We next come to the May Day festivities, which in many respects {242} may be regarded as the most joyous and picturesque of all the year. Without staying to inquire whether the origin of the festival is to be traced to the old Roman Floralia, or games in honour of the goddess who ushered in the spring and strewed the earth with flowers, let us pause for a while to contemplate the old ceremony of “bringing home the May,” as it was performed some few centuries ago. On May Day morning the inhabitants of every village would go out at an early hour into the fields to gather garlands of hawthorn blossom and other flowers, with which they decorated the May-pole and every door and window of the village. These floral trophies were brought home to the tune of pipe and drum; the fairest maid in all the hamlet was crowned with flowers as Queen of the May, and, embowered in hawthorn branches, presided over the mirth and feasting of the day. Stubbe, in his _Anatomy of Abuses_ (1585), describes the ceremony of raising the May-pole, in language which gives some notion of the pretty scene, and which is all the more likely not to be overdrawn, from the evident abhorrence of the writer to what he regarded as the impiety of the whole affair. “They have twenty or fourtie yoke of oxen,” he writes, “every one having a sweet nosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these oxen draw home this Maie pole (this stinckyng Idoll rather) which is couered all ouer with flowers and hearbes bounde rounde aboute with stringes, from the top to the bottome, and sometyme painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred women and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up with handkerchiefs and flagges streaming on the toppe they strowe the grounde aboute, binde green boughes aboute it, sett up sommer houses, Bowers and Arbours hard by it. And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leape and daunce aboute it, as the Heathen people did at the dedication of their Idolles, whereof this is a perfect pattern or rather the thing itself.” The May-pole once raised, of course the next thing to be done was to pour a libation in honour of the day, and in most cases this would, equally of course, be performed with the ale of Old England. The May-pole is up, Now give me the cup, I’ll drink to the garlands around it, But first unto those, Whose hands did compose, The glory of flowers that crown’d it. {243} In olden days even the King and Queen condescended to mingle with their lieges, and to assist in commemorating the time-honoured custom. Chaucer, in his _Court of Love_, describes how on May Day, “Forth goeth all the Court both most and least, to fetch the flowers fresh.” Spenser, in his _Shepherd’s Calendar_, thus describes the May Day festival of Elizabethan times:—