May Day is a celebration with a long and varied history, dating back millennia. The Celts of the British Isles believed 1 May to be the most important day of the year, when the festival of Beltane was held.
This May Day festival was thought to divide the year in half, between the light and the dark and marked the beginning of Summer when cattle were driven out to the Summer pastures. Symbolic fire was one of the main rituals of the festival, helping to celebrate the return of life and fertility to the world; special bonfires were kindled, whose flames, smoke and ashes were deemed to have protective powers. The people and their cattle would walk around or between bonfires, and sometimes leap over the flames or embers. All household fires would be doused and then re-lit from the Beltane bonfire.
When the Romans took over the British Isles, they brought with them their five-day celebration known as Floralia, devoted to the worship of the goddess of flowers, Flora. Taking place between 20 April and 2 May, the rituals of this celebration were eventually combined with Beltane.
With the coming of Christianity many pagan festivals were banned, lost or commandeered by the Church and May Day was loosely associated with Whitsun or Pentecost. In medieval times the celebrations would regularly centre round a village green where dancing would ensue. The Puritans under Oliver Cromwell banned the May Day celebrations but they returned with Charles 1, the Merry monarch.
Some of the customs still remain and dancing round the maypole (whose origins are disputed) is one of these. Maypoles with the ribbons that we know, didn’t appear regularly until the second half of the 19th century.
Often the dancing is also enhanced by Morris Dancers , a tradition which can be traced back to the middle of the fifteenth century, when a troupe is recorded as being paid, but the practice does seem likely to have been older. Morris men and women usually wear bell pads on their shins and dance with sticks, swords and handkerchiefs. Another part of the celebrations is the choosing and crowning of the May Queen and her attendants.
In more recent years 1 May is also International Workers’ Day. On this day, people in many countries around the world celebrate workers’ achievements and march in the streets demanding fair pay and better working conditions.
An entirely different aspect of the title May Day is in the use of it as a distress call. The Mayday call originated in the 1920s. A senior radio officer at London’s Croydon Airport, Frederick Stanley Mockford, was the first to use this signal to indicate emergency situations. Mockford was asked by his seniors to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff during an emergency. As much of the traffic at Croydon airport at that time was to and from Le Bourget Airport in Paris, Mockford proposed the expression “Mayday”, derived from the French word “m’aider” meaning “help me”. This is a shortened form of “venez m’aider”, which means “come and help me”. Due to radio interference and loud ambient noise, pilots are told to repeat the word three times: “Mayday, mayday, mayday.” The repetition also serves to help radio operators distinguish the transmission from others that simply refer to the mayday call.
So the first of May is not just the start of the fifth month of the year; it’s a day that embraces pagan customs, dancing with bells and handkerchiefs, marking workers’ rights and a distress call.
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Giles shares his enthusiasm for Mother Julian here
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