f life and greenery
into the village. When this was forgotten, idleness or economy would
prompt the villagers to use the same tree or branch year after year. In
the villages of Upper Bavaria Dr. Frazer[13] tells us the maypole is
renewed once every three, four, or five years. It is a fir-tree fetched
from the forest, and amid all the wreaths, flags, and inscriptions with
which it is bedecked, an essential part is the bunch of dark green
foliage left at the top, "as a memento that in it we have to do, not
with a dead pole, but with a living tree from the greenwood."

At the ritual of May Day not only was the fresh green bough or tree
carried into the village, but with it came a girl or a boy, the Queen or
King of the May. Sometimes the tree itself, as in Russia, is dressed up
in woman's clothes; more often a real man or maid, covered with flowers
and greenery, walks with the tree or carries the bough. Thus in
Thuringia,[14] as soon as the trees begin to be green in spring, the
children assemble on a Sunday and go out into the woods, where they
choose one of their playmates to be Little Leaf Man. They break branches
from the trees and twine them about the child, till only his shoes are
left peeping out. Two of the other children lead him for fear he should
stumble. They take him singing and dancing from house to house, asking
for gifts of food, such as eggs, cream, sausages, cakes. Finally, they
sprinkle the Leaf Man with water and feast on the food. Such a Leaf Man
is our English Jack-in-the-Green, a chimney-sweeper who, as late as
1892, was seen by Dr. Rouse walking about at Cheltenham encased in a
wooden framework covered with greenery.

The bringing in of the new leafage in the form of a tree or flowers is
one, and perhaps the simplest, form of spring festival. It takes little
notice of death and winter, uttering and emphasizing only the desire for
the joy in life and spring. But in other and severer climates the
emotion is fiercer and more complex; it takes the form of a struggle or
contest, what the Greeks called an _agon_. Thus on May Day in the Isle
of Man a Queen of the May was chosen, and with her twenty maids of
honour, together with a troop of young men for escort. But there was not
only a Queen of the May, but a Queen of Winter, a man dressed as a
woman, loaded with warm clothes and wearing a woollen hood and fur
tippet. Winter, too, had attendants like the Queen of the May. The two
troops met and fought; an