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Updated: June 19, 2025
The English people have always been lovers of dancing; and it forms an accompaniment of almost all their old sports and pastimes. Witness the maypoles, wassails, and wakes of rural life, and the grotesque morris-dance, originating in a kind of Pyrrhic or military dance, and described by Sir William Temple as composed of "ten men, who danced a maid marian and a tabor and pipe."
Like a woman or a child, she held out her arms to the unknown, in a natural recoil from that iron rule which had extinguished her gaiety, silenced her noble liturgy, made innocent pleasures and elegant arts things forbidden. She wanted her churches, and her theatres, her cock-pits and taverns, and bear-gardens and maypoles back again.
Gloom and sour visages prevailed, the maypoles were down, the play-houses were closed, the bear-gardens were empty, the cock-pits were desolate; and a saddened population, impoverished and depressed by the sacrifices that had been exacted and the tyranny that had been exercised in the name of Liberty, were ground under the iron heel of Cromwell's red-coats.
What wonder is it that the cannon in the Tower thundered a loud welcome, and that all over England, at one season or another, maypoles rose and Christmas fires blazed? For Englishmen at heart are not only monarchists, but they are lovers of good cheer and merrymaking and all sorts of mirth. Charles II. might well at first have seemed a worthier and wiser successor to his splendid father.
The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power. But their reign is rover for rever and ever and ev... Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring up. A streamer bearing the legends Cead Mile Failte and Mah Ttob Melek Israel Spans the street.
The earliest Greek and Roman missionaries knew full well the significance of these symbols, and we are given to understand that "a few of the more spiritual of the Christian sects made war upon them and all their ephemeral substitutes, such as Maypoles, holy-trees, real crosses, etc."
In many villages the Maypole was as much a fixture as the parish stocks, but when a new one was required, it was brought home on May-eve in grand procession with songs and instrumental music. I am afraid there is a good deal of evidence to show that the Maypoles were not always honestly come by! One good man groans lamentably: "What adoe make our young men at the time of May?
Under weaker treatment the effect was grievous. There was neither manliness nor solemnity in the usual run of churches built after the similitude of 'Roman theatres and Grecian fanes. Maypoles instead of columns, capitals of no order, and pie-crust decorations such, exclaimed Seward, were the too frequent adjuncts of the newly built churches he saw about him.
They thrust away from them for a little while the ghastly spiritual hypochondria of which Puritanism was a manifestation, and determined to make merry. But, heigh-ho! the day of Maypoles was over and gone. From the beginning the jollity and laughter were forced, and the new era of perpetual spring festival soon became an era of brainless indecency.
Last of all came the corporation of law clerks, with its maypoles crowned with flowers, its black robes, its music worthy of the orgy, and its large candles of yellow wax.
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