WAKING JACK-IN-THE-GREEN
WH&V Morris on Bluebell Hill (by Tony Martin)
At dawn, the Morris dancers come
with sticks, and bells, and beating drums
to wake the light. May morning,
and the Beltane fires leap within the heart.
The Morris circles round a living bush
that stirs out, now, from its long slumber
to walk the path along the hill's crest.
Those lines were written a few years ago – before the covid pandemic, and lockdowns – as part of a poem sequence I was commissioned to write. The particular scene references a ceremony that's taken place at dawn on the morning of May 1st for around the last forty years, the “Waking of Jack-in-the-Green” when Morris dancers welcome the ritual beginning of summer by dancing around a six-foot-tall walking bush. The hill that's mentioned, the venue for the annual event, is Bluebell Hill, a local landmark here in North Kent.
The current Jack-in-the-Green is a modern iteration, but belongs to an older tradition of “green beings” that populate English folk custom. Jack-in-the-Green himself emerged as a tradition in the eighteenth century, becoming closely associated with chimney sweeps and their May Day celebrations. The serious research indicates that he originated from a custom that milkmaids had of carrying milk pails, festooned with flowers, other foliage and objects in pyramid fashion on their heads in processions, hence Jack's usually conical body shape. The walking bush, of course, is carried by the person inside it and it isn't unknown, now as in the past, for Jack's progress to become more unsteady as he consumes more beer.
Jack has cousins in other parts of Britain and across Europe, taking a wide array of forms and associated with various points in the year's cycle. The Burryman appears in mid-August, in the village of South Queensferry near Edinburgh, and may be the lone survivor of a much wider Scottish tradition. The Whittlesea Straw Bear is a creature of the English fenlands, emerging to roam the streets of Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, in mid-January at the traditional start of the agricultural year. Other Straw Bears and Straw Men are fairly common figures further afield, especially through Central Europe, associated with significant calendar dates right through the year and possibly a survival of customs connected to the Wildfolk dating back to the Middle Ages at least. Photographer Charles Fréger's marvellous 2012 book Wilder Mann gathers images of many such figures (including one of me, dressed in my Morris kit, up on Bluebell Hill a few years ago!).
Also due a mention in this context is the related tradition of “folk beasts”, such as the hooden horses of Kent, the Mari Lwyd in Wales, and Cornwall's Obby Osses – but more on those in a future article...
Jack-in-the-Green on Bluebell Hill (by Neil Winn-Williams)
In England, at least, these traditions are revivals, or perhaps they could be described better as restorations, having mostly died out by the early part of the twentieth century. There were many reasons for their extinction, including the decline of agricultural communities and, notably, the slaughterhouse of the First World War. Morris dancing, for instance, only survived at all due to the involvement of women. Most folk traditions in England remained a guttering flame until a first wave of revival in the late 1950s, when interest in folk song and music was strongly influenced by socialist interest in working-class history and culture. A second revival came in the 1970s, when Morris dancing in particular began to rise from its own almost-ashes and new Morris sides (side being the traditional term for a Morris dancing group) emerged and the traditions of the Border Morris style, in particular, reappeared and rapidly grew in popularity.
The Bluebell Hill awakening ceremony may be considered a recent invention – although I feel that four decades of observance could well make it qualify as a tradition, by now – but its roots run deeper, as is the case with so much folk tradition. Bluebell Hill looms over the Medway river valley and a network of ancient megaliths that includes Kits Coty and the Countless Stones, and the White Horse Stone. The hill itself has some literary associations with imaginary magic, at least. Edith Nesbit, an Edwardian writer most famously of classic children's stories such as The Railway Children, regularly holidayed in a capacious house on Bluebell Hill and it became the setting for Five Children and It; the psammead, or sand fairy, at the heart of that novel lived in one of the old chalk pits that still pepper the hill's steep southward slopes.
Bluebell Hill is also the location of the modern local crematorium, and a nature reserve providing a home for some threatened plant species along with plenty of butterflies and other insects, reptiles and small mammals. A section of the North Downs Way walking route runs along the hill, while at its foot runs the Pilgrims' Way, an ancient trackway that has been in use since neolithic times. There are archaeological records of burial chambers that once stood on the hill, too, and of a Roman site at which human remains were uncovered. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that Bluebell Hill is quite notorious for sightings of ghosts and elusive black panthers.
The association of high places with the dead and with the ancestors seems to be ancient, even instinctive. Funerary sites in the British Isles, at least, are often situated on hilltops. From the Early Neolithic long barrow at West Kennet in Wiltshire, through the Iron Age to the Anglo-Saxon burials at Spong Hill in Norfolk, the connection appears to have been quite continuous. In the case of Bluebell Hill, that thread might even be stretched to include the modern crematorium. But the Medway Megaliths in their heyday are thought to have been a network that bore some comparison to more famous places such as Stonehenge and Avebury. And as with those sites, the relationship between life, death and the ancestors seems to have been regarded as an interweaving rather than as a separation.
This year, the Waking of Jack-in-the-Green touched on that theme again. Jack himself represents new life and the fertility of field and forest. However, those of us who dance as members of Wolf's Head and Vixen Morris had reason to mark the other side of the balance. One of our dancers had passed away in mid-December; and given that his first dance with us had been at the same ceremony some years earlier it seemed only fitting that this year it should be the place for his last appearance with us too. So his hat and gloves were laid at the centre of the space while we danced. It was a surprisingly emotional moment. And it was a moment that encapsulated, I think, in the most appropriate context, the whole history and spirit of the place.
Philip Kane
By Grace Sanchez
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).