Abstract
In popular imagination, May Day is the most familiar of British folk customs. With its iconic maypole, and the accompanying garlands, ribbon dances, processions, hobby horses and Morris dancers, it has become, as E. P. Thompson and others have shown, the embodiment of ‘Merrie England’. But for all their familiarity, whether these customs and practices are indeed continuous with those of happier ‘Old-Style days’ is problematic. In fact, the evidence suggests that the form and popularity of May Day celebrations has changed over the centuries, with some falling into abeyance, and others deliberately introduced. Historically, there has been no ‘single dominant version of the May celebration’. As Roy Judge has argued, ‘the ordinary person might well feel a misplaced confidence that he was well-informed about May Day’, while in reality simply taking on trust a collection of material ‘created by romantic imagination’, an established ‘May-Day repertoire […] of allusions of dubious authority that occur with regularity in the material used by folklorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’.
The May-Day dance, for instance, was to be discerned, on the afternoon under notice, in the guise of the club-revel, or ‘club-walking’, as it was there called.
The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still.
The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns—a gay survival from Old-Style days, when cheerfulness and Maytime were synonyms—days before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous average. Their first exhibition of themselves was in a processional march of two and two round the parish.
(Tess of the d’Urbervilles 19)
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Notes
- 1.
E. P. Thompson, ‘Folklore, Anthropology, and Social History’, Indian Historical Review, 3.2 (1978), 247–66 (p. 250).
- 2.
As Essaka Joshua has noted: The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 16.
- 3.
Roy Judge, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, Folklore, 102.2 (1991), 131–48 (p. 134).
- 4.
Judge, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, p. 139; Udal, Dorsetshire Folk-Lore, p. 39.
- 5.
Anonymous, ‘Teaching People How to be Jolly’, EFDS News, 2.18 (1928), 126–7 originally from the Evening Standard and reprinted in EFDS News and in Georgina Boyes’s The Imagined Village, pp. 94, 113.
- 6.
‘The First of May’, in Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People, ed. Thea Holme (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 169, reprinted in Joshua, Romantics, p. 70. Chimney sweeps celebrated May Day as an annual holiday, marked by processions through the streets.
- 7.
Udal (quoting Barnes), Dorsetshire Folk-Lore, p. 41.
- 8.
Barnes, ‘Fore-Say’, in Udal, Dorsetshire Folk-Lore, p. 4.
- 9.
William Archer, ‘With Mr. Thomas Hardy’, Real Conversations (London: W. Heinemann, 1904), pp. 29–50 (p. 33), reprinted in Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Gibson, p. 68; ‘Revision of Article in Folk-Lore’, in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice, ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 156; ‘Letter to A. M. Broadley’, CL 4: 68.
- 10.
Hutton, Stations of the Sun, p. 226. Hutton’s work is usefully supplemented by Nick Groom, The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year (London: Atlantic Books, 2013); see especially ‘May Day’, pp. 160–79.
- 11.
Roud, The English Year, p. 222.
- 12.
Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (4th edition, 1595), ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in Conjunction with the Renaissance English Text Society, 2002), pp. 209–210.
- 13.
Hutton, Stations of the Sun, p. 228. As Hutton observes, the belief that a steep rise in conceptions came as a result of May Day frivolity persisted until overturned by twentieth-century demographic historians.
- 14.
Kingsley Palmer, Folklore of Somerset (London: Batsford, 1976), p. 101.
- 15.
Hutton, Stations of the Sun, p. 236.
- 16.
Hutton, Stations of the Sun, p. 236; Roud, English Year, p. 222.
- 17.
Doel and Doel, Folklore of Dorset, p. 32; H. Colley March, ‘Dorset Folklore Collected in 1897’, Folklore 10.4 (1899), 478–89 (pp. 481–2).
- 18.
Colley March, ‘Dorset Folklore Collected in 1897’, p. 482; Doel and Doel, Folklore of Dorset, p. 56.
- 19.
Hutton, Stations of the Sun, p. 229.
- 20.
Hutton, Stations of the Sun, p. 229.
- 21.
