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May Day, May Day! 7 Things You Didn’t Know about the Springtime Celebration

Thoughts of May Day celebrations often conjure images of village communities dancing around a maypole – a tradition which is believed to have started in medieval Britain. However, as we prepare to celebrate the annual event on May 7 the way the Victorians would have done, learn more about this age-old celebration and the traditions that come with it.

1. Festival of Fertility

The May Day celebration is believed to date back to the Roman era, with festivals worldwide taking place to promote fertility and new life. In medieval times the celebrations would regularly centre round a village green where dancing would ensue. A May King and Queen who would be crowned and they would be dressed in green to symbolise fertility.

2. German Traditions

Historically, Germans also believed May Day to be a time to give thanks and to celebrate fertility. The night before – or May Eve as it was commonly known – young, unmarried men would cut down a fir tree and remove its branches before decorating it and erecting it in the village square. The tree had to remain under the watchful eye of a guard overnight, for fear of it being stolen by men from a nearby village. If the guard fell asleep and the tree was stolen, there would be a ransom to be paid – often a good meal and a barrel of beer.

3. The Puritans

The church was relatively accepting of May Day celebrations until the 17th century when the Puritans became angry about the debauchery which often accompanied the singing and dancing, and the suspected Pagan origins of the occasion. In 1644, Parliament banned maypoles, and it wasn’t until Charles II came to the throne some years later that the tradition was restored.

4. A Victorian Celebration

May Day is often synonymous with the Victorian era as it was at this time that the celebration really saw its revival. The Victorians however, were formal people and many of the pagan traditions and links to fertility were believed to be too risqué, so the maypole became a seasonal game for children instead. In addition to the maypole, Victorian’s would mark the beginning of the summer season with family games, dancing and music – much like Sudeley Castle’s May Day event on Monday 7 May.

5. Working 9 ‘til 5

In 19th century America, it wasn’t uncommon for workers to spend up to 16 hours each day in unsafe conditions, with death and injury a common occurrence in many workplaces. In the 1800s however, it was declared that the working day would be set at 8 hours – without the agreement from many employers. Socialist organisations proclaimed strikes and demonstrations in support of the new policy and on May 1 1866, workers across the United States walked out of their jobs for what was the first International Workers Day, which is still celebrated around the world on May Day.

6. The Great Exhibition

On 1 May, 1851, Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition – also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition – which took place in Hyde Park. The celebration of culture and industry was created by Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and Henry Cole, a civil servant recognised as being the person behind the concept of the greeting card. The event was attended by many of the famous people of the time, including Charles Darwin, Charlotte Bronte and Lewis Carroll. The World Fair is still a celebrated occasion to this day, making May 1 1851 one of the most important May Days in history.

7. ‘Bringing in the May’

There are lots of traditions and superstitions associated with May Day, particularly during the Victorian era – from waking up before dawn and going outside to wash your face in the dew, from gathering flowers and creating garlands for friends to wear. This tradition was known as ‘Bringing in the May’ and often, people would give their garlands or ‘May baskets’ of flowers to someone who needed cheering up.

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The Folklore of May-Day/ Bealtaine

The 1 st of May brings us to the start of summer and one of the most important cross-quarter days (being between the solstices and equinoxes) in the Irish calendar. May-day, like many festivals of its kind has no shortage of traditions attached to it. Also, similar to Samhain, it is considered an extremely liminal time where influences from the otherworld can be a genuine threat. The May festival, or Bealtaine in Irish, is also a time when the fairies, or Sídhe, are thought to be especially active. It is traditionally considered a fire festival so bonfires are an integral part of it (the name Bealtaine is believed to mean “bright Fire” and like many other festivals it has its origins in pagan times) . Many of the traditions associated with the festival are concerned with protection against the otherworldly forces. As this was a time when cattle would be put out to pasture, many of the superstitions (for lack of a better word) of May-day are related to butter production and protection of the animals. In the course of this article I will be looking at some of them and will be drawing examples mostly from the National Folklore Schools Collection (hereafter listed as NFSC).

