Midsummer Traditions and Folklore

A longer version of an essay included with the Folklore Tapes box Calendar Customs IV: Crown of Light

Midsummer is the most natural time of the year for a celebration marked by simple pleasure and unaffected joy. The midwinter rites of Christmastide, the diametric opposite of midsummer on the face of the annular calendar, have an air of fortification and remembrance – illumination kindled to hold back the dark and nurture a hope for solar renaissance. If midwinter is the time when the seeds of light are sown, midsummer is the moment when they flower to their fullest extent. The sun is at its apogee, its long arc across the sky vaulting to its utmost height. The earth, spinning through its axially tilting orbital dance, presents its northern hemisphere to bask in solar warmth, bringing out its summer colours – bright grassy greens and buttercup yellows, speedwell blues and poppy reds. Darkness has been cast aside, compressed into a few brief hours (or dispelled altogether if you travel far enough north into the Scottish isles or Scandinavian wilds). The triumph of light, of the spirit of life, is to be rejoiced in unreservedly, no matter how brief its moment of ascendance.

As with midwinter rites, including Christmas day itself, there is a slight misalignment with the precise moment of solstice division into maximal periods of light and dark. The summer solstice falls on the 21st June. The first rays of the rising sun shafting through the megaliths of Stonehenge onto its central ‘altar’ stone are greeted by Druid revivalists, rooted in 18th century reinventions. Thousands of bystanders respond to the morning solar radiance with the glinting digital scintillations of their mobile cameras and phones – a very modern form of worship, attracting a mass congregation, if only for this one day. The antiquarian dream of Stonehenge as a solar temple of the Druids is one which enchanted William Blake amongst others, as the image of a megalithic trilithon gateway for the giants of old Albion in his illuminated book Jerusalem attests. Mere fancy it may be, but it’s one which still exerts considerable influence on the contemporary imagination, mired in a materialistic present and yearning for a sense of connection with a magical past.

Traditional midsummer celebrations have not taken place at the time of the solstice, however, but three days later on the 24th, St John’s Day, and even more so on its preceding eve. This is the date which has come to be officially designated midsummer’s day. Further festivities were held on the joint saint day of Peter and Paul, the 28th. Many must have simply bridged the two festival days with continuous merriment. And remember, this is the time of Glastonbury weather (the Glastonbury festival being a modern manifestation of midsummer revels), so suggesting alternative dates for a festival which was of its essence an outdoors celebration was an eminently pragmatic hedging of bets.

There’s really only one way to celebrate the supremacy of the sun and whatever divinities are associated with it: build up huge fires on the high places of the landscape to reflect some of its flaring, mesmerically roiling photosphere back at it; to emulate some of its warmth, that radiance which makes the heart lighter, the spirit more buoyant. Poets have recognised the spiritual refreshment afforded by this time of light, its countermanding of wintry melancholy. Matthew Arnold, in Thyrsis, his elegy to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, asks of those who suggest their spirit departs with the falling blossom ‘too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?/Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,/Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,/Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,/Sweet-William with his homely cottage smell,/And stocks in fragrant blow;/Roses that down the alleys shine afar,/And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,/And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,/And the full moon, and the white evening-star.’

John Clare, the farm labourer poet, who suffered desperately from the depredations of depression, nevertheless revelled in the ecstatic moods of summer: ‘Now swathy summer by rude health embrowned/Precedence takes of rosy fingered spring/And laughing joy with wild flowers prankt and crowned/A wild and giddy thing/With health robust from every care unbound/Comes on zephers wing/And cheers the toiling clown.
Happy as holiday enjoying face/Loud tongued and ‘merry as a marriage bell’/They lightsome step sheds joy in every place/And where the troubled dwell/Thy witching smiles weans them of half their cares/And from thy sunny spell/They greet joy unawares’.

Accounts from as far back as the 4th century in the old French province of Acquitaine record midsummer fire festivals in which blazing wheels were set rolling down steep hillsides – the solar disc turning on its tumbling course. In mid 19th century Buckfastleigh in Devon a wheel with rim and spokes wrapped in straw was set ablaze and rolled from the heights on midsummer eve, accompanied on its fiery descent by villagers pelting alongside, attempting to steer it with sticks to a steamy dousing in the river Dart. If they succeeded in their endeavour, good fortune would prevail over the coming months, and a good harvest guaranteed. If not, they’d had a wild time and could repair breathlessly to the nearest alehouse to drown their thirst.

Font in Bratton Clovelly church, Devon

The representation of the sun as a wheel was common in medieval times. It symbolised both its daily progress across the sky and the procession of the solar year with its seasonal transformations. Solar wheels can be traced on many Norman fonts, often the oldest objects in rural parish churches. Like many other pagan symbols or allegorical beasts, they have been translated into a Christian idiom. This marked a process of continuity and fusion as much as an imposition of alien values. It was the cataclysmic historical and cultural rift of the Reformation which brought this continuum of belief and practice to a violent iconoclastic end.

John Aubrey

The fires of medieval belief and ritual were increasingly stamped out, both literally and figuratively. The antiquarian John Aubrey wrote, in his 1688 volume Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme (a pioneering folkloric work), ‘still in many places on St John’s night they make Fires on the Hills: but the Civill Warres comeing on have putt all these Rites or customes quite out of fashion’. Nevertheless, the tradition lived on the further reaches of the isles.

Hilltop fires were lit on St John’s Eve across England and Eastern and Northern Scotland and in the Northern Isles (less so in the Celtic lands of Wales, Ireland and the Western Isles). In Scotland, the sun’s progress would be ritually re-enacted by processing around the fields three times sunwise (ie clockwise) with blazing torches held aloft, the crops and herds thereby blessed. Bonfires were started as the sun slowly sank below the horizon, staining the sky with its tangerine and vermillion afterglow. In the Northern Isles, Johnsmas fires were built from varied materials including heather, fish bones, peat, flowers, seaweed and feathers.

In Westernmost Cornwall, chains of fires were lit tracing the rugged, curving concave coastline of Mount’s Bay from Penzance to the Lizard. Cornish midsummer fire traditions were revived by the Old Cornwall Society in 1929, colouring them with druidic romance whose nationalist elements lent the proceedings a curiously formal, civic air. Beginning atop the tor of Carn Brea, the site of a Neolithic settlement, the fires are blessed in the old Cornish language and flowers arranged in the shape of a sickle thrown into the flames by a local girl designated the Lady of the Flowers. The sickle anticipates the harvest whilst the ceremony is a decorous and fragrant reminder of a more elementally superstitious past when a bountiful harvest required the offering of human life. Antiquarians in previous centuries dreamed of detecting remnants of the wicker giant sacrifices which Julius Caesar claimed to have witnessed in the Gaul of the 1st century BC in midsummer fire rituals, but there was really no evidence to support the fabric of their fancies.

Sir Benjamin Stone's picture of the Whalton Baal Fire rites in 1903

The Baal Fire at Whalton in Northumberland is lit on the village green on the 4th July, harking back to the old midsummer’s eve date before the rift between the Julian calendar and its Gregorian replacement opened up in September 1752, a faultline which swallowed up 11 days (precious moments guarded by the Paladin of the Lost Hour in Harlan Ellison’s short story). It’s a celebration which can lay claim to real continuity, perhaps even with a pre-Reformation tradition. The word baal could derive from the Celtic bel, meaning the sun, or light, or from the Anglo-Saxon bael, meaning fire (which is also the root of Beltane). Fuel for the fire is carried by hand to the place of burning, and children dance around the stacked tinder before it is set alight as the evening shadows gather. Couples take over from the children, dancing around the flames and later leaping over the crackling embers, as was the way with midsummer fires across the land. Leaping the fire and darting through its smoke, breathing in and wreathing the body with its heady woodscent aroma was an act of purification and invited good fortune.

A Shropshire monk writing in the 14th century described the ‘three manner of fires’ which were made on St John’s eve. ‘One is of clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John’s Fire’. The bonefire was a purifying conflagration, its evil stench and acrid smoke driving away malevolent forces and keeping pestilence at bay. The wake fire was the sociable circle of warmth around which people would gather for the night. St John’s Fire was a ritual blaze with a rather more solemn ambience.

