The custom of carrying lighted torches of straw (brandons) about the orchards and fields to fertilize them on the first Sunday of Lent seems to have been common in France, whether it was accompanied with the practice of kindling bonfires or not.  Thus in the province of Picardy “on the first Sunday of Lent people carried torches through the fields, exorcising the field-mice, the darnel, and the smut.  They imagined that they did much good to the gardens and caused the onions to grow large.  Children ran about the fields, torch in hand, to make the land more fertile.  All that was done habitually in Picardy, and the ceremony of the torches is not entirely forgotten, especially in the villages on both sides the Somme as far as Saint-Valery."[279] “A very agreeable spectacle, said the curate of l’Etoile, is to survey from the portal of the church, situated almost on the top of the mountain, the vast plains of Vimeux all illuminated by these wandering fires.  The same pastime is observed at Poix, at Conty, and in all the villages round about."[280] Again, in the district of Beauce a festival of torches (brandons or brandelons) used to be held both on the first and on the second Sunday in Lent; the first was called “the Great Torches” and the second “the Little Torches.”  The torches were, as usual, bundles of straw wrapt round poles.  In the evening the village lads carried the burning brands through the country, running about in disorder and singing,

      “Torches burn
At these vines, at this wheat;
       Torches burn
For the maidens that shall wed!”

From time to time the bearers would stand still and smite the earth all together with the blazing straw of the torches, while they cried, “A sheaf of a peck and a half!” (Gearbe a boissiaux).  If two torchbearers happened to meet each other on their rounds, they performed the same ceremony and uttered the same words.  When the straw was burnt out, the poles were collected and a great bonfire made of them.  Lads and lasses danced round the flames, and the lads leaped over them.  Afterwards it was customary to eat a special sort of hasty-pudding made of wheaten flour.  These usages were still in vogue at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but they have now almost disappeared.  The peasants believed that by carrying lighted torches through the fields they protected the crops from field-mice, darnel, and smut.[281] “At Dijon, in Burgundy, it is the custom upon the first Sunday in Lent to make large fires in the streets, whence it is called Firebrand Sunday.  This practice originated in the processions formerly made on that day by the peasants with lighted torches of straw, to drive away, as they called it, the bad air from the earth."[282] In some parts of France, while the people scoured the country with burning brands on the first Sunday in Lent, they warned the fruit-trees that if they did not take heed and bear fruit they would surely be cut down and cast into