St John's Eve

On the Eve of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, as Thomas Hardy reminds us in The Woodlanders, the young men and maidens of rural country villages would rush out into the fields to - ahem - engage in some traditional midsummer activities. The normal way of things would seem to be that they'd keep this kind of things up, on and off, until such time as a couple had proven their fertility, at which point they would become abruptly married. Apart from the clergy, people don't seem to have thought this such an unusual way to go about things, and no particular blame would be attached to the blushing bride, as long as bride she became.

In some rural spots (Dunstable springs to mind) around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries it could happen that a young couple could have four or five children before they agreed upon what was causing it, and finally got wed. An interesting thought, given we consider the Victorians to have been a buttoned-up, hypocritical bunch. No, they were a church-destroying, colonising, smug, self-aggrandising, orphan-exploiting bunch. But it was really only the middle classes and above (of whom there were proportionally very few) that seem to have gone in for the hypocrisy. The lower classes (i.e. most people) seem to have been as cheerfully vulgar as they ever were or are. Hence the Victorian clergy and squirearchy's obsession with toning-down maypoles, sanitising Mummers and turning Morris Dancers into the rather sad spectacle we have today.

This St John's Eve, the Beaker Fertility Folk tell me they are not celebrating in their usual way - i.e. by leggint it into the woods. They say that running out in all weathers is playing havoc with their arthritis. Turns out even the Beaker Fertility Folk are a graying part of the population. So they're having a bridge evening and a quiet night in. The church ain't what it was.