- summer. Dae ye mind on lang, lang syne, When the simmer days were fine?
Memory makes the summers of long ago warmer and sunnier, and the glories of summers gone by are recorded in early Scots literature: Cum, somer, cum, the suete sesoun and sonne! King James the First of Scotland around 1409 hails the summer in his poem the Kingis Quair. Gavin Douglas in the Prologue to his Aeneid (1513) rejoices in Cleir schynand bemys, and goldyn symmyris hew. For some churchgoers, however, summer had its disadvantages; Charles Rogers in his Social Life in Scotland records how the Kirk Session of Dundonald in 1642 determined that no women be suffered to sit in the time of sommer with plyds [shawls] upon their heids since it is a cleuck [ensnarement] to their sleiping in tyme of sermon. They could sleep snugly through a winter sermon though.