Green birch on the sign-posts at Little Brickhill

The herbalist William Coles remembered riding through Little Brickhill, a town on the London road between Dunstable and Stony Stratford, and finding nearly every sign-post decked with green birch. Brand took it to have been done for Midsummer Eve, when birch boughs were set up at doors; the London churchwardens’ accounts regularly paid for birch at Midsummer. In the fifteenth century Bishop Pecock wrote of country people bringing branches from the Bishop’s wood and flowers from the fields into London on Midsummer Eve, for the citizens to deck their houses in memory of St John the Baptist.