Lammas (from Old English hlāfmæsse, "loaf-mass"), also known as Loaf Mass Day, is a Christian holiday celebrated in some English-speaking countries in the Northern Hemisphere[citation needed] on 1 August.

[3] It is a festival in the liturgical calendar to mark the blessing of the First Fruits of harvest, with a loaf of bread being brought to the church for this purpose.

[6] While Lammas is traditionally a Christian holy day, some neopagans have adopted the name and date for one of their harvest festivals in their Wheel of the Year.

John Brady[9] supposed that tenants of the Cathedral of York, dedicated to St Peter in Chains, of which this is the feast, were required to bring a live lamb to the church.

[8] In Christianity, the offering of first fruits to God has a history, as in the Old Testament, "when the harvest ripened the priest went into the field and gathered a sheaf of first-ripened grain.

[8] For many villeins, the wheat must have run low in the days before Lammas, and the new harvest began a season of plenty, of hard work and company in the fields, reaping in teams.

[8] However, Hutton says that "MacNeill's thesis of a pan-Celtic seasonal ritual, like her reconstruction of pagan rites, is so far un-proven" and to prove it "would involve a detailed knowledge of the religious calendar of the Anglo-Saxons before they arrived in England, which is impossible".

Another well-known cultural reference is the opening of The Battle of Otterburn: "It fell about the Lammas tide when the muir-men win their hay.

[24] Exeter in Devon is one of the few towns in England that still celebrates its Lammas Fair and has a processional custom which stretches back over 900 years, led by the Lord Mayor.

[25] A low-impact development project at Tir y Gafel, Glandwr, Pembrokeshire,[26] Lammas Ecovillage, is a collective initiative for nine self-built homes.