Trick-or-treating started with soul cakes given out for the dead.

The story you've heard

Every Halloween, children walk from door to door, knock, say a few words and are rewarded with something sweet. It feels like a modern ritual, but people have been doing something remarkably similar at this time of year for at least five centuries.

The custom was called souling, and the treat was the soul cake. It is often described as the origin of trick-or-treating. The truth is a little more tangled, but the story of souling is worth telling on its own.

Prayers at the door

In the medieval Church, the first two days of November were set aside for the dead: All Saints' Day on 1 November and All Souls' Day on 2 November. Together with Halloween, the eve before, they made up a season called Allhallowtide. Many Christians believed that the souls of the dead might wait in purgatory before reaching heaven, and that the prayers of the living could help them on their way.

Souling grew out of that belief. Groups of poorer people, and later mostly children, went to the doors of better-off neighbours. They sang and offered to pray for the souls of the household's dead relatives. In return they were given food, money, apples, ale, or a soul cake. According to the historian Lisa Morton, the earliest report of souling dates from 1511, and the custom was once found throughout the British Isles.

Soul cakes were small and round, closer to a spiced shortbread biscuit than a fluffy modern cake. Recipes used sweet spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger or allspice, often with currants or raisins, and the top was marked with a cross before baking to show that the cakes were given as charity.

Shakespeare's beggar

The custom was familiar enough that Shakespeare could make a joke about it. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, written around the early 1590s, the servant Speed teases his lovesick master by listing the signs of a man in love. One of them is whining like a beggar at Hallowmas, the old name for the feast of All Saints.

It is a throwaway line, but it tells us that Elizabethan audiences knew the sight of people asking for alms at Hallowmas, and the plaintive tone in which they did it.

A custom that would not die

Souling outlived the religious upheavals of the following centuries, and in England it was kept up by Protestants and Catholics alike until at least the 1930s. It slowly became more local and more about children, songs and treats. By the late nineteenth century it survived mainly in parts of the English Midlands and the north-west, and in Wales.

By the nineteenth century, some soulers dressed up in costumes and carried hollowed-out turnips with candles inside, said to stand for souls trapped in purgatory. Costumes, lanterns and a knock at the door: it is easy to see why people look here for the roots of Halloween.

In Cheshire, soulers performed short death-and-resurrection plays at farmhouses, with the Old Hob, a horse's head carried on a pole under a sheet. Players at Antrobus still tour local pubs every year between Halloween and mid-November. In Sheffield, children kept up a version known as caking night. Folk song collectors wrote down souling songs in the nineteenth century, and in 1963 the American trio Peter, Paul and Mary recorded a Cheshire version, which brought the tune to a whole new audience.

So is it where trick-or-treating comes from?

Here historians part ways. Souling is clearly one ancestor: door-to-door visits, something given in return for something performed, all at the same time of year. But it is not the only candidate. In Scotland and Ireland, costumed guisers went from house to house offering songs, jokes or poems in exchange for food or coins. In North America, German immigrants brought belsnickeling, in which costumed children visited neighbours at Christmas. And in the early twentieth century, North American children were demanding treats in return for not playing pranks.

Modern trick-or-treating probably borrowed from all of these. The Library of Congress lists several competing theories, and the safest answer is that souling helped shape the habit without being its only root. Soul cakes, meanwhile, are still baked in some English homes every November, ready for anyone who knocks.

Timeline

1. 1511The earliest reported souling activity in England, according to historian Lisa Morton.
2. Early 1590sShakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona jokes about a beggar at Hallowmas.
3. 1819George Ormerod publishes a Cheshire souling song.
4. 1891A Cheshire souling song is collected from a schoolgirl and published two years later.
5. 1963Peter, Paul and Mary record their version, A' Soalin'.