The summer holidays are here again, and many of us may be looking forward to going abroad or on a day trip away for a change of scene.

If you are not having a holiday, you may be feeling rather sad that you are missing out; spare a thought for our ancestors who had very few holidays and had to work six days a week almost all year round.

Our word ‘holiday’ comes from the medieval Holy Days that were held to mark important religious festivals in the church calendar.

Then, everyone would participate in the religious festival, and no work would be done on that particular day.

The Hunts Post: From left to right: John Twigden, Miss Ratchelors, Rev. W. Knights and Mrs Knights on holiday at Skegness,1927.From left to right: John Twigden, Miss Ratchelors, Rev. W. Knights and Mrs Knights on holiday at Skegness,1927. (Image: St Neots Museum)

Christmas Day, Good Friday and Easter Sunday were the three most important holy days during the medieval period.

However, a local saints day might be an important event locally, and the Festival of St Neot (originally December 6-8) was celebrated here throughout the medieval period to honour St Neot, whose shrine was part of the Priory monastery.

READ MORE: Museum curator Liz Davies to stand down after 11 years

Apart from religious festivals, the changing seasons of the agricultural year provided times when less work was required (for example, in winter), and the period after harvest in late August and early September was traditionally a time of celebration.

It was during the Victorian period that workers began to demand limited working hours and some time off each week, and it was the Victorians who created an official holiday for workers when they introduced the August Bank Holiday Act of 1873.

By this time, railway lines were already stretching across the country (The Great Northern Line through St Neots opened in 1850), and day trips or ‘excursions’ began to become popular.

By 1878 the St Neots Chronicle was reporting that over 150 people had taken a train excursion to the seaside at Skegness, and during that summer, the paper was also advertising train excursions to the Huntingdon Races and the Cambridgeshire Agricultural Show.

Day trips remained popular in the following years, but local events such as the Eynesbury Feast also continued to be popular, and Fred Tebbutt recalled attending the Feast on the Conygear field as a small child and seeing stalls, rides and even bears in a cage.

It was not until after the Second World War that increased prosperity and the passenger jet brought the possibility of a holiday abroad, and by 1970 the first prize for the winner of the St Neots Carnival Queen competition was ‘two weeks in the sun at one of Spain’s most sophisticated seaside resorts, Torremolinos on the Costa del Sol coastline’.

If you are holidaying at home in St Neots why not visit the museum, enjoy the marble run activity and try a family workshop session for £4.50 per child by visiting: https://www.stneotsmuseum.org.uk/whats-on.