It wasn’t just in rural areas that fires were started. The estimable John Stow, Elizabethan tailor and self-educated antiquarian (who we’ve encountered in previous Calendar Customs explorations) recorded his good-humoured observations of London midsummer celebrations in his invaluable and highly readable 1598 masterpiece Survey of London. ‘In the month of June and July, on the vigils of festival days, and on the same festival days in the evening after the sun setting, there were usually made bonfires in the streets, every man bestowing wood or labour towards them: the wealthier sort also, before their doors near to the said bonfires, would set out tables on the vigils, furnished with sweet bread and good drink, and on the festival days with meats and drinks plentifully, whereunto they would invite their neighbours and passengers also to sit and be merry with them in great familiarity, praising God for His benefits bestowed on them. These were called bonfires as well of good amity amongst neighbours before at controversy, were there, by the labour of others, reconciled, and made of bitter enemies loving friends; and also for the virtue that a great fire hath to purge the infection of the air’. As well as re-iterating the idea of fire and its smoke as a purgative and purifying force before the potentially arid and pestilential days of the long summer, Stow gets to the heart of the matter here; a communal fire acts as a focal point for gathering around and generates good spirits and an amiable atmosphere. It’s this as much as any symbolic, spiritual or magical purpose which explains the widespread popularity of midsummer fire ceremonies over so many centuries. Even an 18th century protestant cleric such as Henry Bourne, writing in his 1725 volume Antiquitates Vulgares, recognised the fundamental innocence of such impulses (unless taken too far, of course, he felt compelled to add): ‘when they (the fires) are only kindled as tokens of joy, to excite innocent mirth and diversion, and promote peace and good neighbourhood, they are lawful and innocent, and deserve no censure. And therefore when on Midsummer-Eve, St Peter’s Eve, and some other times, we make bonfires before shops and houses there would be no harm in doing so, was it not that some continue their diversion to too late hours, and others are guilty of excessive drinking’.

Fires burning in the streets of London naturally cast the looming shadow of King Mob, summoning the potential spirit of its mutinously grinning collective visage. It’s perhaps no surprise that the city watch played an increasingly prominent role in the medieval and Tudor periods. From the 14th century onwards, they were required to parade through the streets in their gayest finery, carrying flaming ‘cresset’ buckets on poles slung over their shoulders. No such finery for the black-clad, baton-wielding riot police who set about the latterday travellers intent on holding a free Solstice festival in the fields around Stonehenge in 1985, a one-sided altercation which became known as the Battle of the Beanfield (although ‘rout’ would be a more accurate description).

The Salisbury Giant and sidekick Hob-Nob

Midsummer parades grew in size and theatricality throughout the Tudor period, with passing pageants featuring creatures and characters from biblical and national mythologies. Giants were prominent (as they would be) along with saints, dragons, hobby horses, Moorish kings, Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, unicorns and Jesus Christ himself, all accompanied by minstrels and morris dancers and brought to moving picture life in the pixillating flicker of a hundred smoking torches. Such pageantry was another victim of Reformation and Civil War. As early as 1533, Henry VIII’s Royal Council was looking to curtail these potentially rebellious gatherings, and in 1539 he succeeded in suppressing the annual London march for the remaining 8 years of his reign. It was never the same again and soon faded away completely, a fate which befell similar parades across the country. A mouldering remnant of an effigy was discovered in 1844 in the backrooms of a Tailor’s Guildhall in Salisbury; a giant which once bestrode the midsummer parades, now a tattered, dimineshed shade of its former self. It now lies quiescent in the city museum.

Midsummer parades have been reinvented in some areas, though, notably so in Penzance. The Mazey Day festival has been fashioned around the old Golowan (St John’s Eve) celebrations. At midnight on St John’s Eve, a Penglaz ‘obby ‘oss is brought out, a flower-garlanded and gaily beribboned horse’s skull held aloft on a pole, its empty sockets filled with the night’s shadows, chomping incisors flashing an enamelled grin in the torchlight. A female ‘teaser’ leads it in a snaking serpent dance down to the quayside, the townspeople twisting and turning in its mesmerically swaying wake.

Midsummer is not one of the festival periods during which the worlds of faerie are at a perigee point of proximity to the waking world. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its fairy court and mischievous sprites making sport with human destiny is, despite its title, set on May Day eve. Midsummer’s eve is still a time steeped in powerful magic, however. Although Midsummer is a solar festival, a daylit affair, this is also the point at which the astrological calendar moves into the house of Cancer, a sign associated with water and the moon.

It was thought to be a time when witches were active, going abroad to gather flowers and herbs whose potency was at its height on this night. As John Aubrey noted, ‘Midsummer Eve is counted or called the Witches’ Night’. Cornish Penwith witches were said to gather on Burns Down above Zennor on midsummer’s eve, the nomenclature denoting the many fires which were lit amongst the natural cauldrons of the granite landscape basins and on the tables of dolmen stones. The Witches’ Rock which was the ultimate site for their midnight assembly is no longer there, having been broken up and possibly used for stone wall construction in the nineteenth century. It used to be said that touching the rock nine times at midnight would afford protection against ill-fortune – a species of associative counter-magic. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the farm which lies beneath Burns Down is called Tregerthen, or Rowan Tree Farm. Rowan wood afforded powerful protection against the depredations of witchcraft, and twigs tied together with red ribbons and hung above stable and farmhouse doors would keep harmful magic at bay.

St John's Wort

Effigies of witches were burned in some fires, a tradition revived by the Cornish at St Cleer. A witch’s broom and hat are perched on the peak of the bonfire mountain. When it is lit, a variety of herbs and flowers are thrown onto the pyre to nullify their efficacy in any witchery attempted in the vicinity. The very flowers used for the purposes of witchcraft (or, as was more likely the case, herbal medicine) could be employed as magical protection. Garlands of vervain, yarrow, mugwort, plaintain, dwarf elder, corn marigold (the ‘summer’s bride’), orpins and, most powerfully of all, St John’s wort (or chase-devil) could be hung on doors to repel malevolent spells, or burned in midsummer fires to create a purifying incense. Yarrow hung up on St John’s Eve would ward of sickness for the coming year. Those seeking St John’s Wort on the evening when its magic was at its most potent might have a bit of hunt on their hands, however. It was said to be able to move to evade those intent on picking it.

Of course, midsummer flowers were beautiful decorations, magical powers notwithstanding. John Stow noted ‘on the vigil of St. John the Baptist, and on St. Peter and Paul the Apostles, every man’s door being shadowed with green birch, long fennel, St. John’s wort, orpine, white lilies, and such like, garnished upon with garlands of beautiful flowers’, their colours brought out in the evening by the illumination of hundreds of lamps to ‘make a goodly show’. Another tradition involved the creation of midsummer cushions; either an actual cushion upon which flowers were arrayed, or a stool covered in a layer of thick, clayish soil into which flowers were embedded. The poet John Clare loved such presentations and wanted to title one of his later collections The Midsummer Cushion.

Orpine

Midsummer was a time considered particularly propitious for divination, especially when foretelling romantic fortunes. Flowers play their part here too. The prominent floral aspect of midsummer rites and celebrations is hardly surprising given that this is the time of fullest flowering. Two orpine flowers were hung together, sometimes resting against a plate, on midsummer’s eve. If, on the following morning, they had inclined towards one another, love would blossom and fidelity was assured. If they turned away from each other, love would fade and loyalties stray. In the disastrous event of the orpines withering, a death in the household was foretold. Fortunately, this was highly unlikely. Orpine flowers were renowned for remaining fresh long after having been cut, hence one of their common names, life-long. Another such name was ‘midsummer men’, indicating how closely and widely they were associated with these divinations.

The magical potency of flowers reached its peak on St John’s eve, and in some cases this was the only time at which their power became manifest. A piece of mugwort ‘coal’ dug up beneath its roots (in actuality a rotted part of those roots) on St John’s Eve would afford protection from plague, ague, lightning, carbuncle and burning, and was thus a highly sought after natural treasure on this one enchanted night. Fernseed (the tiny spores on the underside of fern leaves) was particularly elusive, supposedly appearing on this one evening of the year and no other. If you were somehow able to gather it (and you would likely face opposition from witches jealously guarding their special patch) it would confer upon you the power of invisibility. Sacred springs or wells could also be used for divination, with the bubbles or ripples produced by offerings of coins, bent pins or flowers thrown upon the waters providing answers to questions of love and matrimony. These offerings, or coloured ribbons tied to adjacent trees, would activate the healing powers of the waters.

A sunwise circumnavigation of the well was often part of the ritual, as at the Pin Well in Alnwick Park in Northumberland. Processing or dancing in a circling, sunwise direction was a feature of many midsummer celebrations, modelling the ecliptic solar passage across the sky and thereby invoking its power and blessing. Never anti-sunwise (or widdershins), however; that would summon dark otherworldly forces into your life and invite ill fortune. The North Eastern antiquarian Moses Aaron Richardson, writing in the 6th volume of his mid-19th century collection titled, with exhaustively thorough accuracy, ‘The Local Historian's Table Book of Remarkable Occurrences, Historical Facts, Legendary and Descriptive Ballads, &c., connected with the Counties of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland, and Durham’, remarks upon the three holy wells near Longwitton-hall in Northumberland. ‘Great concourses of people from all parts, also used to assemble here in the memory of old people on “Midsummer Sunday and the Sunday following” and amuse themselves with leaping, eating gingerbread brought for sale to the spot, and drinking the waters of the wells’. He also notes the myth of the guardian dragon associated with the wells, a creature capable of making itself invisible and renewing itself by dipping its tail in the healing waters. It was defeated by one Sir Guy of Warwick, who noticed its secret and cunningly interposed himself between the beast and its source of power, hacking it about until it could take no more, curled up and died. The wells were thenceforth free for all to use. Three cheers for Sir Guy!