‘Derby, May 21’, Derby Mercury (22 May 1772), p. 4, col. 2.
- 22.
‘Gloucester, May 22’, Derby Mercury (31 May 1733), p. 1.
- 23.
Simpson and Roud, Dictionary of English Folklore, p. 236.
- 24.
Joshua, Romantics, p. 65.
- 25.
Joshua, Romantics, p. 65. As Joshua notes, this extract has been reproduced in full as it appeared in The Monthly Magazine.
- 26.
Joshua makes no mention of this repetition of Coleridge’s piece in the periodical press, but it is evident when searching the British Newspaper Archive. Many more newspapers may have reprinted this story with no hint that Coleridge was the author. The newspapers listed are ‘The Origin of the Maypole’, Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette (10 March 1796), p. 2, col. 1; ‘Origin of the May-pole’, Staffordshire Advertiser (12 March 1796), p. 4, col. 2; ‘Jottings for the Curious’, Alnwick Mercury (12 April 1879), p. 3, col. 5.
- 27.
‘May Fair’ and ‘May Day ’63’, Dorset County Chronicle (7 May 1863), p. 6, col. 2.
- 28.
Bourne, ‘Preface’, Antiquitates Vulgares, p. x.
- 29.
Dorson’s phrase in British Folklorists, p. 19. Henry Ellis, who served as Keeper of Printed Books in the British Museum, continued Brand’s work after his death and published an updated edition of Popular Antiquities in 1813 and again in 1849.
- 30.
Quoted in Joshua, Romantics, p. 70.
- 31.
Scott finished and published Queenhoo-Hall, but the story and the writing was largely the work of Joseph Strutt, author of Sports and Pastimes (1801), who was often called ‘the father of English antiquaries’ (Dorson, British Folklorists, p. 30).
- 32.
Judge, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, p. 133.
- 33.
See, for a notorious but unfortunate example, the Eglinton tournament of 1839.
- 34.
Judge, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, pp. 134–5. Trollope provides an affectionate parody in Barchester Towers (published in 1857, but set in the 1840s), in Miss Thorne’s ‘Fête Champêtre’ at Ullathorne.
- 35.
Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice, p. 156.
- 36.
Archer, ‘With Mr. Thomas Hardy’, reprinted in Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections, p. 68.
- 37.
Udal, Dorsetshire Folk-Lore, p. 39.
- 38.
Simpson and Roud, Dictionary of English Folklore, p. 236.
- 39.
Judge, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, p. 144.
- 40.
Judge, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, p. 139.
- 41.
No title, Gloucester Citizen (30 April 1897), no page number, col. 3.
- 42.
Quoted in Boyes, The Imagined Village, p. 144.
- 43.
Hardy’s spelling, perhaps in resistance to the self-conscious archaism of ‘merrie’; see the Return, p. 369.
- 44.
CP 227. In both ‘Tranter Sweatley’ and ‘One We Knew’, Hardy originally wrote ‘May-pole’ before changing it to ‘maypole’, as noted in <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Complete Poems.
- 45.
Written in 1866, published in 1875, later revised and retitled ‘The Bride-Night Fire’.
- 46.
Michael Millgate has established that Hardy’s grandparents Thomas and Mary Hardy moved from Puddletown to the cottage adjoining the heath in 1800 in Biography Revisited, p. 12.
- 47.
‘The Return of the Native’: A Facsimile of the Manuscript with Related Materials, ed. Simon Gatrell (New York: Garland, 1986), f. 407, p. 460.
- 48.
Simon Gatrell, ‘Wessex’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 19–37 (p. 23).
- 49.
Simon Gatrell, Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 43.
- 50.
Hillis Miller discusses this inner conflict of the narrator who is at once an ‘expert on the ways of his community’, who simultaneously ‘speaks as an outsider who sees those ways from an ironic distance’ in ‘Individual and Community in The Return of the Native: A Reappraisal’, in Thomas Hardy Reappraised, ed. Wilson, p. 158.
- 51.
See Radford, Survivals of Time; Zeitler, Representations of Culture; and Garrigan-Mattar, ‘The Enchanted Heath’.
- 52.
