May Day Bank Holiday.

Why is there a bank holiday on, or the closest Monday to the 1st of May?

 

In short, the May Day celebration originates back into ancient European countries, that celebrated the return of spring. Events and celebrations were recorded many years before the modern era and were based upon religious grounds, promoting the fertility and abundance of the coming crops. From those early agricultural rituals, the beginning of spring was celebrated in increasingly different ways as the modern world developed.

 

By the medieval period most May Day celebrations had developed into an elaborate event, involving the erecting of a May Pole, around which dancers would dance for the coming growing season to come.  Indeed, by the late 1400s the May Day celebrations were a fixed part of the beginning of May and heralded a day of celebration. Many villages and towns would crown a May Queen, usually a young maiden of the village, representing the youth and fertility of the season to come.  

Because the May Day celebrations were a legacy of the pre-Christian England, the puritan Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, banned it as non-Christian, yet most celebrations continued all the same as most towns considered it a ritual that would bring bad luck to the crops and the harvest to do otherwise. With the restoration of the monarchy and the end of the Interregnum of the Commonwealth came to an end in 1660, celebrations on May Day continued with and increased sense of pride in the tradition. So, the tradition evolved into different versions of the same thing. For example, in Cambridgeshire, and neighbouring shires, the practice of ‘dolling’ developed, where young girls would go about the village, with small, elaborately dressed dolls, colleting pennies for local good cause, and often not-so-good causes.

 

As the practice developed, so did the differing regional variations, and so some villages and towns would often have practices that then became the local way of celebrating, such as the jumping off local bridges, usually after a swill of local ale. Representations of local traditions were often shown in popular literature and in Victorian literature particularly.  

Picture is John Collier’s ‘Queen Guinevere’s Maying.’

 

‘May Day’ by Sara Teasdale (1918)

A delicate fabric of bird song floats in the air,

The smell of wet wild earth is everywhere.

Red small leaves of the maple are clenched like a hand,

Like girls at their first communion the pear trees stand.

Oh, I must pass nothing by without loving it much,

The raindrops try with my lips, the grass with my touch.

For how can I be sure I shall see again,

The world on the first of May shining after the rain.