Change, Continuity and Contradictions in May Day Celebrations in Northamptonshire

Change, Continuity and Contradictions in May Day Celebrations in NorthamptonshireAuthor(s): Kate SmithSource: Folklore, Vol. 119, No. 2 (August 2008), pp. 142-159Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40646447 .

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Folklore 119 (August 2008): 142-159

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Change, Continuity and Contradictions in May Day Celebrations in Northamptonshire

Kate Smith

Abstract

Starting with a review of statistics derived from surveys conducted in primary schools in 1958-9 and 2000-1, this paper gives a detailed account of the development of one community's celebrations, exploring and analysing factors that have led both to stability and change over the celebration's lifetime.

Introduction Most teachers and students of folklore and f olkloristics will have encountered the widespread and persistent belief that "folklore/' including traditional beliefs and behaviours, customs and rituals, is dying. Indeed, this is a position that has characterised a great deal of folklore scholarship from the discipline's earliest days. Doubting the truth of the assumption that folklore is, almost by definition, a moribund (and slightly embarrassing) habit, part of my post-graduate research developed into an investigation of whether such assumptions (with relation to perceptions of the supposed demise of May Day) were sustained by evidence resulting from scholarly fieldwork.

This task was made relatively straightforward by the existence of a body of data relating to the celebration of May Day in the Northamptonshire's primary schools collected and analysed by Dennis G. Teall in the 1950s; Teall himself expressed a certain amount of pessimism about the future of May Day and its likely continuation to the end of the twentieth century:

What then is to be the future of the May festival? Is this valuable heritage to be allowed to wither until it eventually dies altogether, or can the majority of teachers be aroused from their apathy and indifference before it is too late? (Teall 1963, 274).

This article in part considers whether such pessimism is in any way justified. It draws on data collected at either end of a fifty-year period in order to establish some degree of actuality about the level of past-present continuity in May Day celebrations.

Quantitative Changes in the Nature of May Day Celebrations Teal sent out his four-page, twenty-four question "Survey of May Rites in the Schools of Northamptonshire" to all the county's primary schools in 1958-9, asking questions both about the nature of May Day celebrations and about how those celebrations fitted into the primary school curriculum. Of the two hundred and twenty schools that responded to his survey, seventy-one (thirty-two per cent) reported that they did celebrate May Day. Responses to my abridged version ISSN 0015-587X print; 1469-8315 online/08/020142-18; Routledge Journals; Taylor & Francis © 2008 The Folklore Society DOI: 10.1080/00155870802056944



Change, Continuity and Contradictions in May Day Celebrations 143

of Teall's survey (questions about the curriculum were omitted and the wording of some questions was amended to reflect changing stylistic and methodological norms) indicated that, of the ninety-six responding schools, fifty-two celebrated May Day at the start of the new millennium - that is, fifty-four per cent of schools responding to my survey celebrated May Day at that time. The filtering of both sets of data eventually revealed direct comparative evidence (where data appeared in both sets) for sixty-five schools. Within this reduced population, twenty-one schools celebrated May Day in 1958-9. According to my survey, responses from the same sixty-five establishments showed that forty schools celebrated May Day in 2000-1. These results clearly suggest an increase of thirty per cent in the number of schools celebrating May Day over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.

Calendrical Changes Of the forty-four schools that responded negatively in my survey to the question "Does your school celebrate May Day?/' nine provided information from which it was possible to deduce that May Day celebrations may have been shifted rather than abandoned altogether. It is clear from their responses that there was, in a relatively large number of schools, a newly inaugurated celebration held later in the year, which could be characterised as a substitute for May Day. For example, a small number of schools gave details of Summer Fêtes at which a "Summer Queen" was crowned and Maypole dancing was performed.

In addition to the existence of these quasi-May Day celebrations, the responses to my initial survey suggested that May Day was actually a movable feast: whilst May Day is 1 May in all reference works, diaries and calendars, examination of the evidence collected by my survey clearly shows that not all schools celebrate May Day on 1 May and that most, in fact, celebrate it later in the month:

. . . [May Day] is usually the Thursday before half-term - 25 May this year . . . (Brigstock Latham's Church of England Primary School).

. . . [May Day is] often far too cold - we celebrate at the end of May (Oakway Junior School).

[May Day is] usually held towards the end of the month because of SATs [Standard Assessment Tests, part of the National Curriculum Key Stages 1 and 2, which usually take place in May] (Stanion Primary School).

Our May Day . . . this year is probably going to be June 23rd due to building extension work (normally it is in May) (Weldon Primary School).

Teall presents evidence for the date of May Day celebrations in 1959 from which it can be calculated that less than one-half of the schools celebrating May Day at that time did so on 1 May.

As clear comparative data about this aspect of May Day celebrations were not obtained in the initial survey carried out in 2000-1, it is not possible to ascertain with any confidence the general extent to which the actual date of May Day celebration has shifted since Teall's research was conducted. It is possible, however, to discern the pattern of change or stability relating to a small subset within the overall body of responses: there are fourteen schools for which comparable data from 1959 and 2000-1 can be derived. These are all schools that



144 Kate Smith

Teall recorded as observing May Day on 1 May. Surveys were returned to me in 2000-1 by twenty of the thirty-five schools that he recorded as observing May Day celebrations on 1 May. Three of these schools responded negatively to the 2000-1 survey and another three gave no indication of the date of May Day celebrations. The remaining fourteen have all moved their May Days to later in the month; in some cases this was only a question of a few days - to the nearest Friday or Saturday. It is possible that the three schools that gave no clear indication of when their May Day was held could all celebrate it on 1 May. It would seem that only nine per cent of schools (for which comparative data are available) formerly celebrating May Day on 1 May continue to do so. If these schools repeated the pattern of calendar shifting demonstrated by the other fourteen positive respondents, then none of the schools that celebrated on 1 May in 1958-9 are likely to continue to do so.

