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M A Y FACT SHEETS D A Y

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May Day is a public holiday usually celebrated on 1 May. It is an ancient Northern Hemisphere spring festival and a traditional spring holiday in many cultures. FACT SHEETS In the UK, is officially known as the Early May Bank Holiday. It is held on the first Monday of May each year.

CONTENTS

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MAY DAY 03

MAY DAY CUSTOMS 04

MAY DAY AND SOCIAL PROTEST 06

WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE WORKERS’ 07

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A Brief History of May Day Since pre-Christian times, people have celebrated the end of winter and the return of spring.

May Day falls roughly between the spring equinox and the summer solstice and Celts celebrated it as the first day of summer with bonfires, feasts

and rituals, calling it Beltane. The earliest recorded FACT SHEETS May Day celebrations are associated with the Floralia, a festival of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, vegetation, and fertility, held on 27 April during the Roman Republic era. As Europe became christianized, pagan festivals including May Day changed into a popular secular celebration. Towns and villages celebrated springtime’s new growth and fertility with May Day revelry such as village fêtes and community gatherings. Seeding had been May Day, Chamber’s Book of Days, an anthology completed by this date and it was convenient to give published in 1864 farm labourers a day off. The spring bank holiday on the first Monday in “May Day falls roughly between the spring May was created in 1978; May Day itself – May 1 – equinox and the summer solstice and Celts is not a public holiday in (unless it falls on a Monday). celebrated it as the first day of summer with bonfires, feasts and rituals, calling it Beltane” In the late 20th century, many neo-pagans began reconstructing traditions and celebrating May Day In 1649, the May Day celebrations were banned as a pagan religious festival. For example, pagans by Puritan parliaments during the Interregnum and druids gather at Glastonbury Tor in Somerset at (1649-60), but it was reinstated with the restoration dawn to welcome May Day (also known as Beltane), of Charles II in 1660. 1 May, 1707, was the day the which they see as a chance to welcome the coming Act of Union came into effect, joining England and of the season of warmth and light. Scotland to form the Kingdom of Great Britain.

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May Day Customs Morris dancing This is a traditional English form of folk dancing from There are many customs and the 15th Century, often performed on May Day by traditions associated with May Day: groups of men or women who wear different outfits depending on which part of the country they are from. Their clothes are white with coloured belts The crowning of the May Queen across the chest. The dancers may shake white The May Queen is a personification of the May Day handkerchiefs or bang short sticks together as part holiday and of springtime and summer and is chosen of the dance. from a group of young girls. She wears a white gown

to symbolize purity and usually a tiara or crown of FACT SHEETS flowers and sits in a flower-decked chair as she is celebrated by her ‘subjects’. Her duty is to begin the celebrations by making a speech before the dancing begins and then ride or walk at the front of a procession.

Maypole dancing This is a ceremonial folk dance believed to have started in Roman Britain around 2,000 years ago, when soldiers celebrated the arrival of spring by dancing around decorated trees to ensure fertility and to give thanks to the goddess Flora. These days, dancers weave ribbons into complex patterns “Morris dancing is a traditional English form around a tall pole garlanded with greenery or of folk dancing from the 15th Century, often flowers, to celebrate youth and the spring time. performed on May Day by groups of men or The maypole is meant to represent male fertility. women who wear different outfits depending on which part of the country they are from”

The Marvellous May Fair, 2014, Lloyd Park

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May Day Customs May baskets These are small baskets of sweets or flowers, There are many different regional usually left anonymously on neighbours’ doorsteps May Day traditions. as a declaration of affection for a potential sweetheart. The giver rings the bell and runs away. The baskets were meant to symbolise female Hooped garlands fertility. This custom, more common in the U.S.A Another tradition for young girls is to make hooped became less popular in the late 20th Century. garlands decorated with leaves and flowers, to represent the goddess of spring. FACT SHEETS

Regional customs There are many regional variations in the way May Jack-in-the-Green Day is celebrated. For example, well dressing is This involves a pyramidal or conical wicker or wooden a tradition particularly associated with the Peak framework that is decorated with foliage being District of Derbyshire and Staffordshire where wells, worn by a person at the head of a procession, often springs and other water sources are decorated accompanied by musicians. Although Jack-in-the- with designs created from flower petals; in , Greens can still be seen in some town and village there is a 500-year-old tradition for the Magdalen May Day celebrations, often associated now with the College Choir to sing from the top of a Tower as the custom of the and signifying spring and sun rises to welcome the warmer months and to rebirth, the custom largely died out in the Victorian bless the city of Oxford. era, replaced instead by a more sedate May Queen.

Jack-in-the-Green May Morning on Magdalen Tower, 1890, by Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt, Lady Lever Art Gallery

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May Day and Social Protest May Day has also traditionally been a time of protests, marches and demonstrations.

An early example occurred in 1517 when a mob of young apprentices rampaged through targeting the businesses of foreign merchants. FACT SHEETS

The socialist origins of our present May Day holiday started in America in 1886 after anarchists there were falsely accused of a bombing. Socialists all over the world spoke out against the trial and sentences. From this year on, May Day was known as International Workers’ Day and became an international festival of working class solidarity. William Morris speaking at a May Day rally in Hyde Park in 1894, 2 years before his death. “May Day was intended to be a one-off Sketched by Walter Crane. protest but it continued largely because of the trade union movement and the London marches grew larger every year”

Initially, May Day was intended to be a one-off protest. However, it continued largely because of the trade union movement and the London marches grew larger every year. In 1892, a huge crowd estimated at half a million walked from Westminster Bridge to Hyde Park, led by the dock workers of . Since then, the 1st May has been associated with protest and uprisings, including anti-apartheid marches and anti- capitalist movements such as Occupy. It became an official bank holiday in the UK in 1978.

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William Morris and the This tribute to the workers of the world, called on labourers and factory workers to come forth on Workers’ Maypole May Day and ‘be glad in the sun’. During the late 19th Century elements from traditional May Day celebrations began to be incorporated into socialist demonstrations.

William Morris joined the Social Democratic FACT SHEETS Federation in 1883 and, with the artist Walter Crane, started combining socialist values with the familiar ‘Merrie England’ imagery of May Queens, garlands and angels. Morris used these images of mediaeval pageantry and a lost rural idyll to criticise the squalor of industrial capitalism, in his Utopian novel of 1890, News from Nowhere. Walter Crane created an image of a workers’ maypole depicting labourers dancing in an idyllic countryside, apparently ready for work that is challenging and rewarding without being demoralizing or exhausting. They hold ribbons that flutter down from a personified maypole, a tall woman wearing a Liberty bonnet or the Phrygian cap associated with the French Revolution. The typical demands and slogans of late-nineteenth- century socialism are written on the ribbons:

• Neither Riches Nor Poverty • Abolition of Privilege • The Land for the People • Adult Suffrage The Workers’ Maypole, 1894, Walter Crane, • Eight Hours The Clarion Magazine. Also published as part of • Leisure for all a collection: Cartoons for a Cause – a souvenir • Employers’ Liability brochure for the 1896 International Socialist • No Starving Children In the Board Schools Workers and Trades Unions Congress. • A Life Worth Living Edition held by the William Morris Gallery Library.

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