Explore "The Bridal Wreath" by Sigrid Undset on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The farmers' guild of Aker had St. Margaret for their patroness, and they began their festival each year on the twentieth of July, the day of St. Margaret's Mass. On that day the guild-brothers and sisters, with their children, their guests and their serving-folk, gathered at Aker's church and heard mass at St. Margaret's altar there; after that they wended their way to the hall of the guild, which lay near the Hofvin hospital -- there they were wont to hold a drinking-feast lasting five days.
But since both Aker's church and the Hofvin spital belonged to Nonneseter, and as, besides, many of the Aker farmers were tenants of the convent, it had come to be the custom that the Abbess and some of the elder Sisters should honour the guild by coming to the feasting on the first day. And those of the young maids who were at the convent only to learn, and were not to take the veil, had leave to go with them and to dance in the evening; therefore at this feast they wore their own clothes and not the convent habit.