The expressed reasons for May Day celebrations no longer being organised by the school on 1 May are that most school staff live some distance from the village, with the result that the arrangement of May Day festivities is left to village organisations who find it difficult to coordinate such an event. May Day has therefore been replaced by a later celebration, organised by the school staff at a time more convenient for them than the month of May.

Several of those schools that now celebrate May Day after 1 May (in June or July) point out that, although their celebrations are no longer called May Day, they have the same outward appearance and include many of the same elements as they did formerly. The head teacher of Chipping Warden School wrote that:

In place of the May Day celebrations we hold our fête on the 1st or 2nd Saturday in June. We then have a procession, led by a "May" Queen who is then crowned. We have Maypole dancing. We have tried to call the Queen our Fête Queen but both children, parents and villagers still refer to her as the "May Queen," so I suppose the general village /school feeling is, "Yes," we do celebrate May Day, but in June.

Despite the fact that the new celebration is nominally differentiated from its predecessor, the people who "own" the tradition (those who attend and participate in it) appear not to recognise the ostensible difference, still naming the various elements of the celebration in the same way. This state of affairs has important implications for the discussion that follows.

Formal Change

Although it is clear from Teall's and my data that there have been few innovations in May Day celebrations since the 1950s, there has been considerable change in the rate of incidence of its traditional elements. The most conspicuous changes in the form of May Day celebrations have to do with its most emblematic characteristics - Maypoles and May Queens. Every school in Teall's survey that celebrated May Day did so in the presence of a May Queen. In 2000-1 this was no longer the case, as only sixty-three per cent of the primary schools that responded included a May Queen in their celebrations at that time.

This diminution is neatly counter-balanced by a rise in the popularity of Maypoles. In Teall's data they were found in only forty-one per cent of schools. By 2000-1 they could be found in eight-four per cent of May Day celebrations




in responding schools; thus the incidence of maypoles on May Day had increased by about forty per cent by that time. As the occurrence of May Queens diminished by nearly the same proportion, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the maypole has, to some extent at least, taken the place of the May Queen as the most important and most emblematic attribute of traditional May Day celebrations in primary schools.

Moving on to consider the figure of the May King, we can observe a substantial increase in the frequency of occurrence of this aspect of May Day celebrations over the forty years since Teall conducted his research. Only one in ten of the schools celebrating May Day included a May King in their festivities in 1959, while my data show that by 2000-1 the proportion of schools having a May King had increased to one in three. It is not clear from the data why this increase has taken place, Plausible explanations include a desire on the part of the head teachers (or other organisers) to include boys in May Day celebrations and to make things fair: if the girls get the opportunity to be special by being May Queens, then the boys should have the same opportunity by being May Kings.

Dancing, whether round the maypole or not, had increased dramatically in the schools' May Day celebrations for 2000-1. Only one-half of the schools in Teall's survey performed dances on May Day, while all but one of those celebrating in 2000-1 included some sort of dancing in their observances.

The proportion of schools engaging in a procession or a parade on May Day has increased only slightly (surprisingly, perhaps, given the above levels of change). In 1959 thirty-three per cent of schools held a parade or procession on May Day, while in 2000-1 only forty per cent of positively responding schools did so.

It is difficult to generalise about the trends in relation to singing and garlanding on May Day. Teall suggests that both were a ubiquitous feature of North- amptonshire May Day celebrations but he did not ask specific questions about this in his survey. As my survey was closely based on his and was designed to collect comparable data, nor did 1. 1 therefore found only extremely limited evidence of activity involving large conical or spherical garlands for May Day celebrations, although a number of schools referred to "garlands" or "maysticks" in their 2000-1 questionnaire responses. During participant observation that I carried out in 2000 it was evident that garlands, maysticks and posies are an ongoing characteristic of May Day celebrations in the county (Figure 1).

May Day in Titchtnarsh, Northamptonshire: A Case Study I now move on to consider in detail the development of May Day celebrations in the village of Titchmarsh in the north of the county. May Day observance there was first recorded in letters from the then Rector of the parish, the Revd Frederick M. Stopford, which are held at the County Records Office. These letters reveal that in the early 1860s he suggested a holiday be granted to the pupils of the village school in return for "solemn and regular" observation of Good Friday services - the implication being that Good Friday church attendance was unsatisfactory at the time. The Revd Stopford, and the then head master of the school, Frederick Blades, agreed that the holiday was to be on 1 May. The first "official" May Day celebrationat the school was held in 1864. That this day was suggested by the Revd Stopford and accepted by the head master, suggests that May Day may have been



146 Kate Smith

Figure 1. Maysticks and "garlands," Glapthorn, Northamptonshire, May 2000.

kept on an informal basis before this official holiday was granted, as a pattern of official "acquisition" of informal May Day celebrations seems to have been widespread (Bushaway 1982, 18 and 238-74; Bloxham 2002, 93-8).