To retain the magical properties of plants and flowers gathered St John’s Eve, or the divinatory secrets of sacred waters, it was a general requirement that complete and solemn silence was maintained. The Moomins understood this, as Tove Jansson related in Moominsummer Madness. After sitting by their midsummer fire for a spell, Moomintroll, the Snork Maiden and the Fillyjonk venture out into the night meadows to gather nine kinds of flower (as we have seen with the Witches’ Rock, nine is something of a magic number). The Snork Maiden recalls previous midsummer evenings when ‘we went off to pick nine kinds of flowers and put them under our pillow and then our dreams came true. But you weren’t allowed to say a word while you picked them, not afterwards until morning’. This most magically-wise of creatures also knew some midsummer romantic divinatory rites: ‘First you must turn seven times around yourself, mumbling a little and stamping your feet. Then you go backwards to a well, and turn around, and look down in it. And then, down in the water, you’ll see the person you’re going to marry’.

Midsummer’s eve in the Moomin’s world was also the only time to sow the seeds which almost instantaneously germinate into the small, ghostworm creatures known as the Hattifatteners. More midsummer’s eve sowing magic could be achieved by a girl who walked 12 times (sunwise, of course) around a church, scattering hempseed in her wake whilst intoning the rhyme ‘hempseed I sow/Hempseed I hoe/Let him tht is my true love/Come after me and mow’. The phantom of her future love would then appear, trailing after her, completely under her spell.

A more unsavoury form of love divination is practised in the kitchen, with the midsummer’s eve baking of dumb cakes by a small gathering of women. Once more, the preparation and cooking must be carried out in complete silence. The ingredients are simple and few: half flour and half flour mixed into a dough with the piss of each participant. Each in turn makes a mark or scratches an initial on the cake (or cakes). After the rigorous observation of various scrupulously specified instructions (for this is a highly ritualised recipe) the baked cakes are taken out of the oven and the spectres of future husbands appear to break the piece of cake (or take the smaller bunlike variants) bearing the mark of their bride-to-be and present it to her. As with all supernatural procedures, there were attendant dangers. The anonymous author of the 1685 volume Mother Bunch’s Closet Newly Broke Open (Mother Bunch herself, perhaps) concluded his or her instruction with the saucily valedictory line ‘if there be any so unfortunate to hear a bell, I wish I had them to my bedfellows this night to prevent leading apes to hell’. Leading apes in hell, a phrase which turns up in a number of Shakespearean quotes, was the proverbial fate of old maids in the 16th and 17th centuries, although its precise meaning remains obscure. However, the fact that it is taking place in hell suggests that it’s unlikely to be pleasant. So, a recipe which risks bestial intercourse of whatever variety in the fiery pits. You don’t get that in Delia (as far as I’m aware).

The combination of summer heat and the heightened influence of the moon led to midsummer being considered a time of delirium and madness, particularly for those already affected by such states. Tove Jansson’s Moominsummer Madness plays on such associations, as well as on the theatrical elements which are also central to the novel. The phrase midsummer madness was common in Shakespeare’s time. In Twelfth Night, Olivia responds to Malvolio’s absurdly misguided advances by declaring ‘why, this is very midsummer madness’. Such tendencies lend St John’s eve festivities and edgily antic air, creating a sense of licensed lunacy and abandon. Midsummer sports such as swinging fireballs on the end of chains, running with tar barrels, leaping through flames or rolling burning wheels down hills were ways of toying with chaos, playing with scarcely contained elemental forces that could easily grow rapidly out of control and scorch, char or completely consume; A good analogy for those skirting the borders of mania. Perhaps by allowing the demons of the mind their night of wild freedom, their longer term ravages might be curtailed in the dog days to come.

The ephemeral nature of the sun’s triumph was acknowledged in rites which anticipated harvest time, the fruiting and going to seed of plants now in the full glory of efflorescence. The smoke from fires was partly intended to ritually cleanse the air, protecting crops and herds from pestilence and blight. In Herefordshire and Somerset, fires were lit adjacent to orchards to encourage a good crop in the autumn, as John Aubrey noted: ‘On Midsummer-eve, they make fire in the fields in the waies: sc. to Blesse the Apples’. The ephemerality of human life was also underlined by the south western custom of the midsummer’s eve church porch watch. On the long, hazy evening and short, balmy (hopefully) night of this enchanted evening, it was the phantoms of the living which drifted dreamily abroad, as we’ve seen in the context of a number of the divinatory rituals. The porch watcher could observe the villagers filing dumbly into the parish church, departing once more at midnight. If any remained inside, it was a sure sign that they would die during the following year (in some variations of the tradition, it was only those thus marked who entered the church in the first place). Once more, dangers attended this encounter with the supernatural. If the watcher was overcome with weariness and slipped into sleep during their nightlong vigil, they would join the phantom congregation remaining inside before the next St John’s eve.

For all that it kept one eye on the time to come, and on the dwindling of the light, midsummer’s eve and its ensuing day were all about celebrating the moment. The sun is rising now, climbing to the height of its radiant glory. Light and warmth and joy fill our hearts in this instant, This Instant! So let us gather around the convivial fires, revel in the amber glow bronzing one another’s faces and leap boldly through the flames and fragrant smoke. Surrender to the holy midsummer madness. We are alive. Blessings and thanks to Bright Phoebus, to the lifegiver, to The Sun.

Calendar Customs II: Merry May

The first Calendar Customs collection from the Folklore Tapes folks focussed on Halloween. It sought to unearth the layers of tradition and vernacular observance which have been largely displaced by the gothic horror pageantry which now characterises All Hallow’s Eve. For the second volume, they have spun the seasonal and calendrical globe to its obverse face, the light rather than the shadow side, and celebrate May and its merrie rites. Halloween, or Samhain in the old Celtic calendar, marked the setting of the sun, the diminishment of its fires as winter’s dark set in. May Day rejoices in its resurgence, the rebirth of the light which heralds summer’s suffusing warmth and easeful languor.

As with the first release, the music creates sound pictures of specific festivities or rituals, or more general springtime atmospheres. Appropriately enough, given the invocations of ancient traditions contained within, it is presented in a format which is, by the modern measure of accelerated time, an ancient relic in itself – the cassette tape. It is packaged with the care and imaginative use of graphic design which Folklore Tapes pride themselves in providing. The inscribed cover is a mutable symbol which could be interpreted in any number of ways: the top of a maypole; an British dreamcatcher; a diagrammatic, time-lapsed aerial view of the weaving dance around a maypole; a handmirror reflecting the fresh vitality of youthful blossoming; or an abstracted focal lens fixing the season’s vigorous moment of awakening. Or all of the above. Both the cassette and the box in which it is housed come in a light shade of pink, the colour with which the edges of some May blossoms are blushed. A small length of maypole ribbon is included, a gift whose handling summons something of the spirit of bright revelry which is the abiding mood of Mayday. Mine is a lovely emerald green, the proliferating colour of spring’s explosion of thrusting, unfurling growth. A small, photocopied booklet offers notes setting each track in context, giving clues as to the soundworld the artist has created. Its rough, handmade quality adds to the impression that the box set is a personal gift, an artefact which has been put together with minimal resources and a deliberate rejection of digital sophistication, but which as a result has a real, individual touch bearing the authentic imprint of the artists involved. Oh, there’s also an essay on May customs and cultural history by some bloke called Jez Winship. It’s alright, but he does go on a bit. He gets his Shakespeare wrong too. It should be ‘How am I, thou painted maypole?’, not ‘though painted maypole?’. Honestly! I suppose he’s only human, though.

The tape (or, more likely, the accompanying digital download) begins with the comfortingly familiar chimes of a domestic clock, with its household echo of Big Ben’s city tolling translated from the big smoke to a country cottage. Its clockwork carillon calls out from the mantelpiece to rouse the sleepy to wakefulness in the middle of the night, to begin the day long May celebrations at midnight. Time to venture out into the woods and fetch in the branches of may. Carl Turney and Brian Campbell, usually operating behind the surgical masks of Clinic, here set up their Lost Tapes Record Club to present this manufactured anthropological field recording, Alan Lomaxes of inner space. Tramping bass and processional percussion combine with reverse tape night calls and splashy harpsichord dabs, the latter adding a 60s psychedelic touch. The processing and electronic backdrop lend a bleary-eyed haziness to the sound, a dreamers’ parade. The second section of this three part piece (a mini prog concept trilogy) introduces the dawn birdsong chorus, and a sense of calmness and peace pervades. Soft variations on the old medieval round Summer Is Icumen In are played in fluting tones which sound at times like the exhalations of a mellotron, with its slight, breathy delay. Counterpoint voices emulate the intertwining calls of the birds as human and avian worlds combine, the birdsong recordings continuing to burble away in the background. It summons the spirit of a Vaughan Williams or Delius idyll, paradise gardens or larks ascending. With the day blooming into post-dawn life and light, the May rituals come into their full flowering. The third part of the piece brings in the springy, lo-fi thumps of tambour and marching drum. Electronic sounds spiral and wiz over the elemental rhythm, darting and bounding like fizzing will-o-the-wisps caroming in Brownian motion around the May paraders. It’s the background buzz of nature’s busy noise, the humming drone and dense sonic weave of summer after winter’s silence, order and pattern emerging from apparent chaos. Human voices join in the chorus, in their own simple, limited fashion.

