Celebrating days of the maypole
30th May 2005. Barwick-in-Elmet Maypole Festival, pupils from Barwick-in-Elmet C of E Junior & Infant School mayple dancing.
Workaday Askern, in the old coal-mining area just north of Doncaster, today seems an odd location for one of English’s most rural of traditions.
However, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, before deep-mined coal was exploited here, Askern was a pretty spot with a unique lake and a glorious rural hinterland.
Furthermore, it was a holiday resort, especially for people from Wakefield and Pontefract.
Famously smelly (sulphurous) spa water completed the image of a health tourism and recreational resort, and the Victorian recreation of traditional maypole and dance, was celebrated annually.
The picture (inset) shows the Askern Maypole Dancers in 1917, at the height of the First World War, perhaps a time when a symbol of Englishness was especially welcome.
The maypole and its dances were probably ancient traditions, and important in annual celebrations; in this case, most likely, fertility rites.
However, they were detested by the Puritans as vehicles for Satan to corrupt young people: “...both men and women, and children, old and young,…going all together, or dividing themselves into companies.
“They go some to the woods, and groves, some to the hills and mountains, … where they spend all night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return bringing with them birch boughs, and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withal”.
A Puritan called Philip Stubbes complained in 1583, “…oxen draw home this May-pole (this stinking idol rather) ...covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round about with strings from top to bottom, and sometimes painted with variable colours... forty, threescore or a hundred maids going to the wood overnight, there have been scarcely the third part of them return home undefiled”.
This sheds further light on the old rhyme, Here we go gathering nuts in May, since there are no hazelnuts to gather at this time.
Most maypoles and celebrations were on May 1, but some, like the tallest maypole in England, at Barwick-in-Elmet, near Leeds, were erected on Whit Monday (nowadays Spring Bank Holiday, the religious date was rationalised and moved to a secular annual holiday).
This pole is about 50ft or more in height, replacement poles being supplied by Scots pine trees from Finland.
The highlight of the event is taking down the pole, when a local youth is required to climb up, release the ropes and get to the top to give the fox-shaped weather vane a spin.
Anyway, Yorkshire has the biggest maypole in the world.
I wonder what happened to the one in Askern?
Ian Rotherham is a writer, broadcaster, and Professor of Environmental Geography, Reader in Tourism and Environmental Change.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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