There is no record of the form of May Day observances in Titchmarsh until 1870 when the following account appeared in the parish magazine:

This year, as the 1st of May, (S.S. Philip and James) fell on Sunday - the May Day holiday was held on Monday 2nd. Ellen was made May Queen with bower, garlands, and maypoles, the collection amounting to £2.30. In the afternoon the children had tea and games in Lilford and family were present in the afternoon. The Club Feast was held on the same day, the members attending Divine Service at the usual hour (Titchmarsh Parish Magazine May 1870, no. 108, 2).

It is clear from this account that the following elements were part of May Day celebrations in Titchmarsh: a May Queen, garlands, the collection of money, and an afternoon's entertainment provided by the local "big house." This account suggests that in the afternoon the children repaired to Lilford Hall, then the home of Thomas Littleton Powys, Fourth Lord Lilford, situated some three miles from the village. In the case of the "bower" mentioned in the account, it is not known what this was. With regard to the "maypoles," I suggest that this refers to the short, stout sticks carried in celebrations in other villages at the present time, and as illustrated in Figure 1 above. In all of the available data, it is clear that when "maypole" is referred to in the plural, it is these decorations that are invariably meant. This suggestion is supported by the absence of any reference to dancing, as well as the lack of a formal Maypole in all accounts of Titchmarsh's May Day celebrations until the 1990s. No reference is made to a procession, although coronation is implied by the statement "Ellen was made May Queen ..." As the




definite article is used in the first reference to May Day, this suggests a regular and anticipated event.

The next account comes from an interview conducted in 1998 with a born-and- bred villager (now deceased) and relates to May Day in the late 1920s. He described a celebration in which the most important element was a long walk around the village. The celebrations started on the evening before May Day (the date of which was not specified, but he would appear to be referring to 1 May), when the May Coach was brought to the school from its storage place, and decorated with flowers. On the actual day:

. . . there was no crowning ceremony then, I think they do [it] now, but they didn't crown the queen, she just sort of got in the coach and off we went.

The procession went first to the village church for a short service of blessing, and then started the (relatively long) walk from the top to the bottom of the village. It seems that, at this time, the procession included a vehicle known as the May Coach (Figure 2) followed by the schoolchildren, some of whom carried flags. His description of May Day observance included mention of three "stops" for "lemonade and plain cake" in the course of this walk. The first was at the Old Rectory, the newest of the two or three "big houses" in the village. The second and third were outside the big farms in the middle and at the bottom of the village.

As well as offering a welcome chance for refreshment, these stops created a structure and stage for the performance (and performative) elements of May Day activities - in that they gave the children a chance to sing their songs and collect money. Money was also collected when the children were walking around the village, and the proceeds of the day seem to have been shared out amongst the

Figure 2. The May Coach makes its first stop of the day at the Old Rectory, Titchmarsh, Northamptonshire, May 1982. (Photograph by B. W. Fuller.)



148 Kate Smith

children. At the end of the procession, the children returned to the Rectory for tea and games:

... if it was nice we'd have tea at the Rectory. Canon Luckock used to provide all that . . . yes, he was very good like that, he used to pay for us all, and some of our mothers or grandmothers, or whatever, used to issue the food and be waiters and waitresses, and keep us in order, or try to ... [and] under the big cedar tree up at the Rectory . . . Canon Luckock would come out with a{n] apple and see who could throw it over it, over the cedar tree . . .

From one point of view, the celebrations could be seen to have drawn to a close with a reaffirmation of the power, generosity and patronage of the church in the person of Canon Luckock. On the other hand, the afternoon games and tea at the Rectory were eagerly looked forward to by the children.

Two pieces of evidence about May Day celebrations in Titchmarsh exist from the 1940s: one is a photograph taken in 1944 and reproduced in Helen Belgion's Titchmarsh Past and Present (1979, illustration 19b); the other (undated) is a photograph that appears on the village website (Titchmarsh Village 2007). Both show the May Queen in her coach next to a bomb-damaged cottage. Everything appears to be much as the previous informant described it, although there are no flags - perhaps surprisingly, given that one might have expected an increased level of patriotic display in the context of war (Figure 3).

By the 1940s, Stella Skinner, a keen folk dancer and folklore enthusiast, had taken over as head teacher of the school. The next evidence of Titchmarsh's developing May Day activities comes from the second decade of her headship. The May edition of the Titchmarsh Parish Magazine from 1952 tells us that the elements of the village walk, collection and singing, were still in place, and that the May Queen led the procession. The Rector organised tea in the clubroom, although no mention is made of games being held at the Rectory. Similar evidence exists about May Day in the later 1950s; as part of my undergraduate fieldwork

Figure 3. May Coach and procession outside a bomb-damaged cottage, May 1944, Titchmarsh, Northamptonshire. (Reproduced from www.titchmarsh.info)




carried out in autumn of 1998, 1 interviewed two women who had been involved in May Day activities in Titchmarsh in the 1950s.

Their evidence indicated that May Day observances had changed little since the 1920s. The school day started later on May Day than on normal school days, and the children went straight from the playground to church for a short service. The procession round the village was punctuated by stops for the performance of May Songs (both with and without refreshments). At the conclusion of the procession the children returned to school, before going home for lunch, and then making their way to the village clubroom for yet more refreshments. This was followed by games on the lawn at the Rectory.

In addition to the honour of being the May Queen, those who were elected by their peers to this position (at the age of eight) also had the opportunity to earn half a crown from the collection made during the walk. The money was collected by children who had left the village school at the age of eleven years but who returned to participate in the May Day celebrations in Titchmarsh. They were given one shilling and six pence for their efforts, and the attendants (the eligible girls who had not been elected May Queen) received two shillings.