Butter Stealing, Witches and Hags as Hares

woman churning butter (1897)

As I mentioned above, a particular fear on May-day was that witches were roaming about to steal the milk and butter from households. As milk and butter were not only an important part of the house-hold economy, but also the diet, the fear of it being stolen supernaturally was a huge threat to the livelihood of the house for the coming year. There are charms for both protecting against butter stealing and also forms of sympathetic magic to steal the butter. This magic allowed the person who cast it to gain all the efforts of the other persons churning, while the person actually churning would get nothing but froth.

Ruby Stronge gives a story of this witchcraft in the NFSC. She tells us how: “Long ago, on May morning, lots of old women went out in the morning before the sun arose and swept the dew of the grass by pulling a long rope after them and calling, “Come all to me, Come all to me.” This was a kind of witch craft [sic], taking away butter of other people’s milk. One May morning, a man was going along the road with his horse and cart to the bog. He happened to see this old woman pulling at the rope and saying, “Come all to me.” He jumped out of the cart and ran over and cut a piece of the rope and brought it home and threw it in a barrel. A short time afterwards, he went to the barrel to look for the rope and to his great surprise, the barrel was full of butter”.

The rope that is mentioned collecting the dew is the form of sympathetic magic I spoke of earlier. As the dew is collected by the rope, it represents the butter that is being stolen from whoever the spell is cast against. It was most likely the land of the person it was being stolen from that the witch was on in the first place.

Hag as a Hare

When it comes to witches stealing butter, one of the most prevalent forms that the story or account takes is in the form of the shapeshifting hag who transforms into a hare. They are quite often impervious to normal weapons as Mrs. Elis tells us in the NFSC: “when she was in that shape she could only be shot with a silver sixpence” (NFSC, Vol. 0949: 092). This element of the story pops up numerous times in the folklore tradition. Another story, told by a collector’s grandfather tells of a man seeing a hare every morning in the field by the cow. When the cow stopped giving milk he got suspicious. He decided to kill the hare and gathered a group of men and hounds. They tried to shoot the hare, but to no avail. The shotgun pellets would not harm it. When attempting again the next day the man had quicksilver in his gun and manged to break the hare’s leg. When they followed it back to a house they found an old woman there with a wounded leg. They refused to kill her because she was an old woman. A month later when she died the cow started giving milk again (NFSC, Vol. 0950: 366).

There was a genuine threat felt by the people in terms of hags in the form of hares. The larger National Folklore Collection is littered with accounts of people who remember patrolling the fields with their fathers with shotguns loaded with silver sixpences on May eve to shoot any trespasser, especially if a hare was seen, showing that this was far beyond just being part of the story telling tradition. It is quite often in the tales with the “hag as hare” motif that when the injured hare is followed back to a house which it enters, an old woman is found injured inside in the same manner as the hare was. This injury isn’t always as a result of silver as we see in the next example:

“There was once a woman who lived in the district and she was supposed to have the ‘evil eye’. One day she was supposed to turn into a hare. When she was going in through her window a dog caught her leg and hurt it. The next day she was in bed with a sore leg” (NFSC, Vol. 0946: 094).

Flowers

The collection of flowers was another important custom. The most common custom was the collecting of flowers and making them into posies. Usually they were gathered before dusk on May Eve but sometimes the tradition held that they should be collected before dawn on May Day (Danaher, 1972: 88). It was also a custom to tie flowers to the bridles of horses, the tails or horns of cows and also to milk churns/dashes. The flowers picked were usually yellow in colour as this was the colour of most of the available flowers in bloom at this time (such as primroses, furze etc.). Decorating in this fashion served both a protective and festive function. In the Schools Collection we find the following story in relation to the May flowers:

“There is a lot of customs connected with May-Day. The first and most important of those old Irish customs, was the scattering of May flowers on the threshold [of the house]. Long, long ago before the light of Christianity brightened this once pagan land, our forefathers believed that in each woodland flower there lived a tiny fairy who could throw a spell of enchantment on any person who held it. The May flowers were supposed to be the tiny golden mansions of good luck. The reason then for scattering the flowers on each doorstep is that the inhabitants of the fairy mansions may shower an abundance of good luck on the entire household. Another reason was to save them from witchcraft of the “cailleachs” or the old hags, who were supposed to go from house to house on May morning stealing butter and milk from the churns. Any person who did not have the fairies of good luck guarding their thresholds when the cailleachs came along, all their efforts at churning would be useless for the following year. They were supposed to battle with the fairies of good luck on the doorstep but the fairies always won the combat” (NFSC, Vol. 0235: 236).

