Maypole

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A maypole is a tall pole, often garlanded with greenery, flowers, and ribbons, raised in a public place for the May Day festivities of late spring. Around it, in the best-known form of the custom, dancers weave colored ribbons into a plaited sheath as they circle. The practice is attested across much of northern and central Europe — in England, in the German lands where the Maibaum is still hauled upright in village squares, in Sweden where the midsommarstång moves the rite to the midsummer solstice — and survives, in revived and tidied form, into the present. The pole stands at the center of a gathering rather than a sanctuary; what is raised is not an altar but a focus, a vertical mark around which a community arranges itself for a day.

A Swedish midsommarstång raised for the midsummer festivities, decorated with birch greenery and wildflower wreaths — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

The documented history, however, is shorter than the custom’s reputation, and the gap between the two is the whole of the matter. Maypoles appear in English and Welsh records from the later medieval period onward, set up by parishes and villages as the centerpiece of communal May games: a focus for dancing, ale, and sociability at the turning of the year toward summer. The earliest secure witness is literary rather than documentary — a poem of the mid-fourteenth century by the Welsh bard Gruffudd ab Adda, addressed to a birch felled and re-erected as a summer pole (bedwen) in the town of Llanidloes, a small but unambiguous testimony that the rite was already a recognizable town recreation in Wales by around 1340. From the same broad period come the permanent London maypoles — the great shaft at Cornhill that gave the church of St Andrew Undershaft its name, so called because the pole set up beside it each May stood taller than the steeple. By the later Middle Ages the custom was common across southern Britain: a parish object, raised by churchwardens and young men, paid for out of collections and the proceeds of May-game ales, taken down and stored or sold for timber when the season passed.

The permanent village maypole at Offenham, Worcestershire, one of the few English communities to keep a standing pole — via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The ribbon dance is recent

The familiar ribbon-plaiting dance — the part most people now picture when they hear the word — is later still, and its lateness is well established. Careful study traces it not to remote antiquity but to the nineteenth century. The plaiting of colored ribbons into a woven sheath around the pole seems to have entered England from the theater: plaited-pole numbers were performed on the London stage from about 1836, drawing on Continental and Italian models in which the pole was carried by the dancers themselves rather than fixed in the ground. From the stage the figure passed into provincial festivity — Derbyshire dances spreading outward from Buxton from about 1840, appearing in southern village fêtes around 1850 — and was then deliberately fixed and propagated through Victorian education. In 1881 the critic and reformer John Ruskin, working with the principal of Whitelands College in Chelsea, a teacher-training college for women, made the ribbon-plaited maypole and a crowned May Queen the centerpiece of a new annual festival. As graduates carried the ceremony into the schools where they taught, the woven-ribbon dance became, within a generation, the standard English form, displacing the older round-dancing about the pole by the 1880s. What looks timeless is in good part recent: a custom of genuine medieval age fitted, in the nineteenth century, with a wholly modern set of movements and a sanitized, scholastic frame. The seam between the old pole and the new dance is exactly the kind of join that the custom’s later interpreters would paint over.

Round-dancing about the pole at a village fair, before the ribbon figure: The Kermesse of St George, c. 1628 — Pieter Brueghel the Younger, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The pole and the Reformation

The maypole became a casualty of religious politics, and in that quarrel its meaning was first hardened into something the records do not otherwise support. To the hotter Protestants of Elizabethan and early Stuart England, the maypole was an idol and an occasion for drunkenness and disorder — the surviving débris, they argued, of heathen idolatry dressed up as harmless recreation. The most vivid single attack is that of the pamphleteer Philip Stubbes, whose Anatomie of Abuses of 1583 describes the young men and women of England going out overnight into the woods to fetch home their maypole and casts the whole proceeding as devil-worship: there is a great lord present among the revelers, he writes, as superintendent and lord over their pastimes and sports, namely Sathan, prince of hell. The pole hauled home by oxen with garlands on their horns and set up with feasting he calls a stinking idol, around which the people fall to dancing as the heathen did at the dedication of their idols. The rhetoric is polemic, not ethnography; but it lodged the equation maypole-equals-pagan-idol firmly in the language of those who wished to abolish it, and the equation would prove durable in a way its authors never intended.

The quarrel became law in the 1640s. With Parliament ascendant in the civil war, an ordinance of April 1644 ordered maypoles taken down across England and Wales, condemning them — in the ordinance’s own words — as a heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness. The famous Strand maypole in London, said to have stood near a hundred feet, came down with the rest. The prohibition lasted the length of the Interregnum and ended with it. At the Restoration of 1660 the poles went up again as deliberate emblems of the returning order; the new Strand maypole, raised in April 1661 to general rejoicing and celebrated in a contemporary tract, rose higher than its predecessor, well over a hundred feet, a piece of royalist theater in cedar and iron bands. The whole episode — banned by one regime as paganism, restored by the next as loyal festivity — stands as a small, legible emblem of a much larger contest over whether the rhythms of popular festivity were innocent recreation or survivals of heathen error. The pole was made to carry political weight; the question of what, if anything, it had ever meant religiously went unexamined by both sides, because both sides already knew the answer they wanted.