Informant Five did not remember many details of the songs performed during the walk, other than recalling that they included "Gone is the Winter, gone is the Snow," and "the 'fah la la' one." A personal letter from Neville Chambers, the head teacher who succeeded Miss Skinner, indicates that she had written down the words of the songs that had been performed during her headship (from 1937 to 1962), and that she also gave notes about their performance to him. The songs passed on in this manner were "Come Lasses and Lads," "Now Is the Month of Maying," "Gone is the Winter" (which Mr Chambers noted in correspondence as being "widely sung in this area and also in Bedfordshire," and which he knew from his childhood May Day experiences in Weldon, Northamptonshire), and "Branch of May." He suggested that this last song may have been an innovation, which had been imported from Bedfordshire by Miss Skinner, as he had not heard the song before he came to Titchmarsh. It is, in fact, a local variant of the familiar "May Day Carol" recorded by Hone (1825, 567) and many others.

Accounts of the celebrations appear in the May issues of the parish magazine in 1960 and 1961:

May Day has come and gone, leaving behind in the minds of the children and others a very happy day. It was kept this year on Monday, and the May Queen arrived at the Church Porch at 10:30, where she was greeted by the Rector and escorted to the front seat on the Lectern side with her attendants . . . Anne Chapman was the duly elected Queen . . . Brian Chapman and Peter Cullum pulled the Coach, which was decorated as usual. The collection made round the village produced £14. 10s of which total £7. 14s was given to the children on the following day, the balance of £6. 16s being retained for the children's treats and pleasure later on. The Rector gave the usual tea in the Club Room . . . The Rectory Garden was enjoyed as always after tea (Titchmarsh Parish Magazine April and May 1960, 3).

[May Day] passed off happily as ever, though it was a loss to the Procession that no holiday was given to the older children attending Thrapston School ... Of the £9. 17s. 3d which was collected round the village, £6.5s was distributed on the following day among the children. 10s was given to the Queen for her Roses, and the balance of £3.2s.3d was banked for future expenditure on outings and other amusements. Tea as usual was provided for 70 in the Club Room . . . (Titchmarsh Parish Magazine April and May 1961, 3).



150 Kate Smith

Informant Six, a cousin of one of the coach pullers mentioned above, was himself engaged in that capacity in 1962 and was able to provide a different perspective on the celebrations at that time.

His recollections of May Day started with the election of the "pullers" from boys in the last year of the school (aged eleven). A slip of paper was passed round the class and "you put the name of who you wanted to vote for and that's it":

Then after about two or three weeks as it went by, we had to go back up to the old Rectory and actually fetch the May Coach down, which we did, and being two lads we sort of thought [this was] the bee's knees here, give it a bit of stick down the track, you know, jumping about . . . we brought it into the school and then . . . the day before May Day everybody would go out, the children, everybody would go out getting flowers and that, asking, knocking on doors . . . The parents used to go up and it got decorated that night, on the spokes, everywhere on it, as full as possible.

The remainder of this informant's account echoes that of Informant Five above, with the additional detail, that following the decision not to give Titchmarsh children at Thrapston school a day's holiday on May Day, the children "would just skive" (play truant) on the day so that they might act as collectors; it also seemed from his account that the few hours of freedom in the Rectory garden were a highlight of the day, just as they had been for previous informants.

Having attending the village school myself between 1982 and 1986 (see Figure 4), my own recollections follow this, by now well-established, pattern. They are also supported by a recording made by John Bussens of the May Day celebrations in 1982 - on hearing children singing in the street, he snatched up his cassette recorder and attempted to record as much of the day as possible. [1] All of the evidence from this period suggests that May Day activities continued much as before, the only changes being that the money that had been collected was given to the school, and that the tea was provided in the school, after which a cine-show of cartoons was held

Changes do not start to appear until the account of my next informant, who was eight years old when she spoke to me in 1998. At that stage, an afternoon performance of dancing in the school playground been added to the familiar programme of events. As well as this change, a formal coronation in the playground had been introduced, followed by the first performance of May songs before the children made their way to church. The afternoon performance was notable for featuring an entirely new element - maypole dancing. Informant Five, who has worked in the school since the early 1990s, indicated that the maypole was introduced by one of Mr Chambers's successors, Miss James, who took over the headship in 1992. Maypole dancing was done in Miss James's previous school. [2] According to Informant Five, "she said: 'We shall have to do maypole dancing,' and we used to borrow a maypole":

We used to borrow it from Woodnewton. For a couple of years we did Morris dancing and sword dancing things as well, but it got quite hectic . . . But it was really good once they got the hang of it. Some people [in] the village sort of said "why are they doing that this year?" and "I expect they'll soon stop going round the village" and that . . .

As the maypole did not fit into the existing pattern of celebration, a new "ritual space" had to be created in order to accommodate this imported, performance- centred element. Thus an afternoon "concert" was introduced, affording space and time for dance displays of varying complexity.




Figure 4. The "official" photograph, May Day 1982, Titchmarsh, Northamptonshire.

In 2000, 1 conducted participant-observation fieldwork on May Day events in Titchmarsh. My participation started on the eve of May Day (never called anything other than "the day before May Day" here) as a small group of women - mothers and grandmothers of school-children, and other villagers - gathered to decorate the coach over a period of several hours.

May Day itself began shortly after nine o'clock as parents (and a few grandparents) and children assembled in the playground for the coronation ceremony. The May Queen was now accompanied by a May King, as well as by her usual attendants. The May King had attendants too, making for a considerably larger royal party than is recorded in previous accounts.