Beer, ‘Can the Native Return?’, p. 519.
- 53.
‘Medieval doctrine’ originally read ‘medieval Christianity’ in the manuscript, so the emphasis is changed from the possible interpretation of religious ‘truth’ to that of an established teaching or tradition that more evenly parallels the Egdon community’s folk traditions, ‘The Return of the Native’: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, f. 407, p. 460. John Paterson and Jane Bownas have both discussed this revision but not in terms of folk culture: see Paterson, ‘The Return of the Native as Anti-Christian Document’; Jane Bownas, Thomas Hardy and Empire: The Representation of Imperial Themes in the Works of Thomas Hardy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
- 54.
See his Penguin edition of the novel, p. 426, note 5.
- 55.
Bownas, Thomas Hardy and Empire, p. 99.
- 56.
George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 35; note also that Lady Gomme, wife of George Gomme, author of The Handbook of Folklore, applied this ‘reason’ to May Day, saying ‘May Day, without a reason for its ceremony and festivity, does not appeal to me, but with that reason made apparent it becomes a beautiful and poetical festival, and the loss of its teaching is to be regretted’ (quoted in Judge, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, p. 142).
- 57.
Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England, The Creighton Trust Lecture 1983, quoted in J. F. Merritt, Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype: 1598–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 27.
- 58.
Quoted in Angelique Richardson, ‘Hardy and the Place of Culture’, in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. by Keith Wilson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 54–70 (pp. 62, 61).
- 59.
Phillip Mallett, ‘Hardy and Philosophy’, in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Wilson, pp. 21–35 (p. 27).
- 60.
Quoted in Mallett, ‘Hardy and Philosophy’, p. 28.
- 61.
Note, however, that Kristin Brady has observed that in Tess Hardy associates ‘primitivism’ with a positive ‘instinctiveness’ over cultivated civilisation; Kristin Brady, ‘Thomas Hardy and Matters of Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Kramer, pp. 93–111.
- 62.
‘Letter to A. M. Broadley’, CL 4: 68.
- 63.
Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, p. 73.
- 64.
Jude, p. 133; see also Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, p. 178.
- 65.
Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 220.
- 66.
Perry Meisel, Thomas Hardy and the Return of the Repressed: A Study of the Major Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 75.
- 67.
Boyes, The Imagined Village, p. 113.
- 68.
Hardy, Life and Work, p. 51; ‘Inspired Paragraph about Jemima Hardy’, Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice, p. 208.
- 69.
Merritt, Imagining Early Modern London, p. 27. Stow does not, however, use the precise phrase.
- 70.
‘Siege Calais’ (Galba), Political Poems & Songs</Emphasis>, ed. T. Wright, 2 vols. (London, 1861), II, p. 156.
- 71.
‘Signior Dildo’, The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1st edition 1703), ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 75.
- 72.
Sir Walter Scott, ‘Introduction to Canto VI’, Marmion: a Tale of Flodden Field (Edinburgh: Constable, 1808), p. 303.
- 73.
Mr. Ingleberry Grisken, ‘Merrie England in the Olden Time’, Bentley’s Miscellany, 5 (1839), 98–108, p. 98.
- 74.
This is Edward Clodd’s phrase in The Childhood of the World: a Simple Account of Man in Early Times (London: Macmillan, 1873).
- 75.
Cf. Peter Widdowson’s remarks on ‘a literary culture in which there is a complex relationship between forms of romanticism and patriotism, and the formation of a pastoral myth of rural England—often recalling a past more glorious heritage—which is the true “essential England” of national identity’: Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 16.
- 76.
Radford, Survivals of Time, p. 157.
- 77.
‘Letter 95’ from Fors Clavigera, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–12), XXIX, p. 496.
- 78.
Malcolm Cole, ‘Be Like Daisies: The Cultivation of Beauty at Whitelands College’ (London: Guild of St George, 1992), pp. 1–37 (p. 29).
- 79.
‘Letter 95’, The Works of John Ruskin, p. 496.
- 80.
‘A May-Day Festival’, Pall Mall Gazette (2 May 1885), quoted in Sara Atwood, Ruskin’s Educational Ideals (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 156.
