Folk Festivals

Folk Festivals, seasonal celebrations connected with the activities of the agricultural year, particularly seed-time and harvest. They appear to date from the first organized communities and vary considerably in form. Some consist merely of a processional dance, as in the morris dance. In England the simpler forms of folk festival were connected with Plough Monday (the first Monday after Twelfth Night); May-Day (1 May), with its sports, Maypole, May Queen, and Robin Hood play; Midsummer Day (24 June), with its fires derived from the Celtic festival of Beltane; and Harvest Home, which celebrated the final gathering into barns of the year's grain harvest. Such festivals as these, found all over Europe, survived the rise and fall of Greece and Rome and the coming of Christianity, although the Church, considering them an undesirable pagan survival, tried either to suppress them or to graft them on to its own festivals. Wandering minstrels or other nomadic entertainers may have influenced them, but in the main they relied on local talent. The most elaborate form of folk festival is the mumming play.