Foraging Through Folklore: The Quickthorn and the Dead

vi: Foraging through Folklore

The Quickthorn and the Dead

Ella Leith

Hawthorn (Crataegus monogynaI) is a tree that sits on borders— spatial, temporal and supernatural. In terms of spatial borders, Hawthorn hedges criss-cross the landscape, particularly in England where, during the large-scale enclosure of common land in the 18th Century, over 200,000 miles worth were planted (Mabey 1996:210). But Hawthorn has been used to mark parish and county bounds for over a thousand years; indeed, it is the most frequently mentioned tree in Anglo-Saxon boundary charters (Mabey 1996:209). Its fast rate of growth explains its suitability for hedging— no wonder, perhaps, that one of its bynames is Quickthorn.

But Quickthorn— or the Quicken tree, a name it shares with the Rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) —does not refer to the speed at which it grows. Instead, it alludes to its position on a temporal border: the cusp of Spring and Summer, when its white flowers— called May —blossom in abundance. The Middle English verb ‘to quick’ or ‘to quicken’ means ‘to come to life, receive life; … return to life from the dead’— even to ‘to give life to’ (Etymonline), and the Maythorn (as Hawthorn is also known) has long been associated with the pan-European festival of life and growth that we call May Day or Beltane. This is the quarter day between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice which marks the first day of Summer, and traditional customs include folk rising early on May Day morning ‘to fetch may or green boughs to deck their doors and mantelpieces in testimony of their joy at the revival of vegetation’, as recorded by a Northumbrian antiquarian in 1825 (in Brown 1959:416).

Decoration was not confined to houses. People too were decorated, mostly with garlands, for the May Day celebrations— including dancing around a bedecked May Pole or, in the more distant past, a Maythorn bush. Garlands were not enough for some rituals; the Jack-in-the-Green tradition involves decking a man with a wooden frame structure to create a a walking pyramid of leaves and flowers). Although originally a generic term for any green foliage, the word ‘May’ had become synonymous Hawthorn by the 17th Century (Brown 1959:416), and the proliferation of Hawthorn blossoms around May Day made it the go-to plant for the celebrations— with some ill effects:

They every May-eve goe into ye Parke, and fetch away a number of Hawthorne-trees, wch they sett before their dores, ‘tis pity they make such destruction of so fine a tree.

(John Aubrey 1688, in Simpson and Roud 2000:169)

For some, Summer cannot start until the Maythorn blossoms: the proverb ‘ cast nae a clout til May is out’ does not refer to the end of the month of May, but to the appearance of the May blossom as the necessary prompt to put away winter clothes.

As if marking Summer weren’t enough, Hawthorn also marks Winter in some traditions. Simpson and Roud (2000:169) record that it was considered lucky to burn a ‘thorny globe’ of Hawthorn on New Year’s Day, so as to quicken the year into Spring. Some varieties of Hawthorn even have a second blossoming at midwinter: the most famous of these is the Holy Thorn at Glastonbury, claimed to have been planted by Joseph of Arimathea and to have blossomed yearly on New Year’s Day or (more commonly) on Christmas morning (Simpson and Roud 2000:183-4). When Britain finally adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 and ‘lost’ eleven days of that year, hundreds of pilgrims visited the Glastonbury Thorn on the new Christmas Day to see whether the Holy Thorn had updated its time of blossoming to account for the change; it had not, which ‘was held to prove that the calendar change … was invalid and 25 December no longer the ‘real’ Christmas Day’ (Simpson and Roud 2000:183). However, as Williamson (1962:42) observes, ‘the Feast of the Epiphany [6th January] was in fact observed as Christmas Day in the time of Joseph of Arimathea and for three centuries afterwards, so the Thorn can hardly be accused of inconsistency.’ The Hawthorn carries a curious mixture of pagan and Christian, sacred and profane connotations. It seems pretty clear that ‘what is now celebrated as May Day is rooted in rituals concerned with fertility and death’ (Pallardy 2011), and ‘debauchery of all kinds’ ensued during the festival. The Puritan pamphleteer, Phillip Stubbes, was horrified by the implications of May Day, particularly of young people heading off into the woods unsupervised, ostensibly to collect May:

Of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood ouer night, there haue scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled.

(1583:163)

It’s not then surprising that Hawthorn is ‘a consistent symbol of carnal love, as opposed to spiritual love’ (Eberly 1989:41)— yet, conversely, ‘the purity of its white blossoms was a central symbol’ in the cult of the Virgin Mary (Vaughn 2015:10). The foliate head of the Green Man, a fertility symbol of at least two millennia old and found across Europe, the Middle East and beyond, usually features Hawthorn leaves— and is most often found carved into Christian churches. The Holy Thorn of Glastonbury was said to have been planted by Joseph of Arimathea from a thorn taken from Christ’s crown of thorns— on a site that was long believed to be a fairy hill (Simpson and Roud 2000:145, 183).

