Page:Elizabethan People.djvu/203

 all over with flowers and hearbes, bound round with strings from the top to the bottome, and sometimes it was painted with variable colours, having two or three hundred men, women, and children following it with great devotion. And thus equipped it was reared with handkerchiefs and flags streaming on the top, they straw the ground round about it, they bind green boughs about it, they set up summer halles, bowers, and arbours hard by it, and then fall they to banquetting and feasting, to leaping and dancing about it, as the heathen people did about their idols."

It was also a custom of the time to deck the doors and porches with green sycamore and hawthorn boughs brought in with the May-pole. The habit of painting the May-pole in spiral lines of different bright colours, mentioned above, is also alluded to in A Midsummer Night's Dream where Hermia calls Helena a painted May-pole.

But the sport par excellence connected with the May-day revels was the morris-dance. "About the commencement of the sixteenth century, or somewhat sooner, probably towards the middle of the fifteenth century, a very material addition was made to the celebration of the rites of Mayday, by the introduction of Robin Hood and some of his associates, This was done with a view