8/22/2019 Mayday Mayhem
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Mayday Mayhem
Mayday celebrations are always associated with maypoles, maypole
dancing, and flower garlands, andthe quiet Essex market town of
Saffron Walden is no exception. But Saffron Walden was unusual as
in
the evening this gentle and picturesque tradition gave way to a
riotous celebration.
This was the game called Pig in the gutter (known locally as
piggetty-gutter) probably a relic ofolder May Day games, and
dancing round the may pole. It consisted of the inhabitants of
Castle Street
and other nearby roads congregating at a given spot and time,
joining hands and then forming a longline, rushing off through the
streets, yelling and shouting like a troop of wild Indians.
Castle Street at that time was a crowded working-class street in
which the poorest people of the town
lived, crammed into tiny houses grouped around small squares.
There are contemporary reports of
some families so poor that parents and children slept on straw.
But poverty could not break their spirit,and once a year, on
Mayday, they overturned the respectable rules of small town
life.
Writing in 1911, Frank Emson described the people gathering in
the evening. Headed by a merry oldsoul, Royal Moll, they danced
round the town hand in hand about 200 strong. When a Moll saw a
chance to suround a few persons she would lead on her tribe and
hem them in, not letting them go until
them had paid toll. The leaders were dressed in colours and
adorned with flowers, and the townspeopleturned out to see the
fun.
The colourful biography of Saffron Waldens socialist mayor,
Stanley Wilson, relates how: On theevening of May Day after the
garlands had faded and the Morris Dancers had finished their dances
and
jigs they adjourned to the Eight Bells for their annual feast of
beer bread and cheese. The townBandsmen went to The Hoops inn.
Then about one hundred and fifty men and boys in their
beribboned smocks and Sunday best clothes
and top hats would assemble at the top of Castle Street, borrow
a very long rope from Bill Beans, thetwine and ropemaker, and all
line up holding the rope in the gutter down the street.
Led by several men playing home-made wooden whistles (made from
hazel with a pea in it) and
beating pails, saucepans and frying pans, they ran through the
town entering every public house by thefront door and out at the
back door, each having a mouthful of free beer in each pub.
As crowds ran down Castle Street, High Street, Gold Street to
the Market Place, they would encircle
and catch as many people as possible on their way. The price of
release was a coin dropped into an oldtin can which went towards
more beer. Those with no money were kicked up the backside and
allowed to join on the end of the human snake. Boys loved to
join the gang and to drink strong beer -an initiation into manhood
wrote Stanley.
Both Wilson and Emson stress that the greatest good humour
prevailed throughout the evening. But
they were writing about a tradition suppressed in the middle of
the 19th century, within living memoryof the bread riots of 1795
and the Swing revolt in local villages in 1830. The respectable
and
wealthier members of the local community were just too
frightened to allow Mayday mayhem tocontinue - in case it became a
more serious challenge to social order.
Martyn Everett
Article originally published in the Walden Local (30 April
2008)
[Thanks to the anonymous librarians of nearly one hundred years
ago, for preserving some yellowing
newspaper cuttings in the local library, and to the late Stanley
Wilson for recording the local folkmemory of these events.]
