Jack-in-the-Green: The May Day Figure Walked Through the Parish

Jack-in-the-Green is a figure covered head-to-foot in greenery, walked through the parish on May Day or the May Bank Holiday weekend. The Jack itself is a wicker or wooden pyramid, taller than the wearer, draped in foliage cut the night before; the wearer is hidden inside. The procession around it includes musicians, dancers, often a Lord and Lady of the May, and increasingly a green-painted crowd. The custom was nearly extinct by 1900. It was revived from one town in 1983, and now runs in several.

What Jack-in-the-Green is

The Jack is a frame, usually conical or pyramidal, made of withies, willow, or wood and built up to a height of seven or eight feet. Fresh greenery is fixed to the frame the night before the procession: hawthorn, beech, ivy, sometimes rowan, sometimes a layer of bluebells across the top. The wearer takes the weight on the shoulders and walks inside it, peering out through a slot or a gap in the foliage. The procession around the Jack is the visible part of the custom; the wearer is invisible, anonymous, sometimes changed at intervals during the day so that no single person is exhausted.

The route varies by town, but the structure is consistent. The Jack starts at one end of the parish, walks through the main streets, attracts the procession behind it, and ends at the central open space, usually the village green or the market square. At the end of the day, in some revivals, the Jack is symbolically "slain": the foliage stripped from the frame, the wearer revealed, the spirit of summer formally released.

An eighteenth-century origin

The custom is younger than the look of it suggests. Roy Judge's The Jack-in-the-Green: A May Day Custom (1979) is the standard study, and Judge's research dates the recognisable Jack to mid-eighteenth-century London. The starting point was the milkmaids' garlands: on May Day, London milkmaids carried garlands of flowers and ribbons through the streets, collecting coins from passers-by. The garlands grew larger over time, and by the 1770s some were being carried on porters' heads, then on frames, then on full-body Jack structures.

The chimney sweeps adopted the Jack from the milkmaids in the late eighteenth century, partly because May Day was traditionally the sweeps' one annual holiday, and partly because the Jack was a useful collecting vehicle: the wearer was hidden, the procession demanded attention, and the coins could be gathered into the foliage. By the early nineteenth century the Jack was associated more with the sweeps than with the milkmaids, and the milkmaids' garlands had faded.

The image of a wholly pre-Christian Green Man surviving in modern dress, much loved by twentieth-century folklorists, does not match the documentary record. The Jack is a Georgian invention. What is older, and what the Jack draws on, is the much wider European tradition of May greenery: the bringing-in of branches, the dressing of doorways, the maying of houses, which is genuinely ancient.

Victorian decline

By the 1850s the Jack-in-the-Green was already in retreat. The sweeps' processions were declining as chimney sweeping moved from boy apprentices to mechanical brushes; the urban character of the custom did not survive the breaking-up of the trades. By 1900 only a handful of provincial Jacks were still running, and most of those quietly ended within a generation.

The custom became, for a while, a memory. It appears in Edwardian folk-revival writing as a survival from "ancient times," already half-mythologised; it appears in Mass Observation reports in the 1930s as something one or two old people had seen in childhood. The Jack itself was largely gone from English streets between 1914 and 1980.

The Hastings revival, 1983

The modern revival of Jack-in-the-Green in England began on the Kent coast: Whitstable in 1976, Rochester in 1980. Hastings on the East Sussex coast followed in 1983, when a group of local Morris dancers and folk musicians put a Jack back on the streets on May Day Bank Holiday Monday. The procession was small the first year. It is now the largest English Jack-in-the-Green procession, drawing several thousand people each May, the streets of the Old Town filled with green-painted faces, drumming, dancing, and the Jack at the front.

The Hastings Jack runs over a four-day weekend in early May. The principal procession is on Bank Holiday Monday morning, starting at the seafront and climbing the West Hill to the slaying of the Jack at the top, with views over the town and the Channel beyond. The event is organised by Hastings Borough Council and Mad Jack's Morris, and is now part of the recognised English folk calendar.

Other surviving towns

Outside Hastings, several other Jacks are now established. Knutsford in Cheshire runs a May Day Royal procession with its own Jack-related custom, said to be the oldest continual annual Jack in the country. Whitstable and Rochester continue their Sweeps Festival processions on the same May Day weekend, drawing on the chimney-sweep ancestry of the custom. Smaller revivals run in Deptford, Bristol, Oxford, and elsewhere, with new ones appearing every few years as local groups take the work on.

If you want to see one this year, Hastings is the largest and best-organised; Rochester is the most atmospheric in terms of period costume; Knutsford is the longest-running with a continuous local tradition.

Sources: Roy Judge, The Jack-in-the-Green: A May Day Custom (1979); Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun (1996); Hastings Jack in the Green (hastingsjack.co.uk); Folklore Society.