The milkmaids’ garland

1 May · London

No longer kept

On May Day the London milkmaids went round their customers’ houses in their best clothes, dancing to a fiddle or pipe and tabor for the annual present. Chambers describes a garlanded cow led by dancing dairywomen, and an older fashion in which a man carried a pile of silver flagons and dishes set in flowers on his head. The silver was hired by the hour from pawnbrokers and passed from one group of milkmaids to the next. By the 1820s a verse in Hone was already mourning that the garlands no longer went.

the silver articles were regularly lent out for the purpose at so much an hour by pawnbrokers, and that one set would serve for a succession of groups of milk-maids during the day.

From Chambers's Book of Days, vol. 1, p. 573; Hone's Every-Day Book, vol. 1, col. 569. Read the original

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Folklore from the old calendars

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The milkmaids’ garland

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