Maypoles
Maypoles
When much of the countryside was covered with forest, the tree was considered the prime product of all nature and often a single, tall, straight tree would be used as the Maypole. Usually selecting pine, larch, elm, birch, or ash, a tree would be cut down on May morning, stripped of its branches, except perhaps for a few at the top, and would be carried to the centre of the community with great ceremony. Adorned with flowers and garlands, it would serve as a centre piece to the May Day celebrations. The Puritans hated them. Ironically, the only vivid descriptions we have of many of our earlier traditions are hysterical outbursts against them.
But their chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their maypole, which they bring home with great veneration, as thus: They have twenty or forty yoke of oxen, every ox having a sweet nosegay of flowers tied to the tip of its horns, and these oxen draw home this maypole (this stinking idol rather) which is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound about with strings, from the top to the bottom, and sometimes painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up, with handkerchiefs and flags streaming at the top, they strew the ground about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer halls, bowers and arbours hard by it. And then they fall to banquet and feast, to leap and dance about it, as the heathen people did, at the dedication of their idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, rather than the thing itself.
Philip Stubbes: Anatomie of Abuses 1583
In some places Maypoles are still permanent fixtures and, although often decorated with brightly coloured rings or spirals and stripes painted on them, they are adorned only when May Day comes round. The Welford on Avon pole has bright red stripes like a barber’s pole and is seventy feet tall. At Barwick-in-Elmet, near Leeds, the height is 88 feet 6 inches and this pole was replaced completely in 1960. In fact, it is taken down every third year on Easter Monday, repainted with its red, white, and blue spiral and its four garlands renewed, to be set up again on Whit Tuesday. The next festival is scheduled to take place in May 2017. The Maypole Raising is a great event with ropes, pulleys, and ladders. Before the crowning of their May Queen, which follows the Maypole Raising, it is customary for a climber to shin up the newly decorated pole and give the fox-shaped weather vane a spin.
When adjoining villages had their own maypoles, a sense of rivalry was sometimes created. Stealing maypoles almost became a tradition in itself and there are many examples, especially in Cornwall. Usually done under cover of night, Gawthorpe in Yorkshire lost theirs in 1850; Barwick-in-Elmet had theirs stolen in 1829.
Evidence that Maypoles were more common years ago is to be found in the many references to them on pub signs and street names. Another maypole stood on the site of St. Mary-le-Strand and was 134 feet high. Decorated with greenery, streamers and lanterns, it was set up in 1661 on the return of Charles II and the first revived May Day. It stood for over fifty years and was finally removed by Sir Isaac Newton who used the wood to support a reflecting telescope!
