A rainbow of ribbons

Once banned by Parliament for being 'wicked', maypole dancing—with its multi-coloured unfurling of fabric and flowers—also affords a sense of mathematical satisfaction

- Deborah Nicholls-Lee

THE May-pole is up,/Now give me the cup;/T'll drink to the garlands around it;' rejoices Robert Herrick. 'But first unto those/Whose hands did compose/The glory of flowers that crown'd it.' Few sights are more convivial than a maypole dance, a traditional celebration of the start of summer. Yet, in 1644, about the time of Herrick's poem, the libations he mentions, coupled with much raucous frolicking around the pole, saw the activity banned by a Parliament that deemed it 'a heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness'.

Some 3,000 years before English Puritans took issue with this 17th-century equivalent of a drunken conga, Germanic and Scandic tribes were enacting a maypole dance around a post or tree trunk, in the belief, perhaps, that circles helped banish ill fortune. Some sources suggest that the Romans also revelled around stripped-down trees decorated with flowers as part of the springtime festivals of the Magna Mater and the Floralia, when clothes were thrown off and wild hares—symbols of fertility—were released among the celebrants.

‘Dancing around the maypole was the 17th-century equivalent of a drunken conga’

Cities were not immune to such frenzied 'mayings', according to John Stow's