The sweeps’ garland and Jack-in-the-green

May Day was the great festival of London’s chimney sweeps. Hone describes their garland as a tall cone of holly and ivy on hoops with a man walking unseen inside it, so that it looked like a moving hillock of greenery, with the sweeps in gilt paper and their faces reddened with Dutch pink. A tall Lord in a cocked hat and a Lady, usually a boy in a dress, danced a stately minuet that quickened into a jig, while the rest clattered shovel and brush and held out a ladle for money. Chambers, a generation later, calls the figure Jack-in-the-green and says the show was by then a poor one. Jack-in-the-green now goes out again in several towns.