On 1 November each year, churches across Britain mark All Saints' Day - a solemnity honouring every saint, known and unknown, who has attained heaven. In 2026, the date falls neatly on a Sunday, meaning no transfer is required and congregations will gather on the actual feast. For many, it is a day buried beneath the commercial spectacle of Halloween, a quiet counterpoint of candlelight and choral hymns. Yet its placement on the calendar was no accident. November 1 was chosen, in all likelihood, to displace something older: Samhain, the Celtic festival that marked the beginning of winter and, in the Celtic reckoning, the new year.
Samhain - pronounced "SAH-win" - signified "summer's end." The Celts, who inhabited England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and parts of northern France, believed that on the eve of Samhain the boundary between the living and the dead dissolved. Souls returned to their earthly homes. Bonfires were lit for protection and divination. The Venerable Bede, writing in the seventh century, referred to November as "Blod-monath" - Blood Month - when livestock were slaughtered before winter and their meat salted.
The Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43 layered additional observances onto the Celtic substrate. Feralia, a late October festival commemorating the dead, and a celebration honouring Pomona, goddess of fruit and trees, both left traces. Pomona's symbol was the apple, which likely accounts for the enduring tradition of apple bobbing - known in northern England as "ducking."
Popes, Politicians and the Making of a Universal Feast
The earliest Christian commemoration of all martyrs can be traced to the fourth century. In Edessa, a feast of all martyrs was observed on 13 May, a date recorded by Ephraem Syrus, who died around 373. In Antioch, it fell on the Sunday after Pentecost. In Rome, Pope Boniface IV chose 13 May 609 - or possibly 610 - to consecrate the Pantheon, the former temple to all the Roman gods, as a Christian church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and all martyrs. He ordered an annual anniversary. For more than a century, the spring date held.
The decisive shift came under Pope Gregory III, who reigned from 731 to 741. He consecrated a chapel in the original St. Peter's Basilica to all the saints - not merely martyrs, but the full communion of the holy - and fixed the anniversary to 1 November. The Venerable Bede, who died in 735, recorded that All Saints' Day was already being observed on that date in England. Gregory's choice has been read by historians as a deliberate act of sacralisation: a Christian holy day planted precisely where the pagan festival of the dead had been celebrated, gradually redirecting spiritual energy from Samhain to the saints.
The policy was consolidated in 837, when Pope Gregory IV ordered general observance throughout the Latin Church. According to the chronicler Ado of Vienne, Gregory IV asked King Louis the Pious to proclaim the feast across the Frankish Empire. The move was not purely pastoral. Christianity coexisted with folk beliefs that proved stubbornly persistent. Samhain's bonfires, disguises and divination games did not vanish. They were absorbed.
All Hallows and the Birth of Halloween
In medieval England, the festival was called All Hallows - a compound of the Middle English "hallow," meaning saint or holy person. The evening before it became All Hallows' Eve, contracted over centuries to Halloween. The word "hallow" survives in the King James translation of the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." To hallow something is to make it holy, to set it apart as sacred.
The three-day period encompassing Halloween (31 October), All Saints' Day (1 November) and All Souls' Day (2 November) is known as Allhallowtide, a triduum dedicated to remembering the dead. All Souls' Day, first instituted at the monastery of Cluny in 993, extended the commemoration beyond the saints in heaven to all the faithful departed, particularly those believed to be in purgatory. Priests encouraged their flocks to pray for the souls of the departed. Families visited graveyards, decorating graves with garlands, flowers, candles and incense.
In England, the Reformation did not erase the feast. The Book of Common Prayer of 1549, and all subsequent revisions, retained All Saints' Day in the liturgical calendar. The Church of England today recognises it as a Principal Feast - one of the highest-ranking days in the Christian year - and permits its celebration on either 1 November or the Sunday between 30 October and 5 November. In 2026, the alignment is convenient: 1 November falls on a Sunday, so no transfer is needed.
Souling, Turnips and the Origins of Trick-or-Treat
Long before the American import of pumpkin-carving reached British shores, All Hallows' Eve was marked by distinctly English customs. The practice of souling - in which the poor went door to door begging for money, apples, ale or "soul cakes" - dates to medieval England and is widely regarded as an ancestor of trick-or-treating. Soul cakes were small round biscuits, often marked with a cross, given in exchange for prayers for the dead. By the 1800s, children had taken up the tradition, gathering in groups and sometimes singing "soulers' songs."