In the province of Munster it was more common to bring a “May bough” instead of flowers into the house. These were small branches of newly leafed trees (Danaher, 1972: 89). These served the same purpose as the flowers, to guard against ill-luck and evil influence, especially in the case where a branch of mountain ash was used. They would be placed on windows, doors, roofs etc., all places that would be at risk of these malevolent forces entering the house. According to local customs that varied per region as certain growths (such as Blackthorn, Whitethorn, Elder, Broom etc.) may or may not be considered auspicious to bring inside of the house.

As to the witches mentioned in the butter stealing segment, one informant in the NFSC tells us how: “On May Eve, people put May flowers on the doors and windows and the out-houses to keep away the witches”. (NFSC, Vol. 1033:174)

May-bush

Another form of protection commonly used against the malevolent forces, be they of the sídhe or otherwise, at this liminal time is the May bush. Like most other traditions this can vary in popularity per region. The practice was to get a branch of a flowering bush and decorate it with ribbons, cloth, eggs shells etc. In terms of decoration with eggshells, the egg shells collected from Easter Monday were especially prized for decoration (Bealoideas 9, 1939:929). An example can be seen in the photo of my own May-bush above. Again the species of bush used varied. For my example I used Hawthorn, the bush traditionally associated with the sídhe, often known as fairy bushes.

As the May bush was also concerned with luck in some areas people tried to steal other May-bushes in the belief that they could steal away the luck. (Danaher, 1972: 92). Thankfully with a resurgence of interest in the field of folklore and also with a rise in the number of people wanting to connect with the traditions of their ancestors, this is one of the many customs that has seen a revival. There are now a number of towns and schools that decorate May-bushes each year. If you would like to watch a video of May-bushes being decorated check out the video by Michael Fortune here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Sm9ZryHNI .

There are other accounts of people putting unadorned bushes outside their house from the middle of the 16 th century (to bring an abundance of milk for the year), but from the 17 th century we see accounts of the decorated variety. The description from Sir Henry Piers (1682) bears a striking resemblance to the more modern accounts of the May-bush. The account goes as follows:

“On May Eve every family sets up before their house a green bush, strowed over with yellow flowers, which the meadows yield plentifully. The May bush was a branch or clump of some suitable tree or shrub, among which Whitethorn was the most popular, which was cut down and brought home…It was decorated with flowers, ribbons, paper streamers and other bright scraps of material. In some places garlands of egg-shells were hung on it; often these were the coloured or decorated shells of Easter eggs that were saved by the children. Sometimes rushlights or candles were attached to the bush at May Eve” (Piers.H,1682).

In William Wilde’s account in Irish Popular Superstitions, he tells us how “it was erected several days before the festival and was illuminated every night” but also claims that it was erected in “some green or common, or at cross-roads, or in the market place in the town” (Wilde, 1852: 60). He makes no mention here of them being erected in each household but it is interesting to note that they were placed at cross-roads, places that are oft associated with the supernatural. As well as the connection of converging roads with the supernatural we will also see how converging streams played a part in May-Day rituals.

Other Traditions and Customs

Water: Although Bealtaine is traditionally thought of as a fire festival, water also played a prominent role. Mrs. Rutledge tells us how:” All young maidens go to a spot where 3 streams converge and wash their faces in the water to bring them good luck for the year and to keep them from being sunburned during the summer. Also, the person who carries the first can of water from the well will also have good luck for the year” (NFSC, Vol. 0235: 237). Washing the face in the dew at dawn was a common belief and the dew itself was considered magical due to its nature of just appearing on the grass and as we have seen, it could be used for bad as well as good (such as in the witch stealing butter that was mentioned earlier). It is thought to be more effective at dawn as it is a boundary/ liminal time (Not quite day or night).

