According to Thomas Tusser's Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie,3 one of the most popular books of the sixteenth century, containing advice on all matters of farming and household economy, the holiday traditionally associated with the slaughter of large animals for winter was Martlemas. The witch's presumably evil motives for killing swine notwithstanding, her butchery is seasonally appropriate. Further, not only does the adjective rump-fed''-interpreted as meaning either fed on rump (i.e., offal, or the waste parts of animals) or fed in the rump (i.e., merely fattened)-underline the association with late autumn, but so also does the reference to chestnuts, which are traditionally harvested in the fall. In this context Banquo's remark in 1.6 about the delicate air that attracts the martlets may be taken as a possible allusion to Martin's Summer,4 the period of unseasonably mild weather occurring in mid-November that customarily marks the migratory departure of the martlet from England.5 In this same pattern of references, the vice of drunkenness, upon which the porter expounds at length and to which Duncan's grooms succumb, thus leaving the king defenseless, was known as St. Martin's evil. ,6