The schedule for the day had been advertised in the village, and was distributed to the "audience" along with a song sheet. This gave the words for the seven "traditional and modern songs appropriate for the occasion." Of these, only two were drawn from the repertoire handed down by Miss Skinner and maintained by Mr Chambers - these were "Gone is the Winter" and "Come Lasses and Lads." The distinctive local variant of "Branch of May" had been replaced by a more "official" version of the May Day Carol taken from the Oxford Book of Carols (Dearmer 1999). The other additions to the repertoire of May songs were "Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill" and "Early One Morning," along with an apparently contemporary song "The Maypole."

The route for the walk as laid out in the programme was also different from that taken in the past, and now covered only the top half of the village. From the school, the children made their way to church for a short, multi-modal service of blessing, praise and prayer. From the church, the children made their way around



152 Kate Smith

the top half of the village, stopping three times along the route before making a final, extended stop in the small area of council housing at the western edge of the village. It was noticeable that this stop was by far the most successful one in terms of the amount of money collected and the size of audience the procession attracted. Here, a dozen people came out of their houses to listen to the singing and to add to the collection - the same number that all the previous stops and the whole passage along the route of the procession had attracted. In this social housing estate, people also joined in the singing when they recognised the song, and spent time inspecting and praising the display of the May Coach and May Queen, and the performance of songs.

There can be little room for doubt that the popularity of the celebration at this location was largely due to the fact that this part of the village is home to the majority of Titchmarsh "locals" - mainly elderly villagers, most of whose families have lived in the village for generations. Furthermore, the attractive stone cottages in the remainder of the village have long been beyond the financial reach of most long-standing inhabitants and their families. There was no visit to the Old Rectory on this occasion, nor was there any opportunity to stop for refreshments. The walk lasted less than ninety minutes and the children had returned to school before half-past eleven.

Most children went home for lunch, before coming back to the school for a concert of songs, poems and dances, which were held in the afternoon. Both country and maypole dances were performed at this concert with the audience being invited to participate in a Circassian Circle. Refreshments were offered to all at the end of the concert but no special "tea" was laid on for the children.

The collection in 2000 amounted to sixty pounds, the whole of which was put towards the purchase of equipment for the school.

Case Study Analysis From the above examples, it is evident that the rate of change in the form of the celebration has been more rapid since the mid-1990s than at any time since the celebrations were inaugurated or formalised in the 1860s: new, controversial and non-local elements have been introduced - the maypole introduced by Miss James is an obvious recent arrival and her successor, Mrs Cleaver, seems to have brought the May King and his attendants in to the event. Parts of the celebration have been abandoned altogether - the element of patronage by the "big house" and by local shops is gone, which results in the absence of refreshments mid-way through the walk, and the "traditional" repertoire of songs has been altered. Elements of formality have been brought in, such as the coronation ceremony and the seated concert in the afternoon.

Secondly, it is apparent that changes to the celebration have not only occurred in recent history; Miss Skinner, for example, seems to have played an important role in establishing the repertoire of songs performed throughout much of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most significant change to Titchmarsh's May Day activities until the inclusion of the maypole was the introduction of the May coach. The origin of this vehicle is uncertain. There are grounds for believing that it was first used in 1918, although photographs held by the school do not show the inclusion of a May coach in its May Day celebrations until 1919. Publicity supplied




by the school promotes the idea that it originated as a "Bath Chair/7 which was donated by a resident of the village in 1918, for conversion into a coach for the May Queen.

These moments of change and instances of innovation contrast with seventy years of considerable stability in the form of the celebrations in the course of the twentieth century. During these seven decades there were only three head teachers at the school (Mr Dunn, Miss Skinner and Mr Chambers), and the outward form of May Day celebrations changed very little - although some new songs were added (drawn from a fairly stable local repertoire) and increasing amounts of the money collected collection were siphoned off for school funds. Thus the perception that May Day celebrations in Titchmarsh had always been like that was not unreasonable, as for several generations this was indeed the case; May Day did not change.

To the question as to why changes did eventually take place, there are a number of answers. It might be expected that a tradition would change

more frequently when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which "old" traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions and their institutional carriers and promulgators no longer prove sufficiently adaptable and flexible, or are otherwise eliminated: in short, when there are sufficiently large and rapid changes on the demand or supply side (Hobsbawm 2002, 5).

This seems to be only partially true at Titchmarsh, as it is debatable whether the instigation of a school May Day in response to falling church attendance represents the destruction of a social pattern for which old traditions had been designed. Certainly, the gathering pace of staff-turnover at the school - with members of staff now staying in their post for, perhaps, half a dozen years rather than for decades - seems to have been a significant factor affecting change in May Day activities. Since Mr Chambers's retirement in the late 1980s, there have been at least four head teachers at the school. As the head teacher of such a small school has an enormous amount of influence on the running of the establishment, a high level of staffing change is likely to beget a similar level of change in other areas of school life also.

Individuals can also bring about stability by seeking to maintain the celebrations in their "proper" order. When I visited Titchmarsh's May Day celebrations in 2000 I was struck by the absence from the event of a number of women who had previously played a significant role in the decoration of the May Coach and in the running of the day, and who I had expected to be still "in charge." I tried to find out why they had not been at home when the May Queen had called, and why they had not been there to decorate the Coach the night before. All the answers I received suggested that these women felt that May activities had been changed without consultation with them, that they had changed too much, that May Day was not what it should have been, and that it now lacked meaning and significance for them. In fact, there was a real (but low- key) sense that "their" celebrations - the village celebrations - had been taken away from them. These women are, in this instance, key tradition bearers who were partly responsible for maintaining the stable form (and functions) of May Day celebrations throughout the twentieth century. It seems likely that the continued absence of these Figures (who had been involved in much of the same



154 Kate Smith

kind of May Day activities as children, parents and grandparents) will lead to a further erosion of the stability of the celebrations.

