gown of resplendent purple instead.

Queen Victoria by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1847



Another token from the Victorian era, this Christmas the BBC will adapt one of Charles Dickens’ lesser known stories - The Bride’s Chamber - for its annual A Ghost Story for Christmas, starring Jim Broadbent and Martin Freeman. And so our fascination persists - whether for the ghost stories or for the ideal of a bride in white. Two sides of the same veil, women in white captivate and enchant. The ideals they embody, the hopes that lie ahead of them, and the stories of how they were denied them, echo through the years. They clothe her like so many reams of white fabric, often obscuring the person herself. Instead, we see simply a woman in white.



We hope that you have enjoyed October’s verse of the Bride’s Ballad. Join us next month for another seasonal deep dive into wedding traditions, superstitions, crafts and folklore.

Sources & Further Reading

• Blodeuwedd, Eyri National Park

• Wedding Colour, V&A

• Why do Brides Wear White, History Extra

• Why do Brides Wear White, Britannica

• Why White is a Colour of Purity That Might Just Have Killed You

• The White Lady, Norfolk Folklore Society

• How Catton White Woman Lane Got Its Name, EDP

• The White Lady Story, The White Lady Worstead

• The Legend of the Mistletoe Bride, Weird Norfolk


















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Claire Evans Claire Evans

The Bride’s Ballad

Marry in September's shine, your living will be rich and fine

  • Traditional English folk rhyme

Welcome to The Bride’s Ballad.

Brought to you by Lavender & Jude - the bridal boutique perched on some of the UK’s easternmost shores in Southwold, Suffolk - The Bride’s Ballad is a curious compendia of the legends, traditions, seasonal lore and superstitions that surround brides and weddings. Each month brings a new verse, using a different material, object or colour as our compass.

We hope that you will join us on a gentle amble through the folkloric and the fanciful, the traditional and the transgressive as we unpick the seams of the old ways and trace their echoes in the new.

Wheat Field By William Page Atkinson Wells


Marry in September's shine, your living will be rich and fine

  • Traditional English folk rhyme




The almanac

These hazy days as late summer wanes into autumn have always been a special, in betwixt time. If the year has been kind, it brings plenty, bounty and abundance. Daylight may be diminishing, the leaves tainting and crisping but there is still a quiet, magic energy. Summer recedes but reminds us of her power with deceptively warm days, while leaden skies and distant thunderstorms can stir overhead.


On these British Isles, the harvest is drawing to its close, heralding a time for gleaning, gathering and gratitude before we turn in for the darker months ahead. Golden fields that have simmered all summer lose their lustre as they are shorn of their flaxen bounty, reduced to swathes of stubble after the cereal crops are brought in.


The month reaches its apex with the autumn equinox, otherwise known as Mabon, the second of three harvest festivals if you follow the Wheel of the Year. This particular spoke falls today - on the 23rd September. Traditionally, the full moon that rose closest to the equinox marked the harvest festival, when lavish celebrations and revelry would honour the homecoming of a successful harvest. The harvest home - known in this corner of East Anglia as the ‘horkey’ - was held before harvest officially ended on St. Michael’s Mass (29 September), and was a communal celebration rich with song, dance, music and plentiful feasting. Weddings today bear many of the hallmarks of such celebrations, chiming with the spirit of gathering, sharing, giving thanks, and preparing for what’s to come.

Image: A Kern Baby from Whalton Northumberland. Photograph taken by Sir Benjamin Stone, 1902.

To the harvest bound

While crop yields which can still vary wildly depending on the vagaries of our wily weather, there has historically been one by-product of the harvest that could be found in abundance - straw. Or perhaps, as it’s more romantically known, poor man’s gold. While humble straw has been proverbially regarded as worthless, a waste product to be cast about by the wind, it is strong, resilient and laden with folkloric significance.

Concerning matters of love and weddings, straw is often a harbinger of luck. In a traditional Shetland fire ritual, a couple could determine whether they should marry by binding two pieces of straw with string and placing the strands on a peat fire. As the knotted string took flame and the fire began to consume the straw, the marriage would be considered destined if the two pieces moved towards each other. If they moved apart, it wasn’t a propitious match.

Elsewhere, straw has been worked and plaited to create corn dollies for centuries, some say since the age of the Pharaohs. Otherwise known as harvest trophies or tokens, these compelling folk objects were born from the last remaining stalks of a standing crop, the hiding place of the corn spirits that had retreated there during the reaping. Hung from the rafters of a farmhouse, the dolly offered a home for t he spirit to overwinter. By keeping the deity safe during the harsh months ahead, and eventually returning it to the soil come springtime, you secured abundance for the following year. As a harbinger of fertility, dollies were commonly given as love tokens and wedding gifts. A Herefordshire fan, for instance, might be given as a house blessing or to a new bride to bring fertility. In Argyll, Scotland, it was common for the harvest maiden - another kind of dolly woven into the shape of a woman to honour the goddess of the grain - to be made in the figure of a young bride. Another would be made in the form of an old wife - a token passed on to any farmer late with his harvest.

