Foraging through Folklore

Fetching the summer home

Ella Leith

Robin Hood and Little John, they both are gone to fair, O! / And we will to the merry greenwood to see what they do there, O! / And for to chase-O! To chase the buck and doe. / With Hal-an-tow! Rumbelow! For we up as soon as any, O! / And for to fetch the summer home, the summer and the May O! / For summer is acome, O! And winter is agone, O!

(in Courtney, 1886)

May Day marks the beginning of summer. It is the month of merriment; of flower-wreathed May Poles, of garlanded May Queens, of village fairs, of young people a-maying in the merry greenwood. They would usually be gathering ‘May’. The plant most commonly known by this name is Crataegus monogyna (Hawthorn, Whitethorn, or Quickthorn), but there are countless other ‘May’s: Lilac (Syringa spp.), Guelder-rose (Viburnum opulus), Cowslip (Primula veris), Furze (Ulex spp.), Narrow-leaved Elm (Ulmus minor), and Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus), to name a few. ‘Literary evidence suggests that May originally meant simply ‘greenery’’, says Brown (1959:416), and it seems to me that those off a-maying would be unlikely to be all that fussy about which green boughs and flowers they brought back. With the rising sap, they may have had other things on their minds. A-maying in the greenwood probably meant more than merely collecting foliage; ‘chasing the buck and doe’ may be a bit of a euphemism for what the unchaperoned young people got up to (see Pallardy, 2011). Social mores could be suspended in times of festivity; the important thing was that they didn’t return empty handed, but laden with the proof of summer growth— literally, fetching the summer home.

The above song was sung in Helston, Cornwall, not on May Day itself but on the 8th — Flora Day, also known as Flurry-Jay and Faddy. This was a day ‘given up to pleasure’ (Courtney, 1886:230-231). After a week of spring cleaning and decorating houses with flowers, the young people— the Hal-an-tow —would dance off into the woods, raucously accompanied by drums, singing, and perhaps the shrill tooting of a ‘feeper’, a ‘rude whistle’ made from young Sycamore shoots and the ‘green stalks of wheaten corn’ (ibid:225-226). Their return was met with festivities, drinking and a dance. Participation was not optional: anyone found working on Flora Day was manhandled onto a pole and taken to the widest part of the Cober stream, where they were made to jump across— an endeavour that inevitably failed (ibid:232). Similar punishments were meted out across Cornwall on May Day proper; in some communities, Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica) were used to ‘chastise ... any one found in bed after six on May-morning’ (ibid:225); in other places, sprigs of Narrow-leaved Elm or Hawthorn had to be displayed prominently by each person, as:

all the boys sally forth with bucket, can, or other vessel, and avail themselves of a licence which the season confers— to ‘dip’ or wellnigh drown, without regard to person or circumstance, the passenger who has not the protection of a piece of ‘May’ conspicuously stuck in his dress; at the same time they sing, ‘The first of May is Dipping-day’.

(ibid: 226)

May merriment was taken seriously.

Sex in the greenwood, boisterous musicmaking, and mob justice, contrast somewhat with the demure image of May Poles on the village green. Judge (1991:134) blames ‘ an established repertoire of material created by romantic imagination’, founded in Victorian nostalgia for Merry England’s ‘contented, revelling peasantry and a hierarchical order in which each one happily accepted his place’ (Thomas, 1983:20). In fact, May festivities were often much more carnivalesque— an opportunity to let off steam, subvert the social order, and mark the liminal space between two seasons with a bit of rowdiness, chaos, and danger. In Hayle, Cornwall, ‘bonfires were lit in various parts of the town’, and ‘a ball of tow or rags...saturated with petroleum, [was] set fire to, and then kicked from one place to another’ (Courtney, 1886:226). In 1598, Oxford men ‘attired in women’s apparel’ instigated a ‘town-and-gown’ riot, ‘with drum and shot and other weapons’, as well as indulging in more ‘disordered and unseemly sports’ (quoted in Manning, 1903:175). In Padstow, Cornwall, May Day was Hobby Hoss (or Obby Oss) Day, on account of the huge hobbyhorse which was processed through the town:

made of sackcloth painted black— a fierce mask— eyes red, horse's head, horse-hair mane and tail; distended by a hoop— some would call it frightful. Carried by a powerful man, he could inflict much mischief with the snappers.

(Courtney, 1886:227)

The Hoss, snapping its jaws and “tilting its skirts ‘for luck’ over the young girls” (Spooner, 1958:35), was followed by:

a vast crowd of men and women gaily decorated with flowers and singing the May Songs, while the men fired in all directions pistols loaded with powder.

(Anon., 1905:60-61)

Unsurprisingly, the rowdiness could easily escalate. Courtney (1886:227) reports:

Formerly all the respectable people at Padstow kept this anniversary, decorated with the choicest flowers; but some unlucky day [c.1815] a number of rough characters from a distance joined in it, and committed some sad assaults upon old and young, spoiling all their nice summer clothes, and covering their faces and persons with smut.

Not to be deterred, by 1880 the townsfolk had incorporated smut into the tradition: well-todo people appearing at their doors would be “greeted by ‘showers of soot’ and had their faces ‘blackened by the application of the sooty or greasy hands of some of the men’” (Spooner, 1958:35). Courtney (1886:227) was not impressed, commenting: ‘[nowadays] the procession is formed of the lowest’.

Social divisions might come to the fore during these seasonal festivals, but despite the chaos and sense of mild threat in many May Day customs, the processions were an assertion of community; a form of visiting custom, physically delineating the town, village, or parish, and marking the community to itself. The night before the Padstow festivities, groups of young men sang outside local houses of note:

Unite and unite, and let us all unite, / For summer it is comen to-day; / And whither we are going we all will unite, / In the merry morning of May.

(Courtney, 1886:228)

Ultimately, these festivities act out the uncertainty and potential chaos inherent in the changing of the seasons— rules get broken, maybe heads get broken too. You might get jostled or chased, you might be burnt by a fireball or covered in soot, you might get drunk and disorderly, but perhaps that’s the price of fetching the summer home.

References

Anonymous (1905) ‘The Padstow Hobby Horse, etc.’ in Folklore, 16(1): 56-60

Bagshawe, T.W. (1953) ‘Elstow (Bedfordshire) May Festival, 1953,’ in Folklore, 64(2): 341-342

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

Courtney, M.A. (1886) ‘Cornish Feasts and “Feasten” Customs’ in The Folk-Lore Journal, 4(1): 221-249

Judge, R. (1991) ‘May Day and Merrie England’ in Folklore, 102(2): 131-148

Manning, P. (1903) ‘Stray Notes on Oxfordshire Folklore’ in Folklore, 14(2): 167177

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

Spooner, B.C. (1958) ‘The Padstow Obby Oss’ in Folklore, 69(1): 34-38

Thomas, K. (1983) The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England, The Creighton Trust Lecture 1983. London: University of London