It is probable that some of our May-day customs came from the Romans, who kept the festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers, at this season.  Others, perhaps, have a different, if not an older source.  One custom was certainly common to both nations.  When the feast of Flora was celebrated, the young Romans went into the woods and brought back green boughs with which they decked the houses.

To “go a-Maying” is in fact the principal ceremony of the day wherever kept, and for whatever reason.  In the north of England children and young folk “were wont to rise a little after midnight on the morning of May-day, and walk to some neighbouring wood accompanied with music and the blowing of horns, where they broke down branches from the trees, and adorned them with nosegays and crowns of flowers.  This done, they returned homewards with their booty about the time of sunrise, and made their doors and windows triumph in the flowery spoil.”  Stubbs, in the Anatomie of Abuses (A.D. 1585), speaks of this custom as common to “every parish, town, and village.”  The churches, as well as the houses, seem in some places to have been dressed with flowers and greenery.

In an old MS. of the sixteenth century it is said that on the feast of SS.  Philip and James, the Eton boys were allowed to go out at four o’clock in the morning to gather May to dress their rooms, and sweet herbs to perfume them, “if they can do it without wetting their feet!”

Thirty or forty years ago May-day decorations, in some country places, consisted of strewing the cottage doorsteps with daisies, or other flowers.

In Hertfordshire a curious custom obtained of decking the neighbours’ doors with May if they were popular, and with nettles if they were the reverse.

In Lancashire rustic wags put boughs of various trees at the doors of the girls of the neighbourhood.  Each tree had a meaning (well known in the district), sometimes complimentary, and sometimes the reverse.

In France it was customary for lovers to deck over-night the houses of the ladies they wished to please, and school-boys paid a like compliment to their masters.  They do not seem, however, to have been satisfied with nosegays or even with green branches; they transplanted young trees from the woods to the side of the door they wished to honour, and then decked them with ribbons, &c.  There is a curious record that “Henry II., wishing to recompense the clerks of Bazoche for their good services in quelling an insurrection in Guienne, offered them money; but they would only accept the permission granted them by the king, of cutting in the royal woods such trees as they might choose for the planting of the May—­a privilege which existed at the commencement of the French Revolution.”  In Cornwall, too, it seems to have been the custom to plant “stumps of trees” before the houses, as well as to decorate them with boughs and blossoms.  And Mr. Aubrey (1686) says, “At Woodstock in Oxon they every May-eve goe into the parke, and fetch away a number of haw-thorne-trees, which they set before their dores; ’tis a pity that they make such a destruction of so fine a tree.”