and the charred sticks were afterwards kept and planted in the fields on Walpurgis Day (the first of May) to preserve the wheat from blight and mildew.[361] About a hundred years ago or more the custom at Althenneberg, in Upper Bavaria, used to be as follows.  On the afternoon of Easter Saturday the lads collected wood, which they piled in a cornfield, while in the middle of the pile they set up a tall wooden cross all swathed in straw.  After the evening service they lighted their lanterns at the consecrated candle in the church, and ran with them at full speed to the pyre, each striving to get there first.  The first to arrive set fire to the heap.  No woman or girl might come near the bonfire, but they were allowed to watch it from a distance.  As the flames rose the men and lads rejoiced and made merry, shouting, “We are burning the Judas!” Two of them had to watch the glowing embers the whole night long, lest people should come and steal them.  Next morning at sunrise they carefully collected the ashes, and threw them into the running water of the Roeten brook.  The man who had been the first to reach the pyre and to kindle it was rewarded on Easter Sunday by the women, who gave him coloured eggs at the church door.  Well-to-do women gave him two; poorer women gave him only one.  The object of the whole ceremony was to keep off the hail.  About a century ago the Judas fire, as it was called, was put down by the police.[362] At Giggenhausen and Aufkirchen, two other villages of Upper Bavaria, a similar custom prevailed, yet with some interesting differences.  Here the ceremony, which took place between nine and ten at night on Easter Saturday, was called “burning the Easter Man.”  On a height about a mile from the village the young fellows set up a tall cross enveloped in straw, so that it looked like a man with his arms stretched out.  This was the Easter Man.  No lad under eighteen years of age might take part in the ceremony.  One of the young men stationed himself beside the Easter Man, holding in his hand a consecrated taper which he had brought from the church and lighted.  The rest stood at equal intervals in a great circle round the cross.  At a given signal they raced thrice round the circle, and then at a second signal ran straight at the cross and at the lad with the lighted taper beside it; the one who reached the goal first had the right of setting fire to the Easter Man.  Great was the jubilation while he was burning.  When he had been consumed in the flames, three lads were chosen from among the rest, and each of the three drew a circle on the ground with a stick thrice round the ashes.  Then they all left the spot.  On Easter Monday the villagers gathered the ashes and strewed them on their fields; also they planted in the fields palm-branches which had been consecrated on Palm Sunday, and sticks which had been charred and hallowed on Good Friday, all for the purpose of protecting their fields against showers of hail.  The custom of burning an Easter Man made of straw on Easter Saturday was observed also at Abensberg, in Lower Bavaria.[363] In some parts of Swabia the Easter fires might not be kindled with iron or steel or flint, but only by the friction of wood.[364]