Shrive, Shrove, Shriven

In the liturgical year, today, the last day before the season of Lent is Shrove Tuesday. Shrove is the past tense of the verb “to shrive”, which in what Merriam Webster informs me is an intransitive archaic form means “to confess one's sins especially to a priest”.

The intransitive archaic form is precisely the form we want, because why “to shrive” also means to administer the sacrament of reconciliation or to free from guilt, the emphasis of the name “Shrove Tuesday” was not on the act of the priest although that is obviously an integral part of the process, but rather on the act of the penitent. At some time during the day, the penitent was required to shrive, to go to the priest and confess his sins and receive absolution (to be shriven), so that he could enter the Lenten season with a clean slate. So important was this practice that in England, workers were given the afternoon off so they had time to hit the confessional. (I‘m sure you’ll all be astonished to hear that this practice is no longer followed.) In many towns, a bell rang to announce the cessation of work and that the shriving season was now open. And in the afternoon as the people tucked into the pancakes you could doubtless hear sentences like “ Round about 2 o’clock I shrove and by half past was shriven.”

Did I say pancakes? Why yes I did, because it is tradition in England to eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. The reason for this is more apparent in the French name for the day “Mardi Gras”, which does not mean, as millions of Americans doubtless think, “Flash your breasts and get some beads” or “Get drunk and urinate in your trousers,” but rather means “Fat Tuesday.”

Lent is a time of repentance and contrition and one primary of the forms of contrition during Lent involved food, to wit the practice of abstinence, refraining from eating certain foods, and fasting, not eating or eating substantially less than usual. Fasting was a common practice in the Bible, but the particular motivation the Lenten fast was Christ’s 40 days of fasting and prayer in the wilderness, which is why Lent is 40 days long (excluding Sundays). The fasting rules in the Western church used to be almost as strict as they still are in the Eastern Church. Originally the faithful were not to eat meat, eggs, or dairy products, including that most lovely form of fat, butter. Thus your frugal housewife has to use up all her milk, eggs, and butter before Lent, and what do you get when you milk together milk, eggs, butter, flour and a bit of leavening (or not) yes, if you're English or Irish, you get a pancake. (Other countries arrive at a different result. On the continent the Teutonic peoples eat doughnuts for Fastnacht (the Eve of the Fast) and during Carnevale the Italians eat pastries, fritters and many other lovely things depending upon the region. And other regions have their own gastronomic traditions.


So tightly were pancakes and Shrove Tuesday intertwined that the bell ringing to announce the time of shriving in is sometimes known as the “Pancake Bell." Olney, England even has a pancake race. The story is that in 1445 a housewife making pancakes lost track of time and when she heard the shriving bell she went dashing out the door with her apron on and her pan in her hand, and thus the pancake race was born, although there are alternative explanations as well.

As the end of Carnival, today was also traditionally a time of merry making, games, celebration, revelry and downright debauchery right up until midnight or dawn when abruptly everything changed to a somber Lenten mood. So get your one last big party in now before the clock strikes midnight!