Merry month of May and all those pagan traditions

THIS year, of course, there's the excitement of the General Election to make May Day special.

Otherwise, it might pass for an ordinary day. But it wasn't always so.

Fun, frolics, mischief and a touch of superstition used to mark the arrival of the "merry" month of May in Lancashire.

Alas, many of the May customs stretch beyond living memory, most having faded out towards the end of the last century.

Older folk will, however, recall the groups of boys who used to blacken or paint their faces, rig themselves out in comic costumes and go about beating tin cans and pan lids in the hope of gifts of coppers from passers-by.

Similarly, they will remember that girls would dress up in white - often it was lace curtains - and dance round home-made Maypoles.

And , every May Day, carters used to plait their horses' manes and tails, deck them with ribbons and decorate their harnesses.

But, by the late 1950s, these last vestiges of the old-time merry-making were becoming increasingly rare.

Indeed, even in 1949, the old Northern Daily Telegraph's columnist Lancastrian was complaining that, although in a five-minute walk through Blackburn on May Day he came across seven lots of young lads going about the traditional cadging revels wearing "dresses" and "locks of golden hair," there was not a girls' Maypole group to be seen.

He was also upset that modernity was creeping into the boys' antics, grumbling that their tin-banging accompanied the "singing of the latest 'swing' tunes."

By 1958 he was saying how May customs were a shadow of their former selves and how much missed the penny-cadging urchins should be - and, even more so, the Maypole dancers. It was, of course, the Industrial Revolution and the factory system that spelled the end of many of the frolics - though in 1644 the puritans had tried to stamp them out. Bosses did not take kindly to the notion of employees taking a day off to go a-maying. The roots of it were pagan. May Day was one of the four great pagan festivals of the year - and one that was taken over by the church. Many will remember the now much-rarer Catholic churches' May processions, which culminated in the adorning of the statue of the Virgin Mary with a crown of blossoms.

All that - and the old-time merry-making - can be traced back to the Roman shindigs in honour of Flora, goddess of flowers and fruit, whose annual festival, held from April 28 to May 3, featured theatrical performances characterised by licentiousness.

Hence the thread of blossom-gathering and merry-making running through the ancient customs and the puritan association of the flower-decked Maypole and the dancing round it, along with the crowning of the May Queen, with heathen idolatry. And that's where the May Day trimming up of horses also comes from - for the Maypole used to be drawn to its site by oxen, each with a bunch of flowers tied to its horns.

Another associated custom was for trees to be cut down and set up before an alehouse, where drunken revelling ensued. Even towards the end of the last century in Lancashire, links with this were kept up with the "May Birches" and "Mischief Night" on the eve of May Day.

The Birches involved collecting branches of hawthorn - whose flowers are known as May blossom - and other trees and shrubs and fastening them over doors or other parts of houses.

There were symbolic meanings to the different shrubs, each supposed to refer to the character of the occupant of the house involved. A thorn tree, other than hawthorn, indicated scorn; mountain ash suggested affection; holly meant folly; a briar indicated a liar; while a plum tree branch in blossom meant "to be married soon." Salt sprinkled before a door was regarded as a great insult. "Mischief Night" - which, more recently, in East Lancashire somehow moved to the night before Bonfire Night - involved more tricks being played on neighbours. Householders who left brooms, mops and buckets outdoors were likely to find them on their roof the next day.

In Burnley, a feature of this custom was for shopkeepers' signs to be switched about.

Even centuries on, the puritan disdain for the whiff of ale-fuelled, heathen origins could be found not only in the religious hijacking of the May Queen, but in the teetotal movement's Band of Hope holding a May Festival, presided over by its Temperance Queen, in the assembly rooms of Blackburn town hall before the First World War.

Little could the dwindling groups of young Maypole lasses going about East Lancashire's streets on May Day 50 years ago have known about their ritual's ancestry in drunken and idolatrous Roman Bacchanalia. But somehow, along the way, their custom often also incorporated a survival of another now-vanished street performance - that of the dancing bears which, for many generations up about the 1920s, used to be taken about the region by itinerant showmen who were usually Italians.

The May Queen's retinue often included a "bear" and his trainer. The "bear", in fact, was a boy covered in a hessian sack, with its bottom corners tied to resemble the animal's ears.

The girls would sing:

Round and round the Maypole, merrily we go.

Tripping, tripping lightly, singing as we go

All the happy pastimes are on the village green

A-dancing in the sunshine, hurrah for May Queen.

Sometimes, however, the second line was altered to:

Treading like an elephant, groaning as we go.

The "bear" would then go through a routine of acrobatics while the girls would chant the Addy-on-con-kay song that the handlers of the real dancing bears used to use.

But where did the grim superstitions about May fit in?

The Lancashire belief that marriages in May were unlucky could be traced back to Roman times. But what of the one that went: "Shear your sheep in May and shear them all away"?

Why should May have had the proverb: "If you use new brushes in May, you sweep one of the family away." Why were kittens born in May considered unlucky and why was misfortune predicted for sleeping in a room with hawthorn blossom in it in May?

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