This leads us to the supernatural border that the Hawthorn straddles. ‘Hawthorn is, above all, the fairy tree,’ writes Schneidau (2019), and stands as a gateway into the fairy world. Recorded in 1972, Helen Galloway (1903-1987) of Port Logan recalled a neighbour’s name for isolated Hawthorn trees:

If there was a little thorn tree growin away on its own somewhere, he called that a Fairy Thorn. […] He was an Irishman, ye see, and there must have been some connection with fairies he gave it that name, ‘that’s a fairy thorn,’ he would’ve said.

Hawthorns are both of the fairies and a protective influence against the fairies: sitting under a Hawthorn on Beltane might get you whisked away (Schneidau 2019), but hanging flowering branches of Maythorn from doors or planting Hawthorn in your hedges will keep fairies at bay (Vaughn 2015:10; Baker 1996:69). Perhaps because of this fairy connection, you don’t want to mess with a Hawthorn tree. In a 1972 interview, Jura shepherd Big Norman MacDonald (1912-1988) recalled an Irishman he knew from the neighbouring island of Islay, who had once burned a Hawthorn; as a result, his son became ill, his daughter fell asleep and could not be woken, and a part of his house came tumbling down. He subsequently left Ireland, perhaps to escape the wrath of the wronged Whitethorn. Other cautionary tales are recorded by Margaret Baker in The Folklore of Plants:

[A] Worcestershire … farmer, annoyed by sightseers, chopped his tree down. … He broke first his leg, then his arm and finally his farm burned down to the ground. At Clehonger, another axe-wielding gambler saw blood flow from the tree’s trunk and stopped work in terror. … In 1877 a County Meath man felled a whitethorn without precautions [i.e. without offering a prayer], pierced his hand with a thorn and died of septicaemia. … When firewood ran short one winter at Berwick St John, Dorset, [the] son of the manor house is said to have cut down an old thorn standing on an earthwork. The horrified village soon found that no chickens would lay, no cow calved and no babies were conceived.

(1996:70)

It is also believed that the failure of the DeLorean Motor Company is down to a Hawthorn standing in the field in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, where the new DMC manufacturing facility was to be built. John DeLorean ignored the advice of his Hawthorn-respecting workmen, and bulldozed the tree himself; the DMC declared bankruptcy in 1982 (Schneidau 2019). And lest fairies get all the blame, when the Holy Thorn at Glastonbury was attacked by Puritans, one was blinded by a flying chip of the trunk (Williamson 1962:41) and another managed to embed the axe in his own leg (Simpson and Roud 2000:183). Margaret Baker concludes, ‘interference with thorns, fairy or holy, [i]s reckless’ (1996:70).

So the Hawthorn sits on many borders: between this place and that, this season and the next, this world and the other. It also sits on the border between the lucky and the unlucky. It protects houses, people and livestock from lightning, fire and injury (Simpson and Roud 2000:143, 169), and the ‘clootie trees’ beside holy wells may grant you wishes if you tie ribbons and pieces of clothing to its thorny branches (Vaughn 2015:10). Yet May blossom, ‘so festively flourished at spring ceremonials’, should never be brought inside the house: not only will it cause bad luck, but it may even precipitate the death of someone in the home (Mabey 1996:209-211). But the Hawthorn does give you fair warning you of this: the strange sickly scent of its blossoms is the same— they say —as the smell of decomposing flesh. Heed the Hawthorn’s warnings, and no harm will come to you.

References

Baker, M. (1996) Discovering the Folklore of Plants. Shire Publications: London

Brown, P. W. F. (1959) ‘Notes on the name of the thorn’, Folklore 70 (2): 416-418

Eberly, S. (1989) ‘A Thorn Among the Lilies: The Hawthorn in Medieval Love Allegory’ in Folklore 100 (1): 41-52

Etymonline, The Online Etymological Dictionary. www.etymonline.com

Mabey, R. (1996) Flora Britannica. SinclairStevenson: London

Pallardy, R. (2011) ‘May Day: Sex, Death, and Fire’, blog post on The Encyclopædia Britannica Blog: www.blogs.britannica.com (29/4/2011).

Schneidau, L. (2019) ‘The Fairy Trees: Blackthorn, Hawthorn and Rowan’, blog post on the Folklore Thursday Blog: www.folklorethursday.com (28/03/2019)

Simpson, J. and Roud, S. (2000) A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Stubbes, P. (1583 [1877-9]) Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakespeare’s Youth, The New Shakespeare Society: London. Full text available at: www.archive.org

Vaughn, B. (2015) Hawthorn. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT Williamson, H. R. (1962) The Flowering Hawthorn. Peter Davies: London

The interviews mentioned can be found on the Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches website, the online portal for selected items held in the School of Scottish Studies Sound Archives at the University of Edinburgh:

Helen Galloway –tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecord/2954 4

Norman MacDonald tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecord/5108 6