“Ay, grandam used to talk of those times—merry times for all they hung for sheep stealing, sure enough, but the lads laughed ’twixt times gay as ecalls,” and the old man bent before the dying fire, and seemed in thought to plunge back to the days of the past, which even he could hardly have seen.
Then Bess and I got up, and Mouse gave a deep bark, and as I said good-bye, I repeated my invitation for the First of May.
“Lor’, mam,” replied old Timothy, sadly, as he opened the door, “it isn’t likely as I shall forget it, for a piece of jollity don’t often come my way. ’Tis dull and parson-like as they’ve made the world now. Well, it is for the young ’uns to call for the tune now.”
We passed into the sunlight, and saw the lads and lasses hastening to school, and away up the streets I saw older lads and lasses in Sunday trim, dressed for courting, and the Sunday walk.
OLD MAY DAYS
Is the world less merry, I asked myself, since old Timothy’s grandam danced beneath the May-pole? Have we forgotten how to laugh and sing in village and hamlet, and is merry England steeped in grey mists? I thought of what I had heard, as I walked along, and tried to picture to myself that merry England of whom a stranger wrote, “A merrier, gayer people breathe not on God’s earth.” I thought of the time when the May Festival was observed by nobles, and even by kings and queens. I remembered how Chaucer, in his “Court of Love,” tells us that early on May Day “went forth all the Court, both most and least, to fetch fresh flowers, and so bring back branch and bloom.”
“O Maye with all thy flowers, and thy green,
Bright welcome, be thou faire, freshe May,”
exclaims the courtly knight Arcite. I recalled a passage in Malory where the great prose poet makes beautiful Queen Guinevere go a-maying with her lords and ladies. In Henry VIII.’s reign the Court still went a-maying, for Hall tells us how Henry, in his youth, accompanied by his stately Spanish queen, “rose up early with all their courtiers” to enjoy the old English custom, and of how the Court went forth with bows and arrows, shooting through the green spring woods, and brought back “flowers and branches.” Shakespeare, in his “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” alluded to the old English holiday, and declares, through the mouth of one of his characters, that folks would not lie abed the last day of April, but rose up early to observe this rite of May, so eager were they for its fun. So keenly did Queen Bess enjoy these revels that she always longed, it is said, to lay aside the state of royalty on these occasions, and live the life of a milkmaid during the month of May.
Towards the close of the Elizabethan era, Stubbs wrote, sourly attacking all such practices. In an old brown, mouldy book by him, that I once came across in an old country house library, entitled “Anatomie of Abuses,” I read a jaundiced account of a May festival.