This perception - that all the changes to May Day activities are due to the influence of "outsiders" coming to the village, and changing things that they do not fully understand - is not supported by the conversations I recorded in 1998. There is widespread agreement that walking to the end of the village would now be "too far" for young children, and that it was an activity that was more appropriate when children stayed at the village school until the age of eleven or even fourteen (although Mr Chambers continued this part of the tradition with children aged only nine). Most of my adult informants suggested general socio- cultural reasons for the changes to the processional element of May Day:

I mean, sometimes you can knock on people's doors and they'll say, "Oh, what is it then?" you know, sort of not aware of what's going on unless they've got children . . . But there's so few people at home now, people have gone out to work. It's not the same. I think its quite disheartening for the children to go round and there's nobody to sing to, 'cause like when we were kids, old grannies, and old people that were at home used to come to the doors 'cause they were probably 60, whereas 60 year olds are probably still out at work [today] . . . (Informant Five).

It's always nice, it's a lovely ceremony, I just wish it wasn't so blessed cold ... of course, it's a trickle to what it used to be in the sense that they don't do the whole village. I mean, to go down here with all this new estate here, it's a waste of time, there's very few people at home, you see . . . (Informant Three).

But I mean, a lot of the old people were still about then. But everybody knew everybody you see, in Titchmarsh. No disrespect to anybody like, now, but it was more of a ... it was just different then ... it was a big holiday for everybody, yes, that's what it was . . . But as teachers progressed, I think, and the demands on teachers, I think they're thinking, well, do we really want to do this, and no disrespect to them, but I think, like, Miss Skinner, when she was here, she lived in the village, so it was there, it was a foregone conclusion that it would be carried on, traditional, it wouldn't alter (Informant Six).

It's not like it used to be. I don't think there's so much [chance for the] parents to get the time off, parents are working and before, everybody, the children who went to the school had parents in the village anyway, it was a big tight community ... It just, it's different. But, I mean, it might be just as good for them as it was for us (Informant Four).

The first two of these comments reflect the immense socio-cultural and economic change that has been experienced in all kinds of communities throughout England in the second half of the twentieth century - people work more, and more people work; and in the context of this village, more people work at a greater distance from their home than was usual in the past.

There is also the issue that, since 1990, there has been considerable redevelopment of derelict agricultural sites within the parish boundaries. In the mid-1990s, there were three such farmyards in the village but they have since been redeveloped to provide high-quality, barn-conversion properties, which are priced to attract salaried commuters. Whilst the increase in population size resulting from this has benefited the village in some ways (it ensured that the school, for example, was not faced with the closure threatened regularly during the 1980s when the roll fell to fewer than thirty pupils), it has also shifted the balance of power within the village away from the "locals/7 The real sense in which this latter group are socially and economically marginalised in this newly




prosperous, sub-Cotswold commuter village, is reflected in the amended route of the May Day procession: in the light of these circumstances, it was no coincidence that the most lucrative collecting stop, and the most appreciative audience, was found at the top of the village in the small estate of council housing,

As explained above, most of the locals who themselves attended the village school as children (and therefore participated in May Day activities) now live in this small corner of social housing. The rest of the village is populated mainly by relative newcomers who (like my own parents) were often extremely active and supportive of many of the village's existing traditions and customs. Nevertheless, they arrived there without any inherent sense of the community's traditions, and still do not have any knowledge about whether a given custom or tradition is one that "belongs" to the village or not. The locally distinctive aspects of Titchmarsh's May Day customs would not necessarily be recognisable as constituting "May Day" to individuals unfamiliar with village traditions. Whilst the afternoon performance of instantly recognisable "proper" traditions, such as Maypole dancing, was very well received by newer residents, it was amongst a relatively economically and physically marginalised subcommunity of "locals" that the oldest elements of the village's May Day activities (the procession with singing and money collection) were best recognised and supported in 2000.

Socio-cultural Context This analysis has so far exploited my position as an insider in the context of May Day celebration in Titchmarsh. Taking instead an etic perspective, and thereby stepping back from the village and the celebrations to view Titchmarsh's May Day activities in a wider context, reveals some distinct patterns. There seems to be a long-term pattern of change in terms of the "transitivity" of May Day. The historical mode of celebration placed both participants and audience in an active role - as the children took part by forming the main procession, and were accompanied in some (historically speaking, in most) instances by one or more parents and grandparents. Audience participation in May Day celebrations was active primarily in the sense that people came out of their homes to hear and join in the celebrations by singing some of the songs, and by putting money in the collection box - a crucial part of the celebration. Residents had thus to play their part in the celebration in order for it to be meaningful. When this no longer happened, this historically stable, procession/singing/collection element of the day began to fragment, as it was gradually being shortened and accelerated until it has now become a relatively insignificant part of the day.