The Blue Funz offer a two part piece evoking Beltane rituals on the Isle of Mull; Need-Fire and Milking Cows Through Cake we are bluntly informed, without any further explanation forthcoming. The sound picture gives us a fairly clear idea as to what is going on, however. We begin with the crackle of fire, like cellophane sweet wrappers being crinkled and rustled. Cow bells clank and jangle, carrying an eerie echo, as if heard through mist. A gentler, lulling female voice sings a soothing, slightly distracted melody in the background, leading the bovine herd onward. Glinting thumb piano or celeste plinks add to the aura of magical suspension. May Eve is a time for lighting bonfires, like All Hallow’s Eve, or Samhain, its shadowy counterpart. The veil between worlds grows thin during these temporal interstices, and protective measures must be taken against maleficent incursions from elsewhere. Thus, cattle are driven through the purifying gates of twinned bonfires as they are led out to pasture. The Need (or Neid) fire is lit from and ember nurtured from the previous year’s fire. A slightly sinister chant is introduced, hinting at spirit worlds a dream or errant fancy away from our fleeting perceptions. A bowed instrument like a sarangi sounds scraped, overtone burnished notes like the clarion calls of an otherworldly horn. But where do they come from, and whence do they lead us?

The second section shifts to an interior resonance, bringing us into the cowshed. The sounds of cows lowing, and the pizzling squish of milking, accompanied by pumping, machine-like percussion, gives us a clear picture of what is going on. Choral synth sighs lightly float around the space, producing an ambience of placid bovine contentment. Tinkling notes could be the splash of milk into containing vats (whether through holed cakes or not) or a continuation of the magical tingle felt outside. Apparently there is only one dairy herd on the Isle of Mull. The unpasteurised cheese produced from the happy cows is reputedly exquisite.

Arianne Churchman’s Minehead Hobby Horse builds a sound picture of a North Devon tradition which has become rather overshadowed by the renown of the Padstow ‘Obby ‘Oss a little further west along the coastline. It begins with the sound of a spectral, radiophonic sea (like the sound the BBC’s electronic workshop produced for Samuel Beckett’s Embers). A finger tapping drum rhythm beats out a procession. Processional drums are a recurrent motif running through this Calendar Customs release, along with the sound of birdsong. A reedy accordion wheezes into life, building up the bare bones of a folk tune; a sketch for a song we already know, even if we’ve never heard it before. A wooden clacking and clopping is a reproduction (or perhaps an actual recording) of the erratic, circling progress of the horse and its snapping, toothless jaws. Shouts of ‘hooray’ come from the horse’s milling entourage of outriders. The piece pauses halfway through, accordion set down for a moment, to allow for a count-up (‘one-hooray, two-hooray’ etc). It’s almost like a belated intro. We can imagine leaping morris dancers or some special and jealously guarded Minehead hobby horse moves coinciding with each celebratory cry.

Rob St John’s Bringing in the May returns us to the Delius idyll, spring as a blessed time of re-awakening. A slow showering of piano notes could be the aural depiction of May blossom slowly drifting to the ground, or shivering in a gentle breeze. Sweetly bowed overtone notes in the background create the impression of refracted light glinting through branches. What sounds like a viola adds limning colour to the piano. The circling, downward spiralling arpeggios are like the peals of distant bells. A piping flute, wavering like a whistling kettle, brings in a slightly off-kilter element. The flute is another characteristic sound threading through this compilation. It is the traditional instrument for evoking pastoral moods and the melodic outpourings of songbirds. Its recurrence in this context underlines the central principle behind May Day celebrations, that of going out into the fields and woodlands and renewing a direct sense of connection with the natural world. Let’s all sing like the birds. Rob St John’s repeated piano figure could also be a Messiaen-like imitation of birdsong. Towards the end it shifts up a couple of octaves, a raising of the spirits as our May communion fills us with a feeling of lightness and joy.

Ian Humberstone’s The Hunting of the Earl of Rone is a soundpicture of a particular May tradition carried out in Combe Martin on the North Devon coast, an observance which blends seasonal ritual with local historical pageantry. We hear a hubbub of festive voices and a braying horn calling the gathered hordes together to set off on the hunt. A hunt for human prey in this instance – shades of the Hounds of Zaroff. We are led on once more by processional drums, and the swaying tune of an accordion (an easily portable backpack of an instrument). A flanged electric guitar takes up the melody, ramping the folk up into psych territory. Pattering percussion produces the impression of a slightly chaotic pursuit. I don’t give much for the Earl’s chances.

Mary and David’s (that's David Chatton Barker, I presume) Wish Before Sunrise concerns the tradition of bathing the face in May dew, the belief being that it would lend the complexion a pearlescent glow for the rest of the month. Mary and David use small sounds to create an atmospheric evocation of this observance. It begins with tambourine and drum – the drum once more suggesting a procession going out into the fields. Recorder pipes away, leading us on a merry morning dance. Sprayed zither chords sprinkle us with cold droplets of dew, and the metallic bowing of strings (or of a cymbal’s edge?) suggest hands dipped in cold water, scooping up a cold palmful of May moisture to lave the face. The gleaming plink of plucked strings could be spilt drops splashing back down. Crystalline chime shimmer catches the diamond glint of light on dewdrops. The susurration of whispering voices invoke personal prayers to nature spirits. They are followed by bright, scintillating sounds, glissando glimmer and pulsating oscillations. The bright gleam of singing wineglasses or Tibetan bowls and the warm radiance of a resounding gong. All of which create the impression of a complexion brightening into a healthy, translucent glow.

Rite of the Maypole: An Unruly Procession is the latest concrete sound collage by Children of Alice, the post-Broadcast trio featuring James Cargill and ex-bandmate Roj Stevens alongside Julian House, Broadcast’s graphic designer, collaborator under his Focus Group guise and co-founder of the Ghost Box label. Children of Alice very much continue the experiments first formulated on the Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age LP. Rapid transitions and cinematic jump cuts create a kaleidoscopic sound collage akin to the fractured form of an experimental film. You can imagine the visual analogue to the sounds, with superimpositions and sudden edits, animated interjections and scratched frames, solarised footage and saturated colours producing an effect of heightened reality. The approach is not far removed from that taken by Richard Philpott in his 1989 film The Flora Faddy Furry Dance Day, included on the BFI Here’s A Health to the Barley Mow DVD of folkloric films. Philpott attempted to use film’s ability to collapse time to create connections between the modern-day celebrations in Helston, Cornwall and a more ancient worldview and symbolism. Images of the labyrinth are flashed up to forge a subconscious link with the dancers as they spiral through the narrow streets of the town.

Children of Alice’s procession is unruly partly in its similar disregard for temporal convention, its disregard for direct continuity and fascination with the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements. These create subconscious connections which subtly rewire the brain – truly psychedelic music. It begins with drums, tambourines and birdsong again. These are soon processed into fluid, psyched-out patterns, however. Bells toll, but odd reverb is applied so that their attack is blunted, their directional provenance rendered oblique and nebulous. This is music which attempts to blur the rigid framework not just of time but also of space. Birdsongs are concreted, which doesn’t make them strange as much as emphasise and work with their inherent strangeness. Birdsong is best approximated through electronic means, since their soundworld often feels closely analogous to electronic music (just listen to the remarkable call of a bird of paradise). It’s no surprise that imitative birds such as starlings have found it so easy to add the sounds of mobile phones and car alarms to their repertoire.

The interjection of a laughing female voice hints at the licentious aspect of May Day revels, the lustiness which so vexed Puritan critics in the 16th and 17th centuries. The voice forms a direct connection with the birdsong which has preceded it, calls which are a mix of territorial assertion and mating cry. The ‘unruliness’ of May license brings the human world closer to that of nature, to the seasonal awakening it feels instinctively drawn towards. An opening door and the jingle of keys seems to indicate a passage into another time and place, another scene. A wavering oscillation sounds a vaguely futuristic alarm call, which could also be heard as the whooping and stridulation of frogs and insects. A trundling, springing rhythm creates a slightly comical, cartoonish sense of movement through a boggy landscape, with bubbling and burbling sounds suggesting a squelchy passage. The revving of a motorbike engine acts as punctuation, and perhaps also references The Owl Service. Its title music also used a mixture of instrumental and concrète sound and employed startling collisions of sonic materials – including a motorbike engine.

