Plow Monday, the day on which work was resumed, and the first day of labor also was marked by a feast.
Forget not the feasts that belong to the plow,”
says old Tusser, in his quaint rural poems.[1] The spindle also had its festival. The harvest feast was one of equality, and an avowal, as it were, of those mutual necessities which bring men into union. On that day, masters and servants collected round the same table, and, mingling in the same conversation, did not appear to be brought into contact with each other by the complaisance of a superior desirous of rewarding his inferior, but by an equal right to the pleasures of the day:
Are guests by right of custom—old and young;
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Here once a year distinction low’rs its crest,
The master, servant, and the merry guest,
Are equal all; and round the happy ring
The reaper’s eyes exulting glances fling,
And, warm’d with gratitude, he quits his place,
With sun-burn’d hands and ale-enliven’d face,
Refills the jug his honor’d host to tend,
To serve at once the master and the friend;
Proud thus to meet his smiles, to share his tale,
His nuts, his conversation, and his ale.
Such were the days—of days long past I sing.’’[2]
Sowing-time, sheep-shearing, indeed, every epoch of interest in rural life, was celebrated by similar meetings—and banquets, and by games of all kinds. But what day could equal the first of May, brilliant with the joys of
- ↑ Thomas Tusser, a poet of the sixteenth century, was born about 1515, and died in 1583. He was the author of some English Georgics, under the title of “Five hundreth points of good husbandry, united to as many of good huswifery.”
- ↑ Bloomfield’s “Farmer’s Boy,” p. 40, ed 1845.