This element been replaced in importance by the more passive attribute of Titchmarsh's May Day celebrations - the afternoon concert. In 2000, the attendance at the concert was more than double that for the morning walk round the village. The parents gathered on the edge of the playground, some sitting on child-size seats that had been brought out to mark the place where the audience should arrange themselves. The afternoon performance of traditional and modern songs and dances is what May Day consists of, as far as the majority of parents with children at the school, are concerned. May Day is about watching a performance of maypole dancing, singing, and poem recital; thus, unless you are a child, May Day celebration is something that you watch rather than do.



156 Kate Smith

The historically grounded custom of walking round the village collecting money in return for display and song has been replaced by a set of "traditional" elements, which make the celebrations more "proper" and less demanding of an audience that consists of passive spectators. There may well be a correlation between the increasing passivity of this custom, and that of village life in general, as Titchmarsh (and other rural communities) are now places where people live rather than work or do business.

Furthermore, when the developments and changes to the may day celebrations at Titchmarsh are examined in the light of aspects of postmodernism, the shift from activity to passivity seems particularly significant. In his chapter introducing postmodernism in Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Peter Barry presents a simplified version of Baudrillard's theory of "Simulacra and Simulations" (reprinted in Brooker 1992, 151-62 and cited in Barry 2002, 87-9), in which signifier and signified gradually become estranged from reality:

[Baudrillard] begins by evoking a past era of "fullness", when a sign was a surface indication of an underlying depth or reality . . . The sign reaches its present stage of emptiness in a series of steps . . . Firstly, then the sign represents a basic reality . . . The second stage for the sign is that it misrepresents or distorts the reality behind it ... The third stage for the sign is when the sign disguises the fact that there is no corresponding reality underneath . . . The fourth and last stage for the sign is that it bears no relationship to any reality at all (Barry 2002, 87-8).

Following this four-stage pattern of analysis, let us assume that the May Day first celebrated in 1864 was a formalisation of a set of behaviours that were already present in the community. In this case, the early celebration May Day 1 can be said to be the "sign" representing real, lived experience: May Day 1 was what it was, and was what had (it is assumed) developed to fulfil a social and economic need - historical evidence suggests that May Day was, at this time, primarily an opportunity for children to make some money:

Though it is probably true that the children enjoyed their garlanding, it would appear that one of the principal incentives was not a deep spiritual urge to welcome the coming of summer, as one feels Ruskin would have liked to believe, but for a reason much more mundane . . . the poverty of the 19th and 20th century labourers . . . The connivance of parents . . . seems to indicate that they may have regarded the proceeds for garlanding as a useful supplement to their meagre incomes (Teall 1963, 49-50; see also Judge 2000, 110-11; 2000, 43-5; Bushaway 1982 [3]).

The church/school formalised version (May Day 2) that came into being in response to issues such as the unacceptability of customary begging, and its concomitant factors of truancy and poor church attendance, can be seen as distorting the reality of the lived experience that May Day 1 reflected. It is likely, on the basis of comparative evidence from other contexts - such as the changes in May Day activities at Iffley, Oxon illustrated in Christine Bloxham's May Day to Mummers (2002, 93-4) - that May Day 2 was a polished and "improved" version of May Day 1, and was re-invented as a romantic and bucolic custom in a highly effective "re-branding," Merrie Englande-style exercise, of May Day.

Bloxham gives visual clues to the progress of this re-invention. The earliest photograph from Iffley shows a group of young children, haphazardly arranged, apparently standing in a field. They wear a jumble of ordinary, rather scruffy clothes; two of the garlands they carry are somewhat misshapen and look rather wilted.




The costume of the May Queen looks grubby and ill-fitting; she wears - somewhat askew - a thick veil over her face (which appears to be a tea-towel); the costume of the May King looks improvised {ibid., 93). There is an overall sense of spontaneity and informality about the scene. The children look very much like they could be one of the gatherings of children that "went round garlanding independently in their own groups" (Judge 1987, 26). They must surely resemble what were described in the late nineteenth century as the "smallest urchins bearing branches" {Northampton Mercury 8 May 1880, 6) that formed "innumerable little parties which used to call at every door and sing their spring-tide lays" (Northampton Mercury 1879, 8).

A later photograph from Iffley (Bloxham 2002, 94) shows a considerable degree of formalisation. The children are more uniformly dressed (which may support the suggestion that this formalisation was associated with the take-over of the celebrations by the village school); their clothes are generally tidier; their faces look cleaner; the overall impression is of formality and order. The Queen wears a thick band of flowers on her head rather than a veil; her white dress is decorated with a broad sash of what appear to be laurel leaves. The King wears an ordinary suit of clothes decorated with large arum lilies and other flowers and leaves, suggestive of a degree of patronage or sponsorship by somebody in possession of an exotic flower hot-house. Most of the boys carry poles of uniform height and decoration, suggesting that they were constructed according to one set of instructions and standards; the garlands are more regular in size, there are only two of them, and they look well constructed. There are considerably more children in these images, which suggests that separate bands of children may have come together in one group.

It seems probable that these later images show us something like: the whole of the Board school children . . . [who] went through the village, forming a gigantic procession, bearing Maypoles, garlands, and small flags, and singing at intervals pieces suitable for the occasion (Northampton Mercury 3 May 1879, 8).

It seems equally likely that the developments at Iffley, so helpfully photographed, echo those that may have occurred in other villages such as Titchmarsh.

