Today’s Date: Nothing to do with Bede

Store Bededag (Great Prayer Day) – which falls on the fourth Friday after Easter Sunday – for most lay folk means a lie-in and no emails, but today’s date holds a bit more historical significance than just that.

The date was first entered into the statute book in 1686 and combines a collection of smaller Christian holy days of obligation into one.

To mark the occasion, wheat buns are eaten – this harks back to a time when the local baker would have shut up shop on the Friday and so only the wheat buns would have been resilient enough to be reheated.