New Year at Hutton Conyers

The story comes from Blount’s Fragmenta Antiquitatis (1815) via T F Thiselton Dyrer's British Popular Customs Present and Past (1911) but has no date. William Aislabie, mentioned below was born in 1700 and died in 1781, which puts it in the early- or mid-1700s..
 
I grew up in Hutton Conyers – it's near Ripon. We used to go to Ripon sometimes, when we had lambs to sell, or eggs and honey. My father would talk to the other men and my mother and I would go to buy fruit and vegetables. Sometimes she would buy me a little sweet pastry if I was good. My father told me about the Hornblower, who blew his horn at nine o clock at night at all four corners of the obelisk. Sometimes I would pretend to be the man blowing his horn, but that meant I didn't always get the pastry, though sometimes I swear I saw my father laughing and my mother telling him off. Those days he would give me a sweet from his pocket, so I wasn't too sad
 
We lived in a cottage with a garden where my mother raised hens and had her beehives and apple trees. I loved watching the bees on sunny summer afternoons, until my mother chased me indoors to do my spelling or help her make the bread.
 
William Aislabie was lord of the soil – that always sounded like he needed a wash to me – and my father and other men in the village kept their sheep on Hutton Conyers Moor. My father was the shepherd for the township of Hutton Conyers, and he looked out for all of the sheep. I knew the days when he'd had to move the sheep because the lord's shepherd demanded the best bits of grass, because he would come home cross and wouldn't play with me.  
 
On the first day of the year, my mother made a big apple pie from the apples stored in the cellar and a peck of flour, and my father took this to the bailiff, along with a two penny sweetcake he bought from the market. He had to take a wooden spoon as well. I didn't understand why until one day he agreed to take me along, provided I was as quiet as the little mice that live in the outhouse.
 
We got to the bailiff's house, and my father needn't have worried about me being quiet – I was too scared to say a word. There were the shepherds I knew from the moors, and the lord and the bailiff and steward looking tall and stern. I sat quiet in a corner and watched my father take up his pie and cake. It was as big as our oven, about 18 inches across, and the bailiff measured it with his rule.
 
He said that he would return it and fine the town if it wasn't big enough. I must have looked scared, because my father looked at me and winked. The bailiff cut it into four parts – one for the steward, one for the tenant of the coneywarren, and the rest cut into six, one piece for each shepherd. My father always brought the pieces home for my mother and I, and my favourite was the one that had an inner pie all filled with prunes, from the the shepherd of Rainton.
 
The sweetcakes were cut up just the same, and then the bailiff brought out an earthen pot of furmenty and a little bowl of mustard. You don't know what furmenty is? It's a porridge of wheat boiled up with broth, and it's tasty on a cold day.
 
The bailiff mixed mustard in, and took the pot outside, into his garth, and gave each shepherd a slice of cheese and a penny roll. The steward took a large spoonful, then the tenant of the warren, and then my father was the first shepherd to take a spoonful, using his own wooden spoon. My father told me that eating the furmenty showed that he was loyal to the lord. The last shepherd told the bailiff that he had forgotten his spoon to eat the furmenty, and I was worried and I asked what would happen to him. My father laughed and put me up on my shoulders so I could see. The bailiff’s face was cross, and then I realised that he was pretending, and was actually trying not to smile. The other shepherds made the man without a spoon lay down on the ground and eat out of the pot. He looked so funny when he stood up, yellow furmenty all over his face.
 
Everyone had a glass of ale and drank the health of the lord of the manor, and then we went back into the bailiff's house. I was so tired that father carried me all the way home, wrapped up tight in a blanket against the cold wind.