a heathen "idoll, