Bower, the continuator of Fordun's "Scotichronicon," makes it a reproach to lax prelates that they suffer the common people to vary after their own pleasure the days kept as fast days in honour of Mary. In doing so he recalls that on Saturday, the first Easter Eve, she abode unshakenly in the faith, when the apostles doubted. Good reason, therefore, why Saturday should be dedicated to her as a fast. "But now," he continues, "you will see both men and women on a Saturday morning make good dinners, who, on a Tuesday or a Thursday, would not touch a crust of bread, lest they should break the Lady Fast kept after their own fancy."
Tyndale seems to have erred in intimating that the Lady Fast, if of an annual character, was regulated of necessity by the feast of the Annunciation, or, in the happier, more affectionate phrase of our forefathers, "the Gretynge of Our Ladye." The Blessed Virgin had no fewer than six festivals--those of the Conception, Nativity, Annunciation, Visitation, Purification, and Assumption--any one of which might be made the starting-point of the fast either by the choice of the votary or by the cast of the die. A third method is instanced in the "Popish Kingdom" of Barnabe Googe (1570), actually an English metrical version of a truculent German satire by one Thomas Kirchmeyer, who was scholar enough to Latinize, or Græcize, his homely patronymic into the more imposing correlative "Naogeorgus." The passage is as follows:
Besides they keep Our Lady's fast at sundry solemn times, Instructed by a turning wheel, or as the lot assigns. For every sexton has a wheel that hangeth for the view, Mark'd round about with certain days, unto the Virgin due, Which holy through the year are kept, from whence hangs down a thread Of length sufficient to be touched and to be handled. Now when that any servant of Our Lady cometh here And seeks to have some certain day by lot for to appear, The sexton turns the wheel about, and bids the stander-by To hold the thread whereby he doth the time and season try, Wherein he ought to keep his fast and every other thing That decent is and longing to Our Lady's worshipping.
Although, as has been said, the "Popish Kingdom" had a German original, it is an extraordinary fact that no Continental example of the Lady Fast wheel is known to exist. Two English wheels have been preserved--both of them in East Anglian churches: viz., those of Long Stratton, Norfolk, and Yaxley, Suffolk. Of the two the former is the more perfect. That at Yaxley consists of a pair of wheels, cut out of sheet iron, which measure a little over two feet in diameter, and are similar and concentric, but separate. The Long Stratton wheels, on the other hand, have a pin passing through the centre which holds them together, and around which they revolve, each of them independently. To the same pin is attached the forked end of a long pendent handle, which was held by the sexton. Each wheel is pierced with three holes through which strings were passed, the total number coinciding with that of the six feasts sacred to Mary, or possibly to the six days of the week excluding Sunday, which did not rank as a fast day.