On All Souls’ Day, for hundreds of years, people would pray for the dead in exchange for a cake.

The gory story of Purgatory

Dying in the Middle Ages wasn’t as simple as going to heaven or hell. If you hadn’t lived a perfectly holy life, your soul would have to go through a period of purification in a place known as Purgatory. Only after this could you find eternal salvation.

Purgatory, the destination for moderately bad sinners, wasn’t a place you wanted to find yourself. If you did end up here, your soul faced various torments; you might be suspended from meat-hooks, frozen in ice, boiled in vats, forced to drink scalding venom, have your tongue or lips sliced off - the list goes on.

How long you spent in this hellish waiting room depended on how well you’d behaved, spiritually speaking, while alive. Regular prayers, good deeds, pilgrimage and giving to the Church all helped reduce your purgatorial sentence.

Once dead, however, the well-being of your soul fell to the living.

Luckily, the living could speed up your time in Purgatory by invoking your name in their prayers.

The Catholic Church also dedicated a day to pray for the dead, the 2nd November, known as All Souls Day. On this day, a Mass was held for all those waiting in Purgatory.

Source: Mirabilia Journal, Electronic Journal of Antiquity, Middle & Modern Ages

Souling for salvation

Besides prayer, the living could say mass, give alms or fast on behalf of the dead. But alongside these traditional practices, other, more unusual, rituals began popping up.

‘Souling’, which was well-established in England by the time of the Reformation, was one of these customs. Practiced around Allhallowtide, particularly on All Souls’ Day, souling was when children and the poor would call at your door, offering prayers for the dead in exchange for small loaves, cakes or quickbreads, known as ‘soul cakes’. (Some of these callers went around bearing hollow turnip lanterns lit by candles, representing trapped souls - aka, the original pumpkins.)

‘Soul cakes’ varied from region to region, though were often made with raisins and spices and sometimes marked on top with a cross. Some believed that for every cake eaten a soul would be released from Purgatory, while others thought if no cakes were offered, restless souls would return to play tricks on the living.

A soul, a soul, a soul cake

The Protestant Reformation saw the tradition of ‘souling’ disappear in many parts of Britain, as it became associated with the older Catholic faith. But the custom was continued by children well into the 19th and 20th centuries in Shropshire, Staffordhsire, Chesire and Lancashire, where they were given soul cakes, apples and sometimes money - though it’s likely that the religious connotations had been lost by this points.

Children would move door to door singing songs in search of a soul cake:

‘A soul, a soul, a soul cake.
Please good missus a soul cake.
An apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry,
Any good thing to make us merry.
Up with your kettles and down with your pans
Give us an answer and we’ll be gone
Little Jack, Jack sat on his gate
Crying for butter to butter his cake
One for St Peter, two for St Paul
Three for the man who made us all.’

Perhaps, as food historian Maggie Black points out, ‘souling’ and the giving of ‘soul cakes’ might have become ‘something of anti-climax after the cheerful, noisy festivities of Hallowe’en’. Yet the practice of visitors moving door to door in search of sweet treats lives on in the modern Halloween custom of trick-or-treating.

Perhaps every time you eat a sweet treat this Halloween a soul finds its way to heaven.

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