Returning to our analysis of Titchmarsh's celebrations, I suggest that the ending, at some point between 1962 and 1982, of the customary sharing of the collection between the children and school funds, pushes the celebration into the next stage of "misrepresentation," as the principal original function of the custom is no longer part of its latest incarnation. Having arrived at May Day 3, children/ participants no longer have the motivation or opportunity for customary begging, yet the ceremonial framework that surrounded the original activity still exists: "the sign disguises the fact that there is no corresponding reality underneath" (Barry 2002, 88). In addition to this, the introduction of the May Coach can be seen as reinforcing the presentation of the romantic, bucolic custom noted above. In this instance, the representation of the custom is one that has a stronger basis in the imagination of Merrie Englanders than it does in the reality of lived experience. The coach seems to have been introduced purely because of its aesthetic qualities. The custom of May Day gradually became an idealised representation for which no original existed; over time, the image became reality and reality became the image, in a kind of conceptual rucklauf.



158 Kate Smith

The fourth and final stage in this process is that the sign eventually comes to have no relationship with the reality of lived experience any more; I suggest that some of the newer elements of the contemporary May Day 4 ceremony (the non-local songs, the introduction of the maypole and the coronation ceremony as well as the introduction of the afternoon concert as a whole) have no meaningful relationship with the reality of Titchmarsh's customs and traditions (or indeed with the customs of any particular place). Yet these new introductions appear to be very traditional: they have all the characteristics of traditionality - they look quaint, old and slightly mysterious, and they correspond to the expected visual and behavioural indicators of traditionality, found in media representations of English cultural tradition - and they are all easily recognisable as being part of a "traditional" May Day celebration. But the reality is that in this particular context, the historical May Day celebrations in Titchmarsh never took this form and never operated in this way. I would argue that these aspects of the present-day celebration are simulacra.

Viewed in this way, the development of one village's May Day celebrations over a period of one hundred and forty-two years can be seen as emblematic of some of the changes that have affected our society more widely. Literary and cultural critics have observed similar trends across all media and (to varying degrees) across all westernised societies. Although folklorists have been reluctant to apply such analyses to their material (particularly when it relates to custom and behaviour), I believe that, as has been shown above, the application of these ideas to traditional custom and behaviour can lead to a new understanding of how these aspects of human society and culture operate and signify meaning.

Concluding Remarks It seems, then, that whilst aspects of May Day celebrations in Northamptonshire have altered significantly over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, these changes are underpinned by a demonstrable level of continuity in the actual quantity of school-based celebrations. As one would expect, the development of the celebrations can be seen to reflect changes in wider society - we get, in essence, the customs we deserve and need. Ample evidence was collected during the course of my research, which demonstrated the very real importance of May Day celebrations and other customs, whether in a new, simulacrous form, or as an ongoing and unchanging tradition. Whilst there were some individuals who felt disenfranchised as tradition bearers when new elements were introduced, all the evidence I collected suggests that it is in fact the willingness of communities to adapt their customs to new circumstances, and the flexibility inherent to those customs (perhaps resulting from the fact that they are, more-or-less "made-up" in the first place) that will ensure that the gloom of Teall and others about the likely demise of our seasonal customs was misplaced.

Notes [1] This recording has been digitally re-mastered and put onto audio CD (a copy can be found in the

archives of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at the University of Sheffield). [2] The school at which she previously taught, in the small village of Apethorpe, was closed down

because of its falling roll. The school did not celebrate May Day in 1959 (Teall 1963, App. 1, 6).




[3] Statistics from another Northamptonshire village, Glapthorn, show dramatic changes in the percentage of unemployed adults during the mid-nineteenth century: four per cent in 1851, seven per cent in 1861, nineteen per cent in 1871, ten per cent in 1881, and eight per cent in 1891. Further research could usefully be done to clarify whether this pattern is found across the areas in which May Day can be shown to be particularly visible at the same period.

References Cited

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Belgion, Helen. Titchmarsh Past and Present. Titchmarsh, Northamptonshire: G.H. Belgion, 1979.

Bloxham, Christine. May Day to Mummers: Folklore and Traditional Customs in Oxfordshire. Charlbury, Oxon: Wychwood Press, 2002.

Brooker, Peter, ed. Reprint of Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulations/' In Modernism/ Postmodernism. London: Longman, 1992.

Bushaway, Bob. By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England, 1700-1880. London: Junction Books, 1982.

Dearmer, Percy The Oxford Book of Carols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hobsbawm, Eric. "Introduction: Inventing Traditions/' In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. 1-14. Cambridge: Canto /Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Hone, William. The Every-Day Book; or, Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements. London: Hunt and Clark, 1827.

Judge, Roy. "Changing Attitudes to May Day, 1844-1914, with Special Reference to Oxfordshire." Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Dialect and Folklife Studies, University of Leeds, 1987.

. The Jack-in-the-Green: A May Day Custom. London: FLS Books, 2000.

Northampton Mercury, 3 May 1879, 8; 8 May 1880, 6. Titchmarsh Parish Magazine, May 1870, no. 108, 2; May 1952, 2; April and May 1960, 3; May 1961, 3.

Teall, Dennis G. "May Festivals in Northamptonshire School: Their Origin, Significance and Influence on the Primary School Curriculum." Unpublished M.Ed, thesis, University of Leicester, 1963.

Titchmarsh Village, [accessed 16 August 2007]. Available from www.titchmarsh.info; INTERNET.

Biographical Note Kate Smith was awarded a Doctorate on May Day customs in Northamptonshire, in July 2007 from the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, University of Sheffield. Her research interests include this and other contemporary calendar customs, particularly in terms of their relationship to socio-cultural contexts and change. Dr Smith is a part-time Associate Lecturer with the Open University.



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Change, Continuity and Contradictions in May Day Celebrations in Northamptonshire

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