Children of Alice seem to incorporate, knowingly or not, all the elements of the Calendar Customs May compilation. Next in this extraordinarily condensed, multilayered work we hear piping sounds, the pastoral flute once more. It is subject to reverse masking and other manipulations, but it still bears its established associations. Two step drum beats once more mark out a procession, and the combination with the drawn-out, curving cries of electronic estuary birds (more meetings of human and avian worlds) suggests that we may be in the midst of the ‘Obby ‘Oss celebrations in Padstow, our senses synaesthetised by a combination of ale, crowd psychology, sunshine and repetitive music. An echoed cluster of xylophone notes perhaps marks a brief, refreshing shower, as well as providing another moment of transition. Glassy sounds resemble those produced by Les Sculptures Sonores for the 70s BBC children’s programme Picture Box. More childhood memories are stirred as a cheerfully creaking, ratcheting duo bring to mind the Froglets from The Clangers. Another jump cut and we are in the middle of a village festival, bass and drum patterns reminiscent of those found on Broadcast’s Tender Buttons LP creating an impression of bustling crowds. Car sirens, bikes and shouting voices bring us into the soundworld of the public information film – time for the Advisory Circle to intervene with an admonitory message, perhaps. There is another switch to an interior resonance, and the chaos dies down. What sounds like an amplified autoharp (of the kind Trish Keenan used to play during Broadcast gigs) is slowly strummed. Its upward glissando conjures warming flames in the fireplace of a village inn. A slowly tapped drum relaxes the rhythms of the day, winding down as evening progresses. And so to bed.

Sam McLoughlin’s I Want to Sing Like the Birds Sing, Not Worrying About Who Hears or What They Think is as good as its wordy wish. It begins with a shimmering, celestial synth drone, the clear air of a crisply blue-skied morning. Harmonium and pattered finger drums add their more earthbound voices before birdsong recordings are once more introduced. Sam then begins his duet, piping with untutored instinctiveness on a wooden flute. The sound becomes denser as more flutes are layered on top, until a joyfully cacophonous chorus has filled the spectrum. Chinking mug percussion is added, lending further urgency to this frenzied attempt at transformation, to enter a birdlike state of unconscious grace – to become the song. The drone drops out at some point, the early morning shimmer clarifying into day as the dawn chorus amasses more and more voices. The piping ceases to allow space for a firmly plucked zither arpeggio. It’s like a free jazz big band dropping out to make way for a featured soloist. John Coltrane’s Ascension, for example. The celestial drone returns and the manic piping builds up mass and momentum once more, swanee whistles adding a particularly antic note (free jazz swanee whistle, now there’s a thought). The recordings of birdsong carry on underneath, like a play along tutor. This is how it should be done. It sounds a hell of a lot of fun. Do try this at home.

Malcolm Benzie rounds things off in low-key fashion with Hawthorne. Birdsong recordings play in the background one more time (this not surprising for someone who plays in a band called Eagleowl). A low-fi drum machine sets up a relaxed rhythm over which bass and guitar gently sway. Benzie’s vocals, easing back in the mix, are pleasingly mellifluous, with a light Scottish inflection. The repeated refrain offers a descriptive paean to the hawthorn bloom, sung as if addressed to the flowering bushes themselves as the may is gathered in. It’s a morning song, soft and blurry with waking. A hymn of sorts. It all ends with the birds, a final fluted note pitch-shifted down until the sound is switched off. It’s a perfect way to end, to disperse the conference of birds and bid farewell to Merry May. But what a fine survey it has proved to be. What calendrical quadrant will the Folklore Tapes family alight on next, I wonder? What further curious customs and arcane observances will they uncover? We will have to wait and see.

The Merry Month of May

This is the unedited version of an essay which appeared in abbreviated form in the excellent Folklore Tapes Calendar Customs II Box Set.

May Day is one of the turning points of the year, the moment when the transformations of the seasons’ cycles are ritually observed and celebrated. The Eve of May displays an obverse face to Halloween’s soot-blackened mask, fixed on the diametrically opposite arc of the slowly-spinning annular globe. Both have origins in the Celtic pastoral (or livestock farming) year and the solar festivals which lent it formal division. Samhain marked its end (and the end of the year as a whole) on the last day of October; Beltane its new May beginning. Samhain heralded the months of darkness, Beltane opened the door to summer. Fires were lit on both occasions, to invoke the sun and anticipate or celebrate its return. After Samhain, the fires would retreat inside, much diminished, to be tended in the hearth. Beltane saw them coming outdoors again, stoked into blazing conflagrations to reflect the solar rising. Samhain saw cattle being led into winter shelter. Beltane was the time for them to be led back out to pasture. On both occasions, they would be driven through twin bonfires. This fiery passage offered protection against the supernatural forces whose power surged at these interzonal periods, when corporeal and spirit worlds were in close proximity, like the Earth and Moon at perigee.

Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, from Arthur Rackham's illustrations for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream dramatises this interpenetration of parallel worlds, blending fantasies of antiquity and British otherworld folklore with the formal dance of Tudor pageantry. At the same time, it allegorises the confusing intoxication of love and desire, the awakening of which is another key element of May Day revels. Whilst the title would seem to fix the date, there are various references to May Day which suggest that the play’s nocturnal entanglements take place on May Eve, and that May Day ritual, revel and romance is on everybody’s mind. Lysander speaks of ‘the wood, a league without the town – where I did meet once with Helena to do observance to a morn of May’. The enraged Hermia spits out ‘How am I, thou painted maypole? Speak! I am not so low but that my nails can reach unto thine eyes’. And Theseus speculates ‘no doubt they rose up early to observe the rite of May’. The interaction of human and faerie worlds, with the appearance of Shakespeare’s versions of Puck (also referred to as Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin) and the King and Queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania, certainly points to May Eve as the more appropriate frame for the night’s dramas. This unanchored calendrical vagueness creates a moondappled superimposition of festive periods which blurs and transcends the rigidly linear grid of time; a grid which is dissolved and dispersed like drifting fog in the eternal lands of dream.

Arthur Rackham illustration for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Human beings also sought immunisation from devilry or the wicked caprices of the fairy folk by jumping through the sacred flames they had driven their cattle between. The pungent woodsmoke purged them of whatever pheremones attracted the attentions of hungry spirit world denizens. Sacrifices of cattle or sheep considered less prime stock would be offered as propitiation. The word Beltane comprises two separate elements forged into one festive name. Bel means shining or lucky, and tane fire. So, Beltane offered the talismanic blessing of fire and the promise of the sun’s renewed beneficence, the return of the light.

Superstitions surrounding May Eve, May Day and the ensuing days at the start of the month persisted well into the medieval period, and even into the post-Reformation era. Fairies might steal or sour milk, or witches spell maleficent harm on the herd. In Northern Europe, May Eve was Walpurgisnacht, the Eve of the sanctified Saxon abbess Walpurga. It was a night when witches were thought to swarm in the skies, flying across the fields and heading to the high places such as the Brocken peak in the Harz Mountains for their Sabbat communion with the Devil, and creating opportunistic mischief and malevolent damage in their wake. Something of the dread attending this night on the continent was translated into the British idiom. The belief The beginning of May was associated with bad luck, and it was considered an unwise act of generosity to pass on fire from the home hearth on May Eve or May Day. The fire was analogous to the kindly donor’s spirit, and could be used to gain mastery over it. Thus, anyone requesting a flame to spark their own fire on or around the first of May might find themselves accused of intent towards witchery. Better to remain shivering by the cold grate than arouse such suspicions. Hares caught in pasture fields on May Day, darting between the hooves of the cattle, would be hunted and killed. They might be witches in transmuted form (werehares?), milksnatchers or livestock blighters. Rowan or elder boughs would offer some protection against supernatural forces, and fairies could be charmed or at least distracted for a vital moment by tying colourful ribbons to hawthorn branches.

Walpurgisnacht flight from Danish director Benjamin Christensen's 1922 film Haxan:Witchcraft Through the Ages

Echoes of Beltane fire rituals can be detected in various May Day games and customs. The sun’s radiance is condensed in the spirit-raising glow of yellow primroses and marsh marigolds (‘the herb of Beltane’) woven into garlands to be hung about the village or town. In parts of Scotland, bannock cakes were cooked in May Day fires, buns with knob-knuckled crowns like a boulder-strewn moorland landscape. One of the cakes would be divided and a piece smudged with charcoal from the fire. The unfortunate who drew this tainted treat from basket or bonnet would be execrated as the ‘carline’ or scapegoat for the following year, spurned and made mock of. A distant memory of human sacrifice on the bone-fire? Probably not. There’s no evidence for such specific seasonal practices beyond Roman anti-Celtic propaganda. It could be a deeply uncomfortable social and psychological experience for the victim, nevertheless, a form of licensed bullying which united the rest of the community. At some point a presumably intoxicated individual noticed, as he bounded after it, how well his fumbled cake bounced down a hillside, and the tradition of bannock rolling was born; a pointless, vaguely idiotic pastime devoid of any symbolic, sacred or ritualistic import which was largely an excuse to pelt down a grassy slope. Like many pointless, vaguely idiotic pastimes it was, and still is hugely enjoyable.

May Day festivities are above all about getting out of doors and inhaling the first breath of summer; throwing the early morning windows wide and heading for the woodlands and meadows with a light skip in the step. The opening lines of many a folk song attest to this spirit: ‘O as I rose up one May morning/One May morning so early (Seventeen Come Sunday); ‘One morning in the month of May/As from my cot I strayed/Just at the dawning of the day’ (The Spotted Cow); ‘As I walked out one midsummer’s morning/To a-view the fields and to take the air’ (Banks of Sweet Primroses); When I was a-walking one morning in May/To hear the birds whistle and nightingales play (Green Bushes); ‘Now it was on a summer’s day in the merry month of May/I was strolling around my grandfather’s farm’ (The Ball of Yarn). Etc. etc.

