Seasonal festivals with one and the same intent—­the promotion of fertility in plants, animals and man—­may occur at almost any time of the year.  At midsummer, as we have seen, we may have rain-charms; in autumn we shall have harvest festivals; in late autumn and early winter among pastoral peoples we shall have festivals, like that of Martinmas, for the blessing and purification of flocks and herds when they come in from their summer pasture.  In midwinter there will be a Christmas festival to promote and protect the sun’s heat at the winter solstice.  But in Southern Europe, to which we mainly owe our drama and our art, the festival most widely celebrated, and that of which we know most, is the Spring Festival, and to that we must turn.  The spring is to the Greek of to-day the “anoixis,” “the Opening,” and it was in spring and with rites of spring that both Greek and Roman originally began their year.  It was this spring festival that gave to the Greek their god Dionysos and in part his drama.

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In Cambridge on May Day two or three puzzled and weary little boys and girls are still to be sometimes seen dragging round a perambulator with a doll on it bedecked with ribbons and a flower or two.  That is all that is left in most parts of England of the Queen of the May and Jack-in-the-Green, though here and there a maypole survives and is resuscitated by enthusiasts about folk-dances.  But in the days of “Good Queen Bess” merry England, it would seem, was lustier.  The Puritan Stubbs, in his Anatomie of Abuses,[11] thus describes the festival: 

“They have twentie or fortie yoke of oxen, every oxe havyng a sweete nosegaie of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these oxen draw home this Maiepoole (this stinckying idoll rather), which is covered all over with flowers and hearbes, bound round aboute with stringes from the top to the bottome, and sometyme painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women, and children, following it with great devotion.  And thus beyng reared up, with handkerchiefes and flagges streaming on the toppe, they strewe the ground about, binde greene boughs about it, set up summer haules, bowers, and arbours hard by it.  And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leap and daunce aboute it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this is a perfect patterne or rather the thyng itself.”

The stern old Puritan was right, the maypole was the perfect pattern of a heathen “idoll, or rather the thyng itself.”  He would have exterminated it root and branch, but other and perhaps wiser divines took the maypole into the service of the Christian Church, and still[12] on May Day in Saffron Walden the spring song is heard with its Christian moral—­

    “A branch of May we have brought you,
      And at your door it stands;
    It is a sprout that is well budded out,
      The work of our Lord’s hands.”