- 81.
‘A May-Day Festival’, Pall Mall Gazette (2 May 1885), p. 4, col. 2. The article adds, with an obvious echo of Tylor’s language: ‘Of late years there has been a tendency to revive this rural custom, which appeared at one time likely to become extinct.’
- 82.
‘Letter to Mary Christie’, 11 April 1883 (CL 1: 116–17).
- 83.
Life and Work, p. 207.
- 84.
Mid-Victorian England saw an excess of women over men of about half a million.
- 85.
Cole, ‘Be Like Daisies’, p. 16.
- 86.
‘A May-Day Festival’, Pall Mall Gazette (2 May 1885), p. 4, col. 2.
- 87.
Ray, Thomas Hardy: a Textual Study of the Short Stories, p. 243.
- 88.
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Superstitious Man’s Story’, in Life’s Little Ironies, ed. Alan Manford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 182.
- 89.
CL 6: 251–2; Literary Notebooks II, p. 45.
- 90.
Lea, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, p. 144.
- 91.
The Book of Days: a Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, ed. R. Chambers, 2 vols. (London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1863), I, p. 815. Chambers’s approach seems to be more sympathetic than the earlier Every-Day Book (of 1838), which had recorded church porch divination as believed by ‘the ignorant’: The Every-Day Book and Table Book, ed. William Hone, 3 vols. (London: T. Tegg, 1838).
- 92.
Udal, Dorsetshire Folk-Lore, p. 47. The source for this information lived within five miles of Melbury Osmond, but this was recorded in the ‘Folk-lore’ column of the Dorset County Chronicle prior to Hardy writing ‘The Superstitious Man’.
- 93.
Firor, Folkways in Thomas Hardy, p. 43.
- 94.
Davies, Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture, p. 133. Davies says that Mother Bunch claimed to be based on a wise ‘old woman who lived at Bonny Venter in the West’; the earliest version of it was printed in 1685, and it continued to be printed into the late nineteenth century.
- 95.
Davies, Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture, p. 135. This version also appears in Mother Bunch’s Closet Newly Broke Open, ed. George Laurence Gomme (London: Printed for the Villon Society), p. 17.
- 96.
The Book of Days I: 816. Chambers’s Journal was the first magazine that Hardy published in (‘How I Built Myself a House’), and it is likely he was also familiar with Chambers’s Book of Days, which was published in the years leading up to the composition of Under the Greenwood Tree.
- 97.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Variorum edition, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 31.
- 98.
Literary Notebooks, I, p. 77.
- 99.
Firor, Folkways in Thomas Hardy, p. 51.
- 100.
‘New Novels’, Saturday Review (2 April 1887), 484–5; Gosse sees The Woodlanders as a successor to Under the Greenwood Tree, writing in the same review: ‘We have not found ourselves in exactly the company we meet with in The Woodlanders since he published Under the Greenwood Tree’ (p. 484).
- 101.
Udal, Dorsetshire Folk-Lore, p. 45. Udal also notes how Barnes drew on such a description in his poem ‘Mrs. Mary’s Tale’ in Erwin and Linda, in his Poems of Rural Life in National English (1846).
- 102.
It is worth noting Hardy’s revision in ‘The Superstitious Man’ from 1894 to 1912 where the ‘rational explanation’ of the bell going heavy in the sexton’s hand (foretelling death) is removed, so as not to undermine the ‘superstitious’ element of the ill omen (Ray, Short Stories, p. 244).
- 103.
This aligns with the novel’s explanation for the ‘hag-ridden’ horses as well.
- 104.
Radford, Survivals of Time, pp. 138–9.
- 105.
For a discussion of the role of the Matrimonial Causes Act in the novel, see William A. Davis, Thomas Hardy and the Law: Legal Presences in Hardy’s Life and Fiction (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses), pp. 125–34. See also Trish Ferguson, Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 89–131.
- 106.
Farrer, Primitive Manners and Customs, pp. 314–15.
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Dillion, J. (2016). Summer Customs: May Day and Midsummer Divination. In: Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50320-6_6
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