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Updated: May 17, 2025
It is pretty to watch the squirrel in his chestnut-red coat among the oaks in their fresh green foliage, full of fun as a bright child, eating his apple like a child, only it is an oak-apple, shining white or white and rosy-red, in his little paws; but you have seen it so many times come away: It was not this voice alone which made me forsake the green oaks of Silchester and Pamber Forest, to ramble for a season hither and thither in Wiltshire, Dorset, and Somerset; there was something for me to do in those places, but the call made me glad to go.
She had a big fan in her hand, but when she saw the visitor she went up to a beautiful little low table, with an ivory frill round it, where stood some dainty, delicate tea-cups and saucers. Into one of these she put a little ball, about as big as an oak-apple, of tea-leaves; a maid dressed like herself poured hot water on it, and handed it on a lacquer-work tray.
The grub undergoes its transformation, and in due course emerges a perfect insect. These pretty pink-and-white apples used to be gathered by English boys on the twenty-ninth of May, which was called 'Oak-Apple Day." "Did they eat 'em?" asked Edith. "I do not see how they could, dear," was the reply; "they were probably gathered just to look at.
She had a big fan in her hand; but when she saw the visitor she went up to a beautiful little, low table, with an ivory frill round it, where stood some dainty, delicate tea-cups and saucers. Into one of these she put a little ball, about as big as an oak-apple, of tea-leaves; a maid dressed like herself poured hot water on it, and handed it on a lacquer-work tray.
Of the many omens afforded by the oak, we are told that the change of its leaves from their usual colour gave more than once "fatal premonition" of coming misfortunes during the great civil wars; and Bacon mentions a tradition that "if the oak-apple, broken, be full of worms, it is a sign of a pestilent year."
We bathed together of mornings; he would come and chat to me when I was at my work; and the hours of work being over, he would lug me into a little outhouse he kept as his own, and show me his treasures guns, and fishing tackle, a breastplate worn by his grandfather in the Civil War, an oak-apple from the tree in which King Charles had hidden after the battle of Worcester.
My spirits rose as he swung his bear-skin bag upon his shoulder, and the last sound of the laboring caravan groaned in the distance, and the fresh air and the freedom of the mountains moved around us. It was the 29th of May Oak-apple Day in England and to my silly youth this vast extent of snowy mountains was a nice place for a cool excursion.
Worcester is distinguished as the Faithful City, for like the County it had small use for Cromwell and his Roundheads; and to this day, on the date of the restoration of Charles II. "the twenty-ninth of May, oak apple day" a spray of oak or an oak-apple is in some villages worn as a badge of loyalty, the penalty for non-observance being a stroke on the hands with a stinging-nettle.
It may be some consolation to the lingering adherents of the name, to those who wear oak-apple on May 29th, and who sigh because there is no "king over the water" who can come to "enjoy his own again" it may be some consolation to them to think that if their cause can no longer stir the swords in men's hands, it can still guide their pens to as poetic purpose as it did in the years that followed the fatal Forty-five.
Another insect stings the same leaf and produces the common oak-apple a smooth, round, green, shell-like body filled with a network of radiating filaments, with the egg and then the grub of the insect at the centre.
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