MISCHIEF AN
MAY Day was the day when country folk said “hello” to summer. Summer’s reply is usually a north-westerly gale. The peasants went out into the woods and meadows to gather flowers and greenery and “bring in the May”. Branches and blossom were used to decorate homes. In the 1400s, morris dancers were first recorded. These bold, beribboned men blew the winter dust off their bells and danced on May 1. Churchgoers were not amused by the “men attired in women’s apparel” who led the Queen of the May into town. These cross-dressing chaps were known as May Marrions. We now have to make do with a May Prime Minister, but at least by dressing in leather trousers she keeps up the cross-dressing tradition. If Halloween is the festival of the dying year then May Day is the festival of life. Still, like Halloween, it’s a night when witches, fairies and ghosts wander the Earth. The Fairy Queen rides out on a snow-white horse, looking for humans to lure away to Fairyland for seven years. Beware the seven-year witch! On April 30, young men and women went out into the woods and “frolicked”, returning on May Day morn. As Kipling put it delicately: “Oh, do not tell the priest our plight, Or he would call it a sin; But we have been out in the woods all night, A-conjuring summer in.”
A Puritan was less delicate when he raged: “I have hearde of tenne maidens whiche went to set May, and nine of them came home with childe.”
Top marks for morality – big deduction for spelling.
Those lads and lasses came home on May Day with a tree (and nine babies, apparently). They trimmed the branches to make a pole, painted it and decorated it with flowers. This was the maypole. MAYPOLES appeared in villages in the late 1300s. Couples joined hands and danced in a ring around them. The custom probably started with those rotten Romans who carried a statue of their goddess Flora past a sacred, blossomdecked tree. The tradition spread across Europe from Italy…rather like the Black Death. By the 1600s, maypole dancing was so much fun the Puritans banned it. That’s their job really. The villagers dedicated May Day to Flora, “a pagan goddess,” the righteous killjoys raged. By the 1700s, ribbons were tied to the top and woven into patterns. The 1800s saw maypoles neglected and left to rot or used for firewood. That’s life – ash tree today, ashes tomorrow. Those romantic Victorians “remembered” a past that never was, revived the old tradition and stuck up new maypoles, probably without planning permission. The people of Padstow in Cornwall still celebrate May Day with their Hobby Horse Carnival. The dawn partying goes on until sunset, by which time most of the pubs have run dry. MAY Day is Labour Day around the world. It started as a peaceful protest in Chicago in 1886. get an eight-hour day. at the police. and fired on the workers, killing four. state troops fired on a crowd of strikers, killing seven. schoolboy and a man feeding chickens in his garden.
A congress of world socialist parties was held in Paris in 1889. It voted to support the US labour movement and May 1, 1890, was chosen as a day of demonstrations in favour of the eight-hour day.
There are still violent Labour Day protests but no recent reports of anyone else being shot while feeding chickens.