Alternatively known as ‘Mid-Lent Sunday’ or ‘Pudding Pie Sunday’, it was a day in Lent when the fasting rules were relaxed to honour the ‘Feeding of the Five Thousand’.

However, it was more usual to refer to the day as Mothering Sunday, despite the fact that noone is absolutely certain how the name began. Theories abound but the most popular is that the celebration could have been adopted from a Roman spring festival celebrating Cybele, their Mother Goddess.

As Christianity spread, the date was adopted by Christians. The epistle in the Book of Common Prayer for the heavenly Jerusalem as ‘the Mother of all us all’ and this may have prompted the customs that we still see and follow today.

Mothering Sunday in the UK is on a different date to the American celebration on the second Sunday in May, as trademarked by Anna Jarvis in 1912.