Natalie Zaman
Flowers, fires, and maypole dances are the essential elements of a Beltane celebration, but this sacred day also has a whimsical side, one that’s all about pageantry, parades, and personality. A unique cast of characters has been welcoming in May Day for centuries with song, dance, and some carefully constructed costumes.
A custom of the British Isles, Morris Dance can refer to a May Day pageant or parade, or specifically to the dance and the group performing it. Uniformed dancers (costumes vary from region to region, and troupe to troupe) maneuver—in formation—through a series of steps and jumps, tapping sticks, clashing swords, or waving handkerchiefs. Folks who dance today will tell you that both steps and props have a purpose. Dancers wear shin pads lined with jingle bells, their steps keeping time to the tunes. Steps and sticks imitate things going on in the fields: “The dance called ‘The Balance of the Straw’ … actually follows two taps of the fork vertically before passing the hay up to the dray cart.” Music to accompany the dance was played on pipe and tabor, and later, concertina and fiddle. Folk songs about rural life on the farm and in the village (sometimes with bawdy lyrics) were sung as well.
The origin of Morris Dancing is uncertain. There are suggestions that it came from Italy where it was called morisca. It’s also possible that John of Gaunt brought it back from Spain when he did a tour of duty there in the fourteenth century. The spiritual dances of the Sufi have been compared to Morris Dancing, “Morris” evolving from “Moorish.” There are regional dance groups in Britain that blacken their faces for the dance, but rather than it being an attempt for the dancers to become “Moorish,” it’s possible that it dates back to the sixteenth century as a disguise that allowed seasonal workers to beg during fallow times and hide their identities.
Shakespeare linked Morris Dancing specifically to May Day festivities in All’s Well That Ends Well, although the dances were incorporated into church and agrarian festivals throughout the year. Whenever and wherever it’s performed, Morris Dancing honors the coming together of nature and spirituality and the sacred and secular life that continues to this day. (Visit http://themorrisring.org/find-side-near-you for a partial listing of Morris Dancing troupes other related resources.)
In the early 1700s, a maypole was a permanent fixture in London’s Strand, but once it was removed by the Puritan government, it nearly wiped out May Day festivities in the city. Thanks to the milkmaids they continued—and evolved. On this day, the maids called on their clients balancing flower pots on their heads to collect some extra cash. Not to be outdone (and with time on their hands, being seasonally employed), the chimney sweeps concocted something far grander. Their creation came to be known as Jack in the Green, a conical cage covered in foliage and crowned with flowers with Jack peeking out from inside. Perhaps as a nod to (or in mockery of) the milkmaids, Black Sal—a man dressed in women’s clothing—and a host of other sweep characters, such as Dusty Bob and May Day Moll, danced alongside Jack and performed songs like this one, sung by the sweeps of Cambridge in the eighteenth century:
The first of May is garland day,
And chimney sweeper’s dancing day.
Curl your locks as I do mine
One before and one behind!
Jack also made appearances in rural areas, sometimes parading with a bevy of attendants who harangued the watching crowd for money, whacking them with bladders on sticks to encourage them to pay up. It’s no surprise that in addition to the Green Man, that Pagan spirit of nature and the wild wood, that Jack also became associated with Robin Hood (though it’s likely that the sweeps kept any money they collected for themselves).
Jack’s May Day celebrations live on in revivals staged in London and a handful of smaller towns and villages throughout the United Kingdom. Today’s Jack is accompanied by boogies or bogeymen, not the nightmare sort, but Puckish green-man spirits. (Visit https://thecompanyofthegreenman.wordpress.com/jack-in-the-green/ for a listing of current celebrations that feature Jack in the Green.)
A curious creature rounds out our May Day mummers, one that is exquisitely portrayed in the 1973 version of The Wicker Man. The film’s hobby horse is true to historical descriptions: a large patchwork cape-skirt to form the body, and a snapping head. The character is thought to be based on an actual horse, an Irish breed popular in the twelfth century, now extinct.
In putting on a horse’s “hide,” the player embodied the essence of the animal, in this case unbridled virility and fertility—the spirit of the day. The horse had a handler called a teaser or fool, who egged him on by whacking him with a bladder on a stick—that May Day ritual tool no reveler could do without—as they paraded through the streets to the sound of rhythmic drumbeats, the pulse of life in the earth that awakens at Beltane. Unlike Jack who collected money and put on a show, the hobby horse moved through the streets flicking water at people in the crowds or capturing women under his skirts, a fertility rite as it guaranteed pregnancy in the coming year.
One of the oldest Beltane celebrations that features a hobby horse—or ’obby ’oss if you go by the local accent—takes place every year in Padstow, Cornwall, where three ’osses are featured: a children’s ’oss, the blue peace ’oss, and finally the old ’oss, in use before WWI .
Merriment and fun have always been a part of May Day. May your Beltane celebrations be blessed with song, dance, and character!
Additional Reading
Grimassi, Raven. Beltane: Springtime Rituals, Lore & Celebrations. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 2001.
Martin, Gary. Hobby Horse. The Phrase Finder. www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/hobby-horse.html.
“Morocco: The Home of Morris Dancing.” The View From Fez, July 21, 2010. http://riadzany.blogspot.com/2010/07/morocco-home-of-morris-dancing.html
Walsh, William Shepard. Curiosities of Popular Customs and of rites, ceremonies, observances and miscellaneous antiquities. Philadelphia: F.B. Lippincott and Company, 1898.
“The Traditional Jack-in-the-Green.” Company of the Green Man. https://thecompanyofthegreenman.wordpress.com/jack-in-the-green/.
Whitcombe, Chris. “Earth Mysteries: Morris Dancing.” Brittania: America’s Gateway to the British Isles Since 1996. 3 January, 2015. http://www.britannia.com/wonder/modance.html.