Nature Watch, with Ron Freethy

NOW that we are into April it is time I started looking forward to May.

May is said to be the time to celebrate summer and it is also the time that the hawthorn looks at its best. Or is it? Did our ancestors make a mistake in calling it the May Tree?

Until the year 1752 in Merrie England all was correct and the May Queen could be decorated with the milky white hawthorn blossom. But not now. What went wrong?

The ancient church calendar was drawn up in the firm belief that the year consisted exactly of 365.25 days. It was then discovered that this was nearly 12 minutes too much.

Roughly speaking this amounted to one day in a period of every 129 years. Because of this error Pope Gregory the 13th in 1582 decided to put things right. He destroyed the old calendar and decreed that to correct the calculations October 5 should become October 15. This caused riots because some people got mad at the Pope for pinching 10 days out of their life.

In England, however, the seasons continued to be out of line because Henry VIII fell out with the Pope and Elizabeth I had no intention of listening to Rome. Britain remained out of step until 1752. This means that the old May Day of medieval England now falls 12 days earlier than it used to. No wonder the poor May Queens and their attendants shiver on May 1 and there is not a decent bunch of May blossoms to be had at any price!

The ancient Greeks thought that the hawthorn was a sign of hope and the Romans carried a burning sprig of the tree in front of a wedding party.

In France it was believed that the hawthorn groans each Good Friday and this signifies a storm is brewing. Countryfolk believed a sprig of hawthorn protected them from being struck by lightning.

As a youngster in the Lake District we called hawthorn leaves "Bread and Cheese". This dates back to the custom when children gathered the May blossom and hung it on cottage doors. They were rewarded for their efforts by being given bread and cheese.

Over the next few weeks I would like readers to send in their memories of fact, fiction and folklore.

In June we can celebrate the history of the May Tree now wrongly named since the Pope pinched nearly a fortnight off the Merry Month of May!

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.