Guldize returns to Penzance: hats off, corn held high

A bundle of corn went up into the evening sky above the seafront on Saturday, and an entire street dropped to one knee and pulled off its hats. Down in Penzance, an old Cornish harvest custom had come back to the streets, complete with a band, a procession and a ceremony performed almost entirely in Cornish.

A rite that goes back to the 1600s

Guldize is Cornwall’s old marker for the end of the corn harvest, and it has been traced back to the 1600s. At the centre of it sits Crying the Neck, a ceremony built around the last sheaf cut from the field, held up as a stand-in for the whole season’s work. The custom faded once combine harvesters took over the job of cutting corn, and it was Old Cornwall Societies in different parts of the county who brought it back during the twentieth century, each keeping their own local version of it going.

A new pair of hands for this year’s festival

Penzance’s own revival of Guldize is more recent, led in past years by Simon Reed. This year the running of the festival passed to the organisers of Montol, Penzance’s midwinter festival, with the Raffidy Dumitz Band providing the music. The evening also included harvest dances, among them Cock in Britches, which acts out the process of sowing and harvesting grain.

The procession made its way from St Anthony Gardens up to the top of Chapel Street, before the evening carried on with more revelry in the Union. The event was well attended, and those there included Deputy Mayor Penny Osborne.

Crying the Neck, in Cornish

The ceremony itself was performed in Cornish, with guidance from Matt Blewett, chairman of the Cornish language society Agan Tavas, who gave a talk beforehand on the history of the custom and on the particular version of it associated with Penzance.

It works in rounds. Bare-headed and down on one knee, the crowd watches as the Neck, the bundle of cut corn, is raised into the air, and the person holding it shouts “Yma dhym”. Everyone then gets back to their feet, hats held high, and calls back “Pyth genes”. That exchange is repeated three times, before the holder closes the ceremony with three shouts of “Pen Yar” in a row.