Bank holiday Monday, April 5 sees one of the Rye annual calendar's great historic days, with mayor making and the tradition of throwing hot pennies from the town hall window for local children to collect.
Cllr Andy Stuart is likely to be officially elected mayor for a second year during a meeting of Rye Town Council. The town hall meeting will also see the confirmation of Chris Hoggart as deputy mayor, along with oaths being sworn by the town clerk, chaplain and mace bearers.
Local dignitaries including the new lord warden of the Cinque Ports, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, will join Rye town councillors in full robes for the ceremony, before a church service at St Mary’s starting at 11:45am.
Guests and councillors will then return to the town hall for the throwing of hot pennies at 12:30pm.
There are two theories why hot pennies are thrown. One is that the coins were fresh from Rye’s mint, though historians now think this is unlikely. The more plausible theory is that the coins were heated to give more children a fair chance of collecting them.
Former Rye mayor EF Benson describes the ceremony in his book Final Edition. “I and other councillors threw bagfuls of pennies to be scrambled for according to immemorial custom by the children of Rye assembled in the street below. The pennies used once to be heated so that the donors might enjoy the medieval amusement of seeing the children burn their fingers when they picked them up, thus combining a mild sadism with inexpensive charity.”
