One certainly agrees with Mr. Aubrey.  Thorns are slow to grow, hard to transplant, and very lovely when they are old.  It is not to be regretted that such ruthless destruction of them has gone out of fashion.

In Ireland “tall slender trees” seem to have been set up before the doors, as well as “a green bush, strewed over with yellow flowers, which the meadows yield plentifully.”  A writer, speaking of this in 1682, adds, “A stranger would go nigh to imagine that they were all signs of ale-sellers, and that all houses were ale-houses,” referring to the old custom of a bunch of green as the sign of an inn, which is illustrated by the proverb, “Good wine needs no bush.”  I have an old etching of a river-side inn, in which the sign is a garland hanging on a pole.

I fancy the yellow flowers must have been cowslips, which the green fields of Erin do indeed “yield plentifully.”

Besides these private May-trees, every village had its common Maypole, gaily adorned with wreaths and flags and ribbons, and sometimes painted in spiral lines of colour.  The Welsh Maypoles seem to have been made from birch-trees, elms were used in Cornwall, and young oaks in other parts of England.  Round these Maypoles the young villagers danced, and green booths were often set up on the grass near them.

In many villages the Maypole was as much a fixture as the parish stocks, but when a new one was required, it was brought home on May-eve in grand procession with songs and instrumental music.  I am afraid there is a good deal of evidence to show that the Maypoles were not always honestly come by!  However, the Puritan writers (from whose bitter and detailed complaints we learn most of what we know about the early English May-day customs) are certainly prejudiced, and perhaps not quite trustworthy witnesses.  One good man groans lamentably:  “What adoe make our young men at the time of May?  Do they not use night watchings to rob and steale young trees out of other men’s grounde, and bring them into their parishe, with minstrels playing before?”

But as the theft must have been committed with all the publicity that a fixed day, a large crowd, and a full band could ensure, and as we seem to have no record of interference at the time, or prosecutions afterwards, I hope we may infer that the owners of the woods did not grudge one tree for the village Maypole.  A quainter vengeance seems to have sometimes followed the trespass.  Honesty was at a discount.  What had been once stolen was liable to be re-stolen.  There seems to have been great rivalry among the villages as to which had the best Maypole.  The happy parish which could boast the finest was not left at ease in its supremacy, for the lads of the other villages were always on the watch to steal it.  A record of this custom amongst the Welsh reminds one that Wales was at once the land of bards and the home of Taffy the Thief.  “If successful,” says Owen, speaking of these Maypole robbers, they “had their feats recorded in songs.”