These opening lines are usually followed by an encounter with a charming maid, or by the lament of a maid waylaid by a charming rogue – essentially two conflicting perspectives on the same subject, conquest and defeat. For May was a time when the sap was rising and the first steps of the summer courtship dances were tripped. The comic romantic complications of A Midsummer Night’s Dream make formal play with such lusty woodland assignations. May folk songs are full of bawdy, nudge nudge innuendos and euphemisms, designed to raise gusts of knowingly ribald if not outright filthy laughter down at the local village inn. Analogies are drawn between seasonal farming labours and the fulfilment of desire, connecting the natural cycles of the year with those of the human heart. So Cupid the Pretty Ploughboy is observed by an enamoured maid ‘ploughing his furrow deep and low/Breaking the clods to pieces, some barley for to sow’; the search for a ‘charming maid’s’ Spotted Cow provides an excuse for a day of sport and play ‘down in yonder bourne’, a pleasurable encounter with the promise of further hunts for the straying and in all-probability non-existant creature heralded by the coded cry ‘ye gentle swain I’ve lost my spotted cow’; The Ball of Yarn plays lascivious metaphorical variations on the farmboy’s desire to wind up a country maid’s ‘little ball of yarn’. The Sussex-dwelling Copper Family song Pleasant Month of May (collected in Bob Copper’s book A Song for Every Season) depicts the sweaty labour of haymaking before the arrival of a travelling piper at sundown and the commencement of festive merriment. The final verse conjures images of bucolic bliss and pastoral amours inseparable from the lay of the land and its tending:
‘We called for a dance and we tripp-ed it along,/We danced all round the haycocks till the rising of the sun./When the sun did shine such a glorious light and the harmless birds did sing,/Each lad took his lass in his hand and went back to his haymaking’.

Sometimes traditional May songs are simply evocations of the early summer ambience, with no double-meanings attached. Such is By the Green Grove, another Copper song, which is a simple and affecting paean to the heartswelling beauty of birdsong in the Sussex countryside. ‘No music, no songster can with them compare’. There are darker presentiments of harvests to come to be found in the memoirs of Bob Copper, too. In his reminiscences of May haymaking, he recalls that ‘the quiet of the field would by invaded by a gang of six or eight men arriving carrying their scythes across their shoulders’. The shadow of the reaper is present even in the merry morning of May, the time of renewal and rebirth. Et in Arcadia ego.

The license associated with May Day inevitably roused the ire of Protestant critics, constant complaint against the state of things inherent in their very name. The Puritan John Stubbes is highly amusing to read for the intense passages of fevered ranting his broiling indignation stews. With variable statistics plucked from the overheated undercroft of his brain, he rages in his 1583 screed The Anatomie of Abuses that ‘I have heard it credibly reported…by men of great gravity, credit, and reputation, that of forty, threescore, or a hundred maids, going to the wood overnight, there have scarcely the third part of them return home undefiled. These be the fruits which these cursed pastimes bring forth’. He would no doubt also have disapproved of the vanity of a later tradition, that of bathing the face in May morning dew to lend the complexion a magical glow for the rest of the month and banish troublesome freckles. Samuel Pepys records in his diary that his wife indulged in this hopeful custom, and he rather touchingly worries about her safety being abroad in the early hours.

Bringing in the May to the streets of Padstow

The custom most widely associated with May Day was the bringing in of the May. Boughs of blossoming hawthorn would be cut down and brought back from meadow’s edge and woodland and strewn or hung about town or village, some woven into garlands, others left as they were found. The spiritually refreshing experience of going out into the fields and communing with the natural world in the renewal of its blossoming and unfurling was an integral and profound part of this seasonal ritual. Hawthorn was generally favoured, but there were regional variations. The Cornish tended towards sycamore, whilst the Welsh often opted for birch. Whatever the arboreal species, however, it was given the designation ‘May’. The Elizabethan tailor turned writer John Stow describes the bringing in of the May with beautiful simplicity and clarity in his 1598 book Survey of London: ‘On May Day in the morning, every man, except impediment, would walk into the greenwoods, there to rejoice their spirit with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the harmony of the birds’. Bringing in the May, or going-a-maying, was a way of connecting the settled, built environment or human habitation with the cyclical patterns of growth beyond its bounds. Wild nature in all its bounteous flowering was brought into the heart of the ordered domain of civilisation where it had been tamed or banished altogether. Something of the spirit felt by those who had gone out into the fields on a May morning was thereby given emblematic form. Some kind of symbolic exchange was effected. Man ventured out into Nature, and Nature entered into the habitations of Man.

The Padstow maypole

Maypoles were also erected in villages, towns and cities. Young trees were cut down from neighbouring woodlands (not always with the permission of the landowner) and hauled by teams of men and oxen into the appointed green or square where they were heaved up and made fast. The towering wooden columns would be painted with colourful stripes or other patterns and hung about with ribbons, boughs and garlands. It became the focal point for local festivities, for dancing, whether in a wheeling, handlocked circle or in more abandoned, weaving approaches and evasions. A maypole could remain in place for many years until it began to rot away at its base and require replacement. Sometimes it would crash to the ground before such removals were effected. There were maypoles of great longevity and renown in London. In the early 17th century, an immense one stood for a good few years at Cornhill in front of the church of St Andrew, whose spire it exceeded in height. The church became known as St Andrew Undershaft as a result. Another stood in The Strand in Elizabethan times before being felled in 1644, the victim of a Puritan ban on maypoles instigated in that year. A giant 134 foot pole was resurrected on the same spot in 1661, the Royal Crest at its tip marking it as a prominent celebratory symbol of the Restoration. It stood on the site of St Mary le-Bow into the early years of the 18th century. A substitute pole, taken down in 1718, was purchased by Sir Isaac Newton. He used it to prop up the great 123 foot telescope which had been installed in Wanstead Park in Essex the previous year. A perfect amalgam of folkloric traditions, possibly reaching back into the ancient past, and the new science, with its distant optic gaze focussed on the future. Nigel Kneale would have made something out of such a richly symbolic conjunction. It reminds me of his placement of a radio telescope besides a stone circle in his 1979 Quatermass series.

Jo and the Doctor join in the Maypole revels at the end of the 1971 Doctor Who serial The Daemons. Yates and the Brigadier retire for a pint

The reliably rancorous Philip Stubbes looked upon such practises with seething horror, of course, voiced in his unceasingly virulent strain of invective. ‘They go some into the woods and groves, some to another, where they spend all night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return bringing with them birch boughs, and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withal. And no marvel, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendant and lord over their pastimes and sports: namely, Satan Prince of Hell. But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is the may-pole, which they bring home with great veneration…twenty, or forty yoke of oxen…draw home this may-pole (this stinking idol rather)’. Stubbes describes how, once the villagers or townspeople have reared up and decorated the pole, ‘then fall they to banquet and feast, to leap and dance about it, as the heathen people did, at the dedication of their idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself’. Escalating his hyperbolic disgust to a climactic pitch, he damns the May merrymakers utterly: ‘Assuredly, I think neither Jews nor Turks, Saracens, nor Pagans, nor any other people how wicked, or barbarous soever, have ever used such devilish exercises as these: nay, they would have been ashamed once to have named them, much less to have used them’.

The May Day revels of late medieval and Tudor England which Stubbes so vocally despised incorporated all manner of May games. Morris dancing (‘the devil’s dance withal’ – Stubbes) featured frequently during its 16th century craze and for a period thereafter, and there might be pipers and harpers, drummers and fools to fuel the festivities with music, capers and general jollity. Mummers plays were sometimes staged, the performers disguised, which gave them a certain license to mock the high and mighty. Parades were peopled by stock figures of British folklore, religious devotion and popular legend: George and the Dragon, regional saints, Jack-in-the-Greens, Giants, Devils and St Michael, also with dragon in tow (the Devil in final Revelation battle form, ready for the slaying). Robin Hood and his greenwood band of righteous outsiders were particularly popular, and would often go around from door to door raising money (not necessarily for the Parish poor, either). Plays relating the familiar tales of daring feats and defiant gestures became widespread in the later medieval period. The first recorded example took place in Exeter in 1427, but they became and integral part of Tudor May Day celebrations in the years leading up to the cultural and historical earthquake of the Reformation. Maid Marian was a relatively late addition to the canon, appearing in the 15th century, possibly imported from French Romances and ballads such as Adam de la Halle’s late 13th century musical play Jeu de Robin et Marion (recorded in the 1970s by David Munrow and his Early Music Consort). Robin has been interpreted at various times as a spirit of the greenwood, a green or wild man figure symbolic of vegetal death and resurrection, a seasonal king whose sacrifice would ensure the return of the sun and the fertility of the crops (a favoured theme of JG Frazier put forward in The Golden Bough, his capacious survey of comparitive myth and religion), the high priest of a coven or a historically-based, rebellious anti-hero fighting the power. Marian and Robin are also sometimes seen as the Queen and King of May; Marian the embodiment of Spring, a Persephone or Flora figure, Robin her knightly green consort. Like all figures who slip out of the mundane world and into the mutable realm of myth he was, in other words, all things to all men.