The turnip, not the pumpkin, was the original jack-o'-lantern. Children carried hollowed-out turnips - or mangle wurzels in some regions - with a candle placed inside. Apple bobbing, nut-cracking divination games and bonfires all persisted through the Victorian era, when Halloween parties became fashionable social occasions. Hugh Miller, in his 1876 book Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, described evenings filled with "a multitude of wild mischievous games which people tolerated at no other time."
Professor Chris Baker, an authority on British folk traditions, noted that All Hallows' Eve customs were "often accompanied by lanterns made from candles within hollowed-out mangle wurzels or turnips" and remained an "uncanny" time when "spirits were abroad." Even where clergy attempted to suppress the bonfires and disguises, the customs mutated - from large communal fires to handheld bundles of straw set alight on forks, or small bonfires known as "tindles" around Derby, associated with prayers for the dead.
The Saints of Britain's Quiet Corners
All Saints' Day honours not only the canonised figures - Mary, Paul, Peter, Francis of Assisi - but also the thousands of unnamed holy men and women who shaped Britain's spiritual landscape. Before formal canonisation was established in the tenth century, Britain had accumulated hundreds of home-grown saints, memorialised by holy wells, caves and churches in remote corners of the countryside.
Between the fifth and seventh centuries, Christians travelled in small wooden boats between Ireland, Brittany, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Wales, founding monasteries devoted to prayer, learning and manual labour. Occasionally a monk or nun left for the wilderness - an island, a cave, a fen - seeking isolation as a hermit. These individuals were venerated as saints long before any centralised authority confirmed their status. Among them is Melangell, patron saint of hares, whose church stands in the valley of the Hafren in Powys.
The Venerable Bede, writing in the early eighth century, recorded that All Saints' Day was already celebrated on 1 November in England - one of the earliest attestations of the November date anywhere in Europe. The English calendar in which Bede participated placed the feast alongside the names of local saints whose lives were remembered in parish churches across the land. This was not a top-down imposition. It was a living tradition, rooted in the landscape.
A Day of Obligation, A Day of Remembrance
In the Roman Catholic Church, All Saints' Day is a holy day of obligation - one of a small number of feasts on which the faithful are required to attend Mass. In England and Wales, the Catholic Bishops' Conference has stipulated that when 1 November falls on a Saturday or a Monday, the solemnity is transferred to the adjacent Sunday. In 2026, no such transfer is necessary. The feast falls on Sunday itself, and the obligation is fulfilled on the day.
The Anglican tradition treats it as a Principal Feast, the highest category of observance in the Church of England's calendar. All Saints Margaret Street, the Anglo-Catholic church in London, marks the occasion with a Vigil Low Mass on Saturday evening, a High Mass on Sunday morning with full choir, and Solemn Evensong and Benediction. The 2026 setting is Mozart's Missa Brevis in B-flat, K275, with William Byrd's Justorum animae as the Offertory Anthem. The congregation will sing For All the Saints, its words by bishop Walsham How, set to the tune Sine Nomine by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate All Saints' Sunday on the first Sunday after Pentecost. The Coptic Orthodox tradition marks the feast on Nayrouz, 11 September, the start of the Coptic new year. These variations remind us that All Saints' Day is not a single observance but a constellation of practices united by a shared conviction: that the saints - whether their names are known or not - remain present in the life of the church.
The Collect appointed for All Saints' Day in the Church of England encapsulates this belief in a few spare lines: "Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son." The saints are not relics of the past. They are, in the theology of the feast, an active company - interceding, inspiring, and holding open the path between the living and the dead.
An English Feast, Still Unfolding
All Saints' Day in England has always been a layered thing - Roman and Celtic, sacred and secular, solemn and mischievous. The bonfires that once warded off spirits became the lanterns that lit children's paths between houses. The prayers for souls in purgatory became the soul cakes that sustained the poor. The costumes that once concealed the wearer from witches became the fancy dress of Victorian parties and, eventually, the branded outfits of a global entertainment industry.
Yet beneath the accumulated strata, the core of the feast endures. On 1 November, in churches up and down the country, candles will be lit. Names will be read from the book of remembrance. The Litany of the Saints will be intoned - a call-and-response prayer invoking Mary, the Apostles and the whole company of heaven. The dead will be remembered. The saints will be honoured. And the boundary between past and present, for a few hours at least, will feel a little less fixed than it does the rest of the year.
