Mayday Mayday

One of the most regularly consulted books on my bookshelf is Steve Roud’s book on The English Year: A month by month guide to the nation’s customs and festivals from May Day to Mischief Night (2006). It’s a brilliant work of synthesis, bringing together evidence of customary events that took place across the country and across the calendar.  I’ve just looked again at his chapter on May Day, which reveals that the start of May ‘was second only to Christmas in popularity with the English people’. As a date in the customary calendar it’s difficult to place clearly, since it was celebrated in such a variety of ways in different places. ‘We desperately need a full-scale historical study of the day in all its manifestations’, Roud writes.

The different ways in which 1 May was celebrated included:

• ‘Bringing in the May’: fetching greenery from the countryside to adorn towns and villages
• May garlands: which could be wreaths of flowers, or nosegays sold for luck, or even pyramids of shiny metal carried on the heads of dancing maids
• Maypole dancing
• Noise: in particular the blowing of horns
• Ducking or Dipping: dousing people with buckets of water if they do not carry a ‘piece of May’ as protection
• Fighting: as at Yarleton Hill in Gloucestershire, where residents of neighbouring parishes customarily met on 1 May to battle for possession of the May Hill
• Decorating horses
• Jack-in-the-green: chimney sweeps covered in a dome of greenery who would perform public dances
• Cheese Rolling
• Hobby Horses

1 May was also adopted as International Labour Day in 1889 and moved from being a romantic celebration of nature and working customs to having a far harder political edge as a day for union processions and industrial agitation.

Interestingly, we’ve only marked the May Day Bank Holiday since 1978, when it was introduced by Michael Foot under the last Labour Government but one. This archive BBC footage is fascinating, not only for the opposition to the public holiday on grounds that it was too ‘Eastern European’, but also because it shows how places like the Tower of London and Hampton Court were shut leaving Londoners with nothing to do.

Since then May Day has been a political hot potato, with the Conservative government of 1979 proposing to replace it with a ‘Trafalgar Day’ in October. This proposal was abandoned in 1993, but has recently been resurrected in the DCMS Tourism Policy paper. The battle for May Day therefore continues.