Hal An Tow

This is a May Day song. The Britons gained the festival of dancing in the spring from the Romans. They erected their May Poles to Goddess Flora and decorated it on every village green. During the 15th and 16th centuries, May Day plays featured Robin Hood's band of outlaws, and the marriage ceremony of Robin Hood and Maid Marion which turned these two characters into the ritual hero and heroine of the May Day celebrations.

One of the ancient customs was to bathe the face in the dew of the morning with the hope that it would make one beautiful. May Poles were noted as late as 1795 in England, though we hope they have made a recent re-appearance.

In his Anatomie of Abuses, published in 1583, Phillip Stubbes wrote a graphic and slightly disapproving description of the excesses of May Day and its symbol the May Pole: 'Against May, Whitsunday, or other time, olde men and wives, run gadding over-night to the woods, groves, hills and mountains, where they spend all night in pleasant pastimes; and in the morning they return, bringing with them birch and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withal. ... But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-Pole, which they have bring home with great veneration. ... They have twentie or fortie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweet nose-gay of flowers placed on the tip of his hornes, and these oxen drawe home this May-Pole (this stinking Ydol, rather), which is covered all over with floures and hearbs, bound round about with strings, from the top to the bottome, and sometime painted with variable coulours, with two or three hundred men, women and children following it with great devotion. And this being reared up ... then fall they to daunce about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols, wereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself. I have heard it credibly reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of forty, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over-night, there have scarcely the third of them returned home againe undefiled.'