On Mothering Sunday, or Mid-Lent Sunday (fourth Sunday in Lent), children and young people living away from their parents would make a point of going home for the day, taking presents, usually including a cake for their mother, and sharing a meal with their family before returning. This day was particularly important for apprentices, live-in farmworkers, and girls in service, and it was generally accepted that they had a right to the day off. The earliest two references to the custom come hard on the heels of each other in the mid-17th century:

Every Midlent Sunday is a great day at Worcester, when all the children and god-children meet at the head and cheife of the family and have a feast. They call it the Mothering-day’. (Diary of Richard Symonds, 1644)

and, in Robert Herrick's oft-quoted poem A Ceremonie in Glocester: ‘I’le to thee a Simnell bring, ‘Gainst thou go'st a mothering’ (Hesperides, 1648).

The first two references are thus from the same western side of the country and support the idea that this was a regional custom which later spread to other parts of western and mid-land England (and Wales) but was never universal. Several writers make a point of saying that they had never heard of it before, for example in N&Q (4s:5 (1870), 399-400) and Gentleman's Magazine (1784: 343), but it persisted into the early 20th century in some areas. The visiting gradually died out as living-in with employers became a rarity. The elements that are almost always mentioned are the foodstuffs; either the items taken by the returning youngsters, or the traditional dishes eaten at the home, and variant names for the day were often derived from the food involved.

Several authorities maintain that the ultimate origin of the day is to be found in a previous Church custom in which parishioners went in procession at mid-Lent to visit their Mother Church—hence the name Mothering Sunday. There is no proof either way, but given the regional nature of the family-visit Mothering Sunday it seems unlikely that there is a connection between the two customs.

During the later 20th century, a subsidiary custom developed, based on the local church, with clergy handing out little posies of flowers, and sometimes pieces of cake, to children to give to their mothers. But a much stronger influence came from the USA, from where the invented Mother's Day was introduced soon after the Second World War, although it was placed on Mid-Lent Sunday rather than the fixed American date. Most British people now use the term Mother's Day, although churchgoing families still tend to call the day Mothering Sunday. It is likely that the latter term will continue to lose ground to the more widely used Mother's Day.

Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.

• Charles Edward Long (ed.), Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army During the Great Civil War Kept by Richard Symonds (Camden Society, 1859), 27
• Wright and Lones, 1936: i. 42-51
• Hutton, 1996: 174-7