Westerling Page

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Page Added 5 February 1998

Westerling, Margaret., Country Contentments,  London: Constable & Co, (1939)

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CHAPTER III

GREEN AND LUSTY MAY

"The fields are fragrant and the woods are green."
                                                                       TITUS ANDRONICUS.

ALTHOUGH there are no longer any maypoles still standing on the hills, the country people have vivid memories of one kind or another of the May Day celebrations.  Warwickshire is full of them, and at Welford-on-Avon, not very far from Stratford, the tall maypole stands on the village green, and old Granny Gould remembers clearly how they all used to dance there.  Maypoles and country dances for the women and children, Morris dances for the men only - that was how it generally went. Bidford-on-Avon, a little nearer to Evesham on the winding river, kept its revived Morris dancing at least till 1906, and possibly later.  As a child I saw the Bidford mummers, and though I have no memory of the tunes or the dances I well remember the hobby-horse, and a small girl's fright at his antics.

Nearer at hand, Cutsdean and Ford kept their maypole till quite recently, and a woman under forty remembers how she and the other children used to make garlands and short maypoles on sticks to carry round when they went collecting pennies.  Kind Mrs. Gardiner who lived at Cutsdean used to rob her garden of

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flowers for them, and they picked "mayblobs" or "water-bubbles" from the stream below the Cliffs, where her cottage stood.  The song they sang ran as follows:

"All round the maypole, trit, trit, trot,
See what a maypole we have got!
Blythe and gay, skip away,
We've come to tell you it's the First of May."

The primitive celebration of the end of winter and the coming of spring has left its traces in the slower rhythm of the Morris dances, as the use of animal masks also indicates.  At Bidford-on-Avon the fool had a foxmask, and his bladder was decorated with an ox-tail. The ceremonial of many of the Gloucestershire dances also indicates their origin in the belief in magic, like the sword-dances of the North.  Everywhere the coming of spring was the signal for joyful celebration. In Bledington and Longborough, as in many other Gloucestershire villages, dancing sides survived until very recently, and I often find men who have danced in their local teams.  It would only need the familiar music, I feel sure, to set their feet jogging again.  When, in the summer, the Cambridge team of country-dancers came, as they do each year, to dance in the villages, the old dancers gathered to watch them, and here and there a local side, or one or two of its members, were found to join in and dance with them.

Each village formerly had its own tradition, its steps and its tunes, often differing slightly from the same dance as found elsewhere.  Sometimes the sides would

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meet to dance together, sometimes they would compete in friendly rivalry.  This was often the case between Bledington and Longborough, whose sides had strong traditions.  The special features of the Longborough side were the Handkerchief dances.

Versions and echoes of tunes and dances are so universally found as to argue an ancient common origin, as well as a wide diffusion.  The names have a delightful ring; there is London Pride, Maid o' the Mill, Old Trunkles, Swaggering Boney, Green Sleeves, Constant Billy, Laudnum Bunches, Bean Setting, Shepherd's Hey, and many more. Several of these were collected by Cecil Sharp in Gloucestershire.

The dancer's dress was usually a white pleated shirt, crossed with ribbons, breeches or flannel trousers caught in below the knee with ribbons or bells, generally the latter, and stout shoes or boots for dancing on the greens.  The favourite hat was a high top-hat with bright ribbons or flowers to enhance it.  A bowler, a straw hat, or even a felt one, is worn by the Cambridge dancers, who dance to the traditional fiddle or pipe and tabour known as whittle and dub. Sometimes a concertina was used, as I heard later from another old man, who remembered the dancing at Ford.  At Winchcombe one of the older men told how he had worn one white sock and one blue when he danced.

At Longborough I found the man who had collected a number of the tunes for Cecil Sharp - George Joyns, whose original manuscripts are at Cecil Sharp House. He could not tell me very much about the dances themselves,

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but he did explain to me that mysterious "Once to yourself " which I had seen at the top of so many of the dance tunes.  It simply indicates that the musician plays the opening bars over once before the dancing starts. Joyns' versions of such tunes as Old Trunkles, Cuckoo's Nest, Old Woman Tossed Up in a Blanket, and Constant Billy differ from the versions found elsewhere, and, like the Longborough Morris or Hey Diddle Dis, are peculiar to the Longborough tradition.

Dancing had its place in most of the village festivals, and perhaps the club outings and fairs which were such a feature of village life forty or fifty years ago had their origin in some such celebrations.

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