The afterlife of the pagan charge

That charge — that the maypole is a relic of an ancient fertility religion — has had a long and curious afterlife, and its later history runs in the opposite direction from its origin. What the Puritans alleged in order to abolish the custom, romantic and antiquarian writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embraced in order to celebrate it. The image of the maypole as a phallic symbol and the surviving stump of a pre-Christian fertility cult belongs far more to interpretation than to evidence. It owes its currency to the comparative mythology of the period around James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which read the seasonal customs of European villagers everywhere as fossils of a single forgotten paganism — the May-tree and maypole, in Frazer’s reading, relics of the worship of trees and of a vegetation spirit carried from house to house to spread its blessing. This was the intellectual climate of the early comparative study of religion, the milieu of the Eranos circle and its predecessors, in which apparently trivial folk practices were assumed to encode deep and ancient meaning, and in which the recovery of a lost European paganism was a project pursued with real scholarly seriousness and real romantic longing.

Careful study of the actual records, most fully by Ronald Hutton in The Stations of the Sun (1996), finds little to support a direct descent from any specific pre-Christian rite. The custom’s medieval emergence is documented; its cheerful sociability is documented; its supposed pagan ancestry is not. There is no continuous thread running from a known heathen ceremony to the parish maypole of the fifteenth century — only the assumption, made first by its enemies and then by its admirers, that so green and exuberant a thing must be old beyond record. The same assessment belongs to the broader narrative of a hidden, unbroken Old Religion surviving the Christian centuries in the countryside: the historical case for it, as the specialist scholarship of the later twentieth century established, does not hold. The honest position is that the maypole is an old and genuine festive custom whose meaning was reinvented at least twice: condemned as paganism by reformers who wished to abolish it, and then embraced as paganism by romantics who wished to celebrate it.

This second, romantic reading is itself now a living thing, and is fairly described as such. Within modern Paganism — the new religious movements assembled in the twentieth century, of which Wicca is the most prominent — the maypole is widely understood as a fertility symbol, the masculine pole set into the receptive earth, danced about to quicken the season’s growth. The Frazerian comparative mythology that supplied this reading was woven, in the mid-twentieth century, into the founding synthesis of modern witchcraft, alongside Margaret Murray’s now-discredited thesis of a surviving witch-cult; the maypole entered the revived festival calendar carrying the ancient-fertility meaning that the records do not document but that the founders took as given. To set the date of this understanding — twentieth-century, built on nineteenth-century comparative scholarship — is not to weigh its worth to those who keep it, only to place it. The same long shadow of the comparativist imagination touched the way witchcraft itself was narrated, and the lurid image of the witches’ sabbath re-read as a pagan survival; in each case a ritual or an accusation was given a deep prehistory it could not bear the weight of, and the projection long outran the proof.

The name itself carries some of the same backward pull. May takes its name, by way of the Roman calendar, from Maia — the eldest Pleiad and, separately, an old Italic goddess of growth honored at the start of the month — and the warm-season festivity of the maypole has often been set beside the Roman games of Flora, goddess of the flowering of everything that blooms, whose riotous Floralia fell at the turn from April into May. The etymology is real and the seasonal resonance is real; what they do not furnish is a line of descent. A goddess gave her name to a month, and a month gave its name to a pole; that the pole was once her cult-object does not follow, and the records do not supply the missing steps.

The textual record

The primary witnesses to the maypole are scattered and small: churchwardens’ accounts recording the cost of raising and storing the parish pole; the May-game references in town and guild records gathered in the Records of Early English Drama project; the hostile pamphlet literature of the godly reformers. The fullest and most quoted of the last is Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), whose maypole passage can be read in the Early English Books Online text-creation edition and is the source of nearly every later quotation of Puritan hostility to the custom. The interpretive tradition that made the pole a pagan relic is best read at its fountainhead in J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, whose chapter Relics of Tree-Worship in Modern Europe sets out the May-tree-as-vegetation-spirit reading in full; it is a document of its method, to be read for the climate of opinion it created rather than as a guide to what the maypole was. The decisive modern reassessment is Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), which assembles the documentary record parish by parish and dismantles the assumption of pagan continuity; Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999) traces how the discarded continuity-thesis was taken up as the historical self-understanding of the modern Pagan revival. Charles Kightly’s The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain (Thames & Hudson, 1986) remains a useful descriptive gazetteer of the surviving local forms.

A Bavarian Maibaum on the Viktualienmarkt in Munich, hung with plaques of the local trades — a surviving Continental form of the custom — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Neither the reformers nor the romantics left much room for the simpler thing it seems mostly to have been — a way of marking the return of the warm season in company. The pole was raised, the village gathered around it, and the rest came afterward.

→ Related: Tree Worship · Modern Paganism · The Reformation · Comparative Religion Eranos · Ritual · Witchcraft · Witches Sabbath · Maia · Flora