May Day For Merry Making (16 April 1976)
I like the idea of May Day becoming a public holiday again. For many centuries May Day holiday and merry making were customary throughout the land. Historically speaking, the custom has only recently died out, and country children continued to celebrate the day up to living memory.
Even I, comparatively young as I am, can remember cart horses wearing coloured rosettes and ribbons on the first of May – which, I suppose, was a carry-over of ancient practice.
How ancient, nobody really knows. Some have traced the May revels back to the Festival to Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and fruitfulness.
Similarly, dancing round the garlanded maypole, in which coloured ribbons are interwoven until the pole is touchable by the dancers’ hands, is said to have originated in the ancient custom of touching a green tree in the spring to gain contact with the spirit of growth dwelling unseen among its foliage. The still-common practice of “touching wood” for luck could be a relic of this.
The early Christian church frowned upon such proceedings because of their origins, but then apparently accepted them as being comparatively harmless, for during the Middle Ages everybody, both high and low, went a-maying at an early hour on May Day “to fetch the flowers fresh.”
Later, the Puritans strongly denounced the revels and their Parliament banned them, but they came back to favour with the restoration of the merry monarch, Charles II.
I don’t know when “Flora’s Holiday” ceased to be general. I do know that continual days off for Saints’ days, May fairs and the like could hardly be tolerated by industrialists using steam power.
However that might be, May is usually the prettiest month of the English year, and village children, aided and abetted by their mothers, continued to celebrate it in their own pretty ways up to modern times and long after most village maypoles had disappeared.
In fact, there are still quite a number of old ladies who recall May Day as one of the highlights of their childhood years.
Thus, in a book of memories, “A Pattern Of Hundreds,” recently compiled by the Bucks Federation of Women’s Institutes, no fewer than 14 of the contributors refer to May Days in their respective towns and villages.
Some describe the proceedings in some detail: the choosing of the May King and Queen, Jack-in-the-Green, Chief Courtier, Prince and Princess, etc. At least one indicates that she herself was once Queen of the May.
Ten of the May Day mentions are from Mid-Bucks and South Bucks, but there are also four from the north – Wolverton, Little Horwood, Leckhamstead and Westbury.
The Wolverton one says: “In Wolverton, just before the First World War, carol singers still used to come round early on May Day morning. Small groups of children, carrying a May garland and a collecting box, called at the houses and sang;
A bunch of May I have brought you
And at your door it stands.
It’s well set out and well spread about
By the work of our Lord’s hands.
“The garland was often a small hoop, covered with coloured tissue paper and flowers, but sometimes the carol singers pushed a decorated wooden push chair. Even the baby in it was covered with daisy chains!
“The flowers used were often cowslips and bluebells. The bunch of may was usually only in bud, as on this cold clay soil it was hardly ever in flower by May Day.”
The Little Horwood contributor writes: “One of the year’s loveliest days was May Day. My grandmother had a beautiful garden full of old-fashioned flowers. She used to pick a small bunch for the younger children and the older ones each had a crown imperial.
“We carried these flowers round from door to door singing as we went, all dressed up in our prettiest dresses with daisy chains for hair bands, necklaces and bracelets.” There follows the May Day song, but it now had two verses.
An even better description comes from Leckhamstead, and this has a song of four verses.
Of the 14 contributions it is interesting to see how the custom is strongest in the smallest and most remote villages, while in other places, as at Wolverton, with its groups of carollers instead of a procession, it is obviously in process of dying away. Three contributors still remember dancing round the maypoles, but in other cases the maypole has degenerated to a stick with a garland at the end, carried by the boys.
None of the Old Bletchley contributors mentions May Day, and the Rev. F W Bennitt’s “History of Bletchley,” though mentioning May Day customs, does so in general and without relating specifically to Bletchley. Maybe he thought that could be taken for granted.
We know that Fenny Stratford celebrated, however, for Mrs Emily Fennemore, in memoirs published by the Gazette in 1949, when she was aged 76, wrote: “On Valentine’s Day children used to come round and sing, and on the First of May they brought their garlands and sang. All these old customs have died out.”
The last May Day custom in this area of which I have a note comes from the North Bucks Times of June 4, 1946, and refers to Little Brickhill. It was written by an old man who was a regular contributor, and it says:
“I referred in one of my notes about the merry month of May to an old custom which was once popular at Tilsworth. A Little Brickhill reader who is unknown to me writes that he has seen the custom in operation this May. It was carried out on the feast day, May 12, and branches of may were placed at the doorsteps of inns and of houses wherein lived a spinster.
“The writer understands that it was the custom of the person responsible for placing the branches on the doorsteps to call later for a tip from those living in the house. I might add that in the days of long ago the people of Tilsworth also sought a drink or a cake or both.”
Which makes me wonder whether this is still done up there on the hill.
Of latter years May Day has come to be associated with a political movement. “Mayday” is also a distress signal. But I don’t think either of those is what our old merry May day should be all about, do you?
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