Weather: Since May-Day is traditionally considered to be the first day of summer, signs of the weather, the appearance of the sky and of the May moon, strength and direction of the wind and the amount of rain were all carefully noted on this day as indications of the coming weather. For example: a cold east wind or a touch of frost was an ominous sign of hard things to come (Danaher,1972:88).

Work: One should not sail, dig, whitewash or bathe on May Day. This is either explained as either a reluctance to engage in any activity which might seem to have a magical purpose or to avoid anything that could be dangerous at a time where bad luck or evil influence might prevail (Danaher,1972:88).

Other superstitions: People never gave butter or milk away on May-Day because they feared bad luck. The man of the house would go get a branch of mountain ash and place it in the manure heap. This was to guard the cows and keep them from harm. Salt was never leant or given away (NFSC, Vol. 0235: 237). Long ago it was customary not to put out the ashes from the hearth, or sweep the floor on May-Day (NFSCVol.0235:235).

I hope you enjoyed this quick selection of the many traditions concerned with this major festival and turning point in the Irish calendar. I hope you found this look at our old traditions as fascinating as I did while researching it. Why not decorate your own May-bush, make your own May-flower posie or garland, or leave an offering out for the Sidhe? Make it a yearly tradition and get your friends, family, or even better your children involved. Because it is with the next generation that the fate of these traditions lie.

Bealoideas ix, 1939.

Danaher.K (1972), The Year in Ireland, Mercier press.

NFSC,Vol.0147:558, Collector: Bridgie McHale, Knockmore.

NFSC.Vol.0235:235, Collector: Nan Rutledge, Boyle, Co.Roscommon, Informant: Mrs.McLoughlin.

NFSC.Vol.0235:237, Collector:, Nan Rutledge, Informant: Mrs.Rutledge.

NFSC.Vol.0946:094, Collector: Mary McGinnity, Derrynawilt, Roslea.

NFSC.Vol.0949:092, Collector:Paddy Ellis, Drumlillagh, Co.Monaghan, Informant: Mrs.elis.

NFSC.Vol.1033:174, Collector: Ruby strong, Dronmore,Co.Donegal.

Wilde.W (1852), Irish Popular Superstitions.

The Pagan Origins of May Day

Falling on May 1 st , May Day marks the end of the winter half of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and is traditionally a day of celebration and revelry in many cultures around the world. Our contemporary incarnation of May Day might bring to mind simple images of children dancing around a festively decorated Maypole and engaging in foot races, but this holiday has surprisingly deep roots that tap into ancient pre-Christian customs relating to fertility, agriculture, and the spring equinox. May Day was once the premier summer holiday in many ancient European pagan cultures, where the beginning of February marked the beginning of spring, May 1 st marked the beginning of summer—the season of growth and life for crops, animals, and people. Although the origins of May Day are difficult to pinpoint, we can trace our modern festivities back to a few different celebrations, most of which come from pagan traditions. We can still see many elements of those traditions in the flowers, colorful ribbons, and tall poles that mark May Day today. Let’s take a brief look at these origins.

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Beltane

Pagan celebrations often arose from the needs of the community, and May Day was no different. May Day probably arose from the Celtic holiday, Beltane, which was celebrated in ancient Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. This was one of four Gaelic seasonally-based festivals, which include Samhain, Imbolc, and Lughnasadh. Beltane, however, was one of the most important.

The ancient Celts were a pastoral people, completely dependent on the land and their herds of livestock. Beltane fell at the beginning of the season that saw herds of livestock shepherded out of the summer pastures and grazing lands. Rituals, at this time, were performed that were thought to protect crops, livestock, and people, and to encourage reproduction and growth. Spirits were also said to be capable of crossing over into the world of the living at this time, and the Celts sought to appease them in order to have a more prosperous year. These rituals revolved around the lighting of bonfires in the mountains on the eve of Beltaine. The druids of the community would create these fires and drive the village cattle between them so that the livestock might be purified and brought luck. People would also pass between these fires to gain the same benefits. Another custom of Beltane—a familiar one that would form the basis of the Maypole—was the erection of May Bushes, which usually consisted of a branch of rowan or whitethorn in bloom. These branches would be decorated with painted shells, ribbons, and flowers, and it was customary for a community to decorate them together and hold dances around them. This was believed to bring blessings to the village from tree spirits.

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