From love tokens and wedding gifts to celebration rituals, in parts of Ireland rural wedding parties were likely to receive a good gatecrashing from the ‘strawboys’. Although the tradition has largely died out, it still continues in certain areas and even saw a recent revival with a celebration in Dublin city centre. Here, a group of local men sporting conical hats of straw to disguise their faces would descend on the gathering, providing entertainment, music and jokes and were notorious for leaving the wedding party short of drink. By stealing a dance with the bride, the strawboys were sure to bring luck to the marriage. Treat them poorly, and they were liable to block your chimney with straw and smoke out the bridal party gathered inside. In this wonderful BBC Archives video, the reporter James Boyce attends a straw wedding in Derrylin, where the dancers would greet the married couple shortly after returning from their honeymoon.

Poor man’s gold

Venturing beyond the realm of folklore, the phrase ‘poor man’s gold’ refers to straw embroidery, where the strands are worked in such a way as to resemble a golden thread. A damp strand of straw can be cut to an angle that can be threaded (through pre-made holes) without the use of a needle. If prepared correctly, the straw is as robust as metal embroidery thread and so convincing that it has historically been used to adorn ecclesiastical garments. A striking modern example of straw embellishment is the Dior dress worn by Princess Margaret on her 21st birthday ( and later described by the Princess as ‘her favourite dress of all’). Although not strictly a wedding gown, it does have a distinctly bridal feel. Aside from the raffia detailing, it was a shining constellation of straw sequins that completed the decoration.

Before the rise of the veil, and while it remained very much a luxury item, the most likely place that straw might make an appearance in a wedding was atop the bride’s head. To return to the dollies, it is likely that farm workers working with straw were using techniques that had been mastered by straw plaiters working for the hat industry. In the UK, Luton was the wellspring of the straw hat trade which employed folk in the surrounding villages to plait straw for hat manufacturers, beginning with the farm workers who would prepare the straw. Throughout the 18th century and into the 19th, it was customary for a bride to wear a bonnet; a stylish and practical choice made with longevity in mind. Straw was a common material - as seen with this beautiful bridal bonnet trimmed with horsehair embroidered lace with a twisted and split straw braid that is linked to the marriage of one Eliza Neath to Joseph Candlin in Sheffield in 1851.

Straw wedding bonnet, 1851 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Sadly, straw work has become a threatened art form, partly due to the homogenisation of the kinds of wheat grown in the UK which lacks the variety that has historically been available throughout the craft’s heritage. Maris Widgeon - a long-stemmed winter wheat preferred by straw workers - is in short supply, as are the farmers who grow it.

The final straw

Thankfully, the wind is now stirring the corn as an interest in this unsuspecting material is being rekindled. Although sadly listed today as a Critically Endangered Craft, there are many voices dedicated to the survival of straw plaiting. Veronica Main MBE is among them - the former Straw Plaiter in Residence at Luton’s Wardown House Museum and Gallery and the UK’s most experienced traditional straw hat plaiter.

Meanwhile, corn dollies to celebrate the harvest are a staple of the AW26 Season Concept at womenswear company TOAST through a collaboration with Lu Towle - a third-generation grain weaver and the brains behind Braided Grain. You will find artisanal small-batch perfume makers Ffern doing the same, working with wheat weaver Rhia Davenport and Staffordshire-based Simply Straw Farm - one of the only British farms that grows the traditional straw used for corn dollies. Hay extracted from sweetgrass is blended into their Lunasa eau de parfum as a nod to this tradition - a fine and fragrant flourish for any September bride.

Following a national straw shortage after what has been a truly punishing summer, artisanal hat maker Emily Hurst made news this August when King Charles III gifted her an entire field of heritage wheat on the Sandringham state. Emily herself is a maker of fine hats for formal occasions, having been accepted into the inaugural cohort of The CHANEL and The King’s Foundation Metier D’arts Millinery Fellowship - a programme that pioneers the conservation of hat making in the UK.

Finally, no longer the domain of the mother of the bride, bridal hats are ripe for a comeback, as seen with Dua Lipa’s intimate wedding ceremony and her choice of a wide-brimmed silk hat from David Jones Millinery. While pillboxes are tipped as the hat to topple the veil for this wedding season, straw hats are enjoying a resurgence too as an elegant nod to the past, as seen with this sisal straw veil wide brim hat from Parisian hatmaker Maison Krasnova and the Elysian Boater from Awon Golding, handmade to order in London.

Image: a Luton lass plaiting straw, published in Penny Illustrated Paper 29th August 1885, via @thebritishnewspaperarchive


We hope that you have enjoyed September’s verse of the Bride’s Ballad. Join us next month for another seasonal deep dive into wedding traditions, superstitions, crafts and folklore.

Sources & Further Reading


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