TODAY WE celebrate the feast day of St David, patron saint of Wales. David appears to have been a sixth century monk who founded various monasteries. He was a vegetarian and drank only water. No one seems to know why the leek is the old symbol of Wales, and in fact these days it has been replaced with the prettier daffodil.

What we do know is that the wearing of a leek in your hat on St David’s Day was a popular custom in days gone by. Here is Professor Ronald Hutton on the history of leek-wearing and the fighting that went along with it:

“To the Welsh, lent was a matter of pride, symbolized by wearing of a leek as a national emblem. It had been associated with St David since the Middle Ages, being linked to him in the Salisburye Prymer of 1533: despite much later antiquarian speculation, the reasons for this are lost. What was always clear was that the sporting of it was always much more common among the Welsh when abroad than at home. The earlier reference to it is also to the most famous, when it is made the occasions for some broad comedy in Shakespeare’s Henry V, apparently written in 1599. During the Stuart period it grew into a tradition which affected metropolitan society from top to bottom. A Dutch visitor to London on 1 March 1662 noted that:

“His Majesty and many great lords and gentlemen, common people, and even lackeys, coachmen, porters and all kinds of riffraff and layabouts wear one in their hats. NB: The office to fix the leek to the King’s hat on this day is worth 600 guilders. We saw some country folk carry such large leeks on their hats that their heads hung almost sideways because of them.

“The same observer also recorded the response of the cockneys: ‘not only by calling after them Taffey, Taffey or David, David, but also by hanging out all kinds of dolls and scarecrows with leeks on their heads’. Five years later, in the City, Samuel Pepys encountered ‘(it being St David’s Day) the picture of a man dressed like a Welshman, hanging by the neck upon one of the poles that stand out at the top of one of the merchant’s houses, in full proportion and very handsomely done’.

“Not surprisingly, all this gave rise to a great deal of fighting, so that in 1661 alone one Welsh gentleman stabbed a local commoner near Westminster, while the retinue of another got into a pitched battle with a London crowd. The pattern was repeated regularly thereafter. A more exalted Dutchman, William of Orange, gamely donned his leek as part of his transformation into a British monarch, while Londoners continued to abuse the Welsh in effigy on 1 March, until the large-scale immigration of Irish and Jews in the nineteenth century provided other targets for xenophobia. As for the Welsh, the more delicate daffodil was substitued for the leek as the national symbol by Lloyd George, to lend a greater dignity to the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1911. The only group still to wear the vegetable on St David’s Day seems to be the Royal Fusiliers.”

From The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996) by Ronald Hutton.

ENDS