Maypole dancing is done around a tall pole hung with ribbons. Dancers each take a ribbon and move in opposite directions, weaving in and out of each other, until the ribbons are plaited into a pattern down the pole. Then they reverse and unwind it.
The Victorian ribbons
The plaited-ribbon version everyone pictures is not the old tradition. Maypoles are recorded in England from at least the fourteenth century, and what happened around them was straightforward dancing around a decorated tree or pole, with garlands and greenery.
The ribbon weaving was introduced in the nineteenth century. John Ruskin is generally credited with importing it, having seen something similar in Italy, and it was taken up by teacher training colleges and spread rapidly through the new elementary schools.
This is a common pattern in British folk custom: a genuinely old practice given a tidy, decorous Victorian form and then assumed to be medieval.
The Puritan ban
Maypoles were suppressed by Parliament in 1644, during the Civil War, as relics of pagan superstition and occasions of drunkenness and immorality — which, on the contemporary evidence, they frequently were. One Puritan writer complained that a substantial proportion of girls who went to the woods to gather greenery on May Eve did not come back in the state they left.
The poles came down across the country. At the Restoration in 1660 they went straight back up, and a famously enormous one — over 130 feet — was erected in the Strand in London, which stood for around fifty years.
What it means
The obvious interpretation — a tall pole, spring, fertility — is the one usually offered, and it is not baseless, but it is worth noting that no medieval source says so. The explicit fertility reading is largely a Victorian and later anthropological gloss on a custom whose participants have left no explanation of their own.
What the records actually show is a village raising a decorated pole, dancing around it, drinking, and having a good time in the first properly warm weather of the year, which needs no deeper theory.
Where it survives
Mainly in two places:
- Primary schools, where it is taught and performed on May Day or at summer fairs. A great many British adults learned it aged eight and remember chiefly that somebody always went the wrong way.
- Village fêtes and May Day celebrations, frequently alongside a May Queen and morris dancing.
Permanent maypoles stand in a number of English villages and are repainted and re-ribboned each spring. Barwick-in-Elmet in Yorkshire has one of the tallest, around 86 feet, taken down and re-raised by the village every three years in a ceremony that draws a considerable crowd.
The going wrong
Worth saying plainly: the plaiting is genuinely difficult. It requires every dancer to alternate correctly, and one person going the wrong way produces a tangle that cannot be unwound. Anyone who has watched a school maypole display knows that this happens roughly half the time, and that it is the best part.