Robin and Marian’s assumption of the roles of King and Queen are indicative of a more general play with inversion and transformation within the context of May Games. In a variation of the Christmas tradition of electing Lords of Misrule, mock-kings or lords were often crowned or ennobled for the day and presided over the celebrations. In the Scottish districts of Borthwick, Haddington, Peebles and Linlithgow an Abbot of Unreason was ordinated to give his anti-clerical blessing to the wild indulgences of the day. There was a strong element of mischief making, and echo of the licensed knavery of Hallow’s Eve, and of the Puckish trickery of fairy world denizens so active at these intersticial times. Guisers, cocky chancers (latterly geezers) in disguise, prowled the streets planning and enacting pranks on the suspecting victim who, on this day, was powerless to seek recourse. The 19th century Lancastrian radical Samuel Bamford recalls the occurrence of ‘mischeif-neet’ on May 1st in Early Days, his 1849 memoir of his early life in Middleton, Manchester and Salford. Tokens from the fields would be left by young men on the doorsteps of neighbours (mainly female) as symbolic assessments of character, whether cruel and spiteful or complimentary and amorous: ‘a gorse bush indicated a woman notoriously immodest; and a holly bush, one loved in secret; a tup’s horn intimated that man or woman was faithless to marriage; a branch of sapling, truth in love; and a sprig of birch, a pretty girl’. A similarly laddish blend of horniness and spite was enacted across the country in the Cambridge fenlands. Here, sloe blossom was for the favoured and blackthorn for those considered loose, elder for those judged insufficiently well turned out and nettles for those the boys thought had a sharp tongue (no doubt directed at their clumsy advances).

Masks and costumes provided the opportunity for the wearer to get away with all manner of mischief, taking on new identities which allowed for a distancing from the everyday social self. Transvestism was rife, men seizing the chance to put on dresses and wigs and paint their bearded faces. There were Morris ‘Mollies’, and May Marians in Robin Hood plays generally embodied by men in drag presenting their exaggerated, grotesque versions of femininity. Taking hybrid human and animal form was also prevalent on this day of transformations. Stag, bull or ram horns or heads might be borne. But such cross-species mummery and guising was most widely manifested in the migration of the hobby horse across the country. It was a costume which came in a variety of shapes and sizes, from draped frames which entirely enveloped the human occupant to ‘Hooden Horses’ from which the upper torso of the ‘rider’ emerged, to poles with clacking heads (and in some cases stripped and garlanded horse skulls) affixed to their upheld tips.

The most renowned hobby horse (or Obby Oss as it is idiomatically known) is undoubtedly the one which is led out of its paddock in the back of the Golden Lion inn and onto the streets of Padstow every year. It comprises a large hoop tightly covered with shiny black oilkskin which drapes around in a loose circling skirt. The disc is like a black anti-sun, glistening with photo-negative inversion; or an occult moon, a remnant of the dark days goaded through the summer-garlanded streets one more time before being shut away for the year. Stylised features on the flat plane of its broad face (intriguingly reminiscent of the designs found on traditional African ceremonial masks) heighten its disconcertingly alien quality. It is more like the product of a sleek biomechanical future than a horse, a 1970s Dr Who monster in swaying, revolving motion. It is guided, led and driven by ‘Teasers’ who try to keep its attention by drawing it into a ducking and swirling dance. The unpredictability of its movements might find it suddenly swivelling to turn its blank-eyed disc-visage on nervous onlooker, however, throwing back a distorted shadow reflection, seen as through a glass darkly. Its inky depths are akin to the Elizabethan alchemist and occult philosopher Dr Dee’s obsidian shewstone, the spirit mirror whose polished black surface he tried to see through to communicate with angels (or demons?) in another dimension. Who knows what one might see if one gazes too long into the depthless yet potentially bottomless void of the Oss’s ‘face’, especially with the intoxicating effect of the freely-flowing ale and the pounding beats and hypnotically repeated refrains of the Padstow Obby Oss song deranging the senses. But it passes swiftly on before anyone can get truly lost. The black, flashing form glints against the blue (with any luck) of the sky and the white and red of the Padstonians’ costumes.

The ceremony and its preparations were captured by folklorist and recorder Alan Lomax and cameraman George Pickow in their 1953 film Oss Oss Wee Oss (the cajoling cry of the onlooking townsfolk), included on the BFI collection of folkloric footage Here’s a Health to the Barley Mow. They preface their dramatised document with the assertion that ‘this strange dance is a modern remnant of an ancient springtime rite in which primitive man rejoiced in the renewed fertility of the land’, adopting the romantic fancies of the mid-century which actively sought to unearth ancient Pagan roots in any and all seasonal observances. Traditions are open to, and indeed require re-interpretation, remodelling and above all reinvigoration, otherwise they eventually ossify (if you’ll pardon the pun in this instance) and crumble into dust, to be blown away by the forgetful winds of the progressing years. So let’s join Lomax and Pickow in this fulfilling fancy, so long as we don’t mistake supposition for historical fact – no matter how intuitively ‘right’ it feels.

Helston May Morris dancers

You’ll also come across The Flora Faddy Furry Dance Day in the BFI collection, Richard Philpott’s impressionistic record of another famous Cornish May Day festival, the Helston Furry Dance. Furry here could be a corruption of the Cornish feur, meaning holy day. The Floral Dance could be in honour of Flora, the Roman Goddess of flowers, or her local equivalent. The town is certainly resplendently decked out with green boughs and flowered garlands, and the Helston Town Band heroically plays the Floral Dance throughout the day as an accompaniment to a rather sedate series of parading, genteely pirhouetting dances which wend their way through the narrow nexus of the town centre’s winding streets. Philpott’s 1989 film (which feels more like it was made in the 70s) uses cross-editing, montage and intercut woodcuts and silhouettes of labyrinths, dragons and maypoles in an attempt to convey a sense of continuity with older traditions, sacred processions and universal archetypes. Like Lomax and Pickow, he claims the Furry Dance for ‘an ancient pre-Christian spring ritual’. Or perhaps he is simply trying to exorcise the twinkling spectre of Terry Wogan and his dispiritingly popular 1978 version.

George Cruickshank's cartoon of a London May Day parade

The Milkmaid's Parade

EP Thompson, in his classic 1963 history The Making of the English Working Class, notes that the rapidly expanding urbanisation brought about by the industrial revolution did not mean the dying out of old seasonal rituals and customs. Just as new towns grew over old rural settlements and villages were absorbed by the spreading boundaries of cities to become suburbs, so there was a continuity of celebratory tradition. May rituals brought the rhythms of the now-distanced natural world into the smog-darkened centres of the industrialised cities. In London, urban milkmaids who delivered supplies of the whitestuff danced through the streets, initially with a milk pail balanced on their head like an inverted metal bonnet. This basic set-up was steadily elaborated over the seasons, an element of competition undoubtedly coming into play. In the end, piled helmets of polished silver were precariously balanced on platters garlanded with flowers, the whole ensemble thrillingly threatening to tumble to the pavement in a clattering disaster if perfect deportment was not maintained. It was a celebration of the first significant milk yield, and a reminder that even in the crawling heart of the metropolis, from which nature was increasingly smoke-blotted and walled out, people were still reliant on the turning seasons and the bounty they produced. To such an end, garlands were thrown into the Thames to acknowledge the watery conduit along which this bounty was carried into the city.

As if to mock the new-found ostentation of the milkmaids, ‘bunters’ dressed in rags would follow in their wake, parodying a now-established tradition. These women were of a lesser social standing, rag pickers or, as some whispered, ladies of ill repute. Class distinctions and their attendant snobberies infected even these celebratory occasions, noticeably more so once they had migrated to the city. What would once have been inter-village rivalries were now concentrated into more condensed and divisive centres of population. Sweeps also joined in the parades, whose money-raising opportunities were invaluable to them at this time. Whilst everyone else was greeting the lengthening days and warming sun with joy in their hearts, the sweeps were fretting at the upcoming loss of trade as hearth fires were gradually extinguished. Their presence became more and more prominent, and they introduced the startling figure of the Jack-in-the-Green to proceedings. Again, this was a prideful and competitive elaboration of initially simple leaf and blossom garlanded bonnets. As if the Jacks were undergoing a gradual vegetal growth, they got annually more expansive. Eventually, the sweep disappeared beneath a huge conical frame covered in greenery and flowers, and giant Jack was seen to walk with a swaying gait through the streets of London, guided by his ‘bogies’. These attendants were often the children whose chimney crawling labours were ended by progressive legislation in the late 19th century.

May Day traditions have always been subject to appropriations, revivals and revisionism. Many of the customs we associate with it are largely Victorian fabrications, attempts to escape from the pressures and inequities of industry and empire into a Merrie England fantasy of a simple, gilded past when everyone knew their place and all was pageantry, chivalry and happily purposeful agricultural labour. The term merry England was popularised in the early nineteenth century by the essayist William Hazlitt (who referred to its ‘rustic gambols’) and in particular by Walter Scott, whose 1808 poem Marmion referred to a time when ‘England was merry England’. Scott’s immense popularity in the 19th century did much to fuel the Victorian passion for medieval revivalism. Victorian worthies refashioned the old May Day rites, flensing them of their carnality and wild, celebratory communal spirit and reducing them to children’s games and carefully staged worker’s pastimes. They bequeathed us the much-diminished maypole with its trailing, coloured ribbons grasped by glumly skipping boys and girls, and the election of young May Queens for the year, condemned to sit shivering on floats for an interminable duration. Their resurrection of Morris Dancing, which had long since fallen out of fashion, was a singularly pallid ghost of its formerly rambunctious self. Even our old friend Philip Stubbes would have found it hard to work up a head of indignation over their polite village fete prancing.

The manufacturing and manipulation of a dream of England’s glory was not new, however. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had participated in May Games which evoked visions of a medieval golden age. Elizabeth attended formal May celebrations at Greenwich Palace in 1558, the first year of her reign, and witnessed a pageant whose no doubt trembling and fearful cast included Morris Dancers, St George and the Dragon, a giant, drummers, the ‘nine worthies of Christendom’, Robin Hood, Little John, Maid Marian and Friar Tuck. John Stow, in his A Survey of London, is one of several writers who record Henry VIII’s May Daying outing (on this occasion setting out from Greenwich Palace) with Catherine of Aragon to the woods on Shooters Hill. Here they picnicked beneath the trees and were entertained by their host, Robyn Hood, with displays of archery. Both monarchs made conscious use of the popular May Day customs, associating themselves with the golden age neverland such pageantry summoned up. In a sense they became magical king and queen of May, roles as chimerical as the mock monarchs they displaced with self-mythologised projections of the authentic article. Alan Moore recognises this Tudor version of Merrie England dreaming as a Disney construct in The Unearthing, his psychogeographical Shooters Hill reverie of history, myth and place and their interaction with an individual human consciousness, spiralling outward from an intimate portrait of his friend Steve Moore, the late comic strip writer. He writes ‘out a-maying with one of his Catherines, Henry VIII attends a Robin Hood fair, Shooters Hill as Medieval theme park, and meets players dressed as Robin, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, Bashful, Goofy’.

Thankful Sturdee's 1906 photograph of Fowler's Deptford Troop with attendant Jack-in-the-Green

Traditions have been re-invented for the modern age too, with the resurgence of a composite Paganism patched together in the latter half of the twentieth century playing a vital role. The London Jack-in-the-Green walks again, bringing a shimmying rustle of spring greenery and floral colourflash to the grey steel and glass canyons of the city. Its rebirth came about through the discovery of a 1906 photo of the old Jack by Thankful Sturdee (a strong and blessed name if ever there was one), its faded black and white image brought to vibrantly technicolored life. The milkmaids balance their silverware again, and the sweeps have returned to Rochester with a 7 foot Jack in tow. Beltane is now marked in the city, too, with a Pagan Pride parade making its way through Bloomsbury, an aptly named district to beat the bounds of. The spirit of Virginia Woolf looks down on them with amused benediction, I’m sure. Her final novel, Between the Acts, is all about the staging of a village pageant of British history and culture, and the continuity, renewal and convergence between the universal and the individual which it represents. Woolf’s story is partly about how there is no real distinction between the pageant and the incidental activities and incidents which take place around it – between the acts or during them. It’s all part of the great human parade. Issues of ‘authenticity’ or authorship seem beside the point in the light of this great communal connection, the sense of history’s vast acreage encompassed within an afternoon, or a flickering instant of flashing consciousness. The Pagan parade, with its inventive costumes and joyful sense of celebration, partakes of this spirit.

May Day rituals have repeatedly been the object of suppression and political appropriation over the centuries. A 1555 Act in Scotland banned the appointment of mock bishops and the participation in May Games. A political act which perhaps betokened a fear of mocking satire undermining authority. May Games were also banned in Kent in the wake of the 1554 rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose ragtag Kentish troops had reached as far as Southwark. The Puritans banned maypoles and the revels which took place around them, and their erection became an act of anti-Parliamentarian defiance. The restored Stuart monarchy lost no time in allying themselves to a renewal of the May Games, as we have seen from the royal crowning of the Strand maypole. May revels were even shifted to the end of the month to mark Charles II’s birthday on the 29th May, which was conveniently also the day on which he rode into London in 1660, restoring monarchical rule to the land. Oak boughs replaced May blossom as the dominant symbol of the day, memorialising the instantly storied occasion on which the king had hidden in an oak tree to evade Parliamentarian troops. It was a calculated act of propagandistic self-mythologisation, an equation of the king with the national tree, and with the renewal and rebirth of the spirit of the greenwood (although if JG Frazer’s theories are to be given credence, this could of course be an unfortunate analogy). Royal Oak Day became an officially decreed holiday for a while, although observance of it rapidly tailed off as the Stuart monarchs squandered the public’s affections. There are echoes of it still in Oak Apple Day in Wiltshire and Garland Day in Castleton, and indeed in the Bank Holiday which comes towards the end of May.

May Blossom and Oak Leaf - Opposing symbols at the poles of the month

This is at the other end of the month from May Day Bank Holiday, and if the link with Charles II and the restored monarchy is granted, at the opposite end of the political spectrum. With elections of mock monarchs, bishops of unreason and the welcoming of Robin Hood to preside over the festivities, May Day always had a strongly anti-authoritarian side. This was why the authorities felt the need periodically to exert their control over it. In 1890, the International Socialist movement (the Second International) chose May Day as the occasion for an international strike in support of the struggle in America to establish an 8 hour working day. It was subsequently formally declared as International Workers Day, an annual celebration of solidarity and united purpose. The romantic Merrie England associations of English utopian socialists in the William Morris, Arts and Crafts mould can be seen in Walter Crane’s poster The Worker’s May-Pole, his ‘offering for May-Day 1894’. The may-pole is given female embodiment, arms held out like spreading branches, a circling garland of flowers below. She loosely bears a ribbon in the open palms of her hands as if it had been draped across her statuesque form by one of the surrounding celebrants. On it is blazoned the ideological trinity Socialization, Solidarity, Humanity. The ribbons extending from the may-pole Goddess’ dress are grasped by happy and healthy Arts and Crafts peasants who dance around this figure of bounty and utopian promise. The ribbons are also imprinted with slogans and ideals such as ‘Eight Hours’, ‘Leisure for All’, ‘Abolition of Privilege’, ‘The Land for the People’, and ‘No Starving Children in the Board Schools’ (echoes of Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall). Further banners held aloft in the background read ‘The Hope of Labour is the Welfare of the World’ and ‘Neither Riches nor Poverty’. The next year, Crane produced A Garland for May Day 1895, held up by a bare-footed Arts and Crafts Goddess, and would about with further slogans, including one which reads ‘The Land for the People – Merrie England’.

Walter Crane's Workers' Maypole

This politicisation of May Day has proved a recurrent irritant over the years. During the Cold War, the International Workers Day descended into a grim opportunity for the Soviet Union and its cowed Eastern Bloc dominions to roll out their latest armaments for a rumbling, earthshaking parade, missiles and tank snouts cocked at the sky like half-erected maypoles. Robin Hood and his merry greenwood band were replaced by Khruschev and his Red iron generals. In Britain, the Conservatives are always grumbling about May Day, latterday Stubbeses whose focus has shifted from moral indignation to the raising of the shibboleths of a quiescent socialism which still rankles with them even as it fades into a historical memory. Proposals to impose a Margaret Thatcher Day on the late August Bank Holiday proved as divisive as the Royal Oak Day celebrating the Restoration soon became.

May Day is ours, even as seasonal patterns and political power bases shift around us. It is to be decorated with boughs and garlands not flags of allegiance; an anticipation of haymaking not a commemoration of Thatcher; a day for dancing around the maypole, nor for marching in ranks behind sky-pointing missiles; rejoicing in the restoration of the sun, not of the monarchy. So let us all come together in merrie communion, feast, drink and dance, and sing the old Padstow song once more:
Unite and unite and let us all unite,
For summer is a-come unto day
And whither we are going we will all unite,
In the merry morning of May.

Bibliography:

Clifford, Sue & King, Angela (eds.) England in Particular
Steve Roud – The English Year; A Month-by-Month Guide to The Nation’s Customs and Festivals from May Day to Mischief Night
Nick Groom – The Seasons
Sara Hannant – Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey Through the English Ritual Year
Roland Hutton - Pagan Britain
Roland Hutton – The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain
Roland Hutton – The Rise and Fall of Merrie England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700
Asa Briggs – A Social History of England
E.P.Thompson – The Making of the English Working Classes
Rodney Castleden – The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts
Iain Sinclair (ed.) – London: City of Disappearances (inc.Alan Moore – Unearthing)
Steve Roud & Julia Bishop (eds) – The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs
Alexandra Harris – Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (14th Edition)
Bob Copper – A Song for Every Season
William Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
BFI DVD – Here’s A Health to the Barley Mow