On the fiftieth day after Easter, the feast of the Resurrection, we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to the apostles (Acts 2). The church has always called it Pentecost, a Greco-Latin word which derives from the Greek for ‘fiftieth’. This year it falls on 24 May. It also happens to be a bank holiday weekend, although nowadays that only occurs occasionally, because in 1971 the late May bank holiday was fixed as the last Monday in May, whereas the date of Pentecost varies because it is counted from Easter, which is a movable feast. Prior to 1971, the bank holiday (then known as the Whitsun bank holiday) moved around in May because it was the weekend of Pentecost itself.

In Common Worship this feast-day is listed as Pentecost, with Whit Sunday being given in brackets after it, in smaller type and not in bold, indicating that this is an alternative name but not with the same status as Pentecost. Yet the Book of Common Prayer uses Whit Sunday for the feast-day itself, and Whitsun-week for the days that follow (Monday in Whitsun-week etc.) which constitute the Whitsun season, before Trinity Sunday, which occurs on the next Sunday (31 May this year).  So why does the BCP use Whit Sunday/Whitsun rather than Pentecost; why have we changed back in Common Worship; where does Whitsun come from; and why is it no longer so commonly used?

Whitsun is an English term for Pentecost, just as there was (and is) a popular English name, for example, for the Feast of the Purification on 2 February, commonly called Candlemas because of the distinctive experience of the day: the spectacle of everyone holding lit candles in church. Whitsun is an abbreviation of Whit Sunday. It’s first recorded in 1067 with the unambiguous meaning of ‘white Sunday’ — although we have changed the pronunciation of the first syllable over the centuries by shortening the ‘i’, leading to a confusion with ‘wit’, and, as a result, various false explanations of the word. Dictionaries explain that the name denotes the day on which white was worn in church. However, although we know that white was worn in the early church on the set days for (adult) baptism — Holy Saturday being the primary occasion and Pentecost  the secondary one — this was not characteristic practice by the time England was converted. Fixed dates were impractical in a missionary context, and in any case infant baptism quickly became the norm. For obvious reasons it was carried out as soon as possible after birth. Yet in an echo of the older tradition, babies were required to be dressed in white for baptism and to be brought to the daily mass for a week thereafter, still in white. The popular naming of Whitsunday suggests, nevertheless, that older traditions were reflected in a practice of wearing white at Pentecost, although I’m not aware of any references to or descriptions of this in Anglo-Saxon times, despite the word coming from the language of this period. The BCP chose the popular English name in preference to the Greco-Latin one of Pentecost as a break from Roman practice. Now, however, we more commonly use Pentecost within the church. Culturally we  have lost sight of ‘Whitsun’ since 1971 when the late May bank holiday was divorced from the church’s liturgical year, and so ‘Whitsun’ is used less and less. This year, however, the dates come together, and Monday 25 May is a bank holiday. It won’t be called Whit bank holiday, though!

Joyce Hill