For centuries in some parts of England, people would get together on Good Friday – to skip. Men, women and children would mark the start of the Easter weekend by jumping over long lengths of fishing rope or washing lines, sometimes aiming to jump for the entirety of what became known as “long rope day” or “skipping day”.
Almost – but not quite – everywhere, the custom has been all but forgotten. This Easter, however, English Heritage hopes to revive it, hosting skipping events at eight of its sites across the bank holiday weekend.
At Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire, Audley End in Essex and six other sites, visitors will be invited to join in with skipping games whose origins are murky but which may be very ancient indeed.
“It is traditions like these that add so much colour to our social history,” said the heritage charity. “We aim to bring history to life for our visitors and I think helping traditions like this live on is a really important part of doing that.”
Amy Boyington, senior historian at English Heritage, said: “During the 20th century, whole families would try to skip all day on Good Friday, eating hot cross buns to keep them going. They believed skipping would bring good luck and guarantee good harvests or catches of fish in the coming year.”
Though Easter skipping was a popular pastime in a number of towns and villages across England, by the pre-second world war years it had come to be particularly associated with fishing communities in Sussex. Sean Goddard, an amateur historian from Brighton, said his father had recalled communal skipping events in a local park.
Before that, fishers and their families would skip beside the beach, said Goddard, “but they would also do the long rope skipping a few streets in from the beach, where the fishermen lived. They would have put a long rope across the street [where] it was all narrow cottages.”
Like many folk traditions, the origins of festive skipping are uncertain. The custom is at least four centuries old, according to English Heritage, but may be considerably older.
One leading folklorist speculated in the 1950s that the then lingering association of skipping with bronze-age barrows on the South Downs suggested the activity was “the far-off descendant of the sports and games played at burials and … possibly at barrow funerals”.
If so, Good Friday would have been a much more recent association, with some later speculating that the long rope was associated with the legend that Judas hanged himself after betraying Christ. (In Scarborough, community skipping has taken place since the early 1900s, but on Shrove Tuesday.)
“We would love to hear from anyone who remembers – or has a relative who remembers – skipping on Good Friday,” said Boyington.
“The rhymes that would have undoubtedly accompanied these Easter games are largely forgotten too, which is such a shame as oral tradition is so important in our understanding of social history.”
Almost forgotten as it may be, Good Friday skipping has not quite died out. Goddard is a member of the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men, and on Friday they and two other morris groups will perform outside a pub in Ringmer in Sussex before hosting a community skip for all comers.
“We have very long ropes, enough to get eight to 10 people skipping at a time,” he said. “The morris people do it; anybody can do it.”
Also present will be Gill Phillips, whose all-female morris group the Knots of May revived the Good Friday tradition in 1981.
“It’s not really associated with morris dancing at all,” she said, “but if we don’t do it, what’s going to happen? It’s going to die and it’s great fun. It’s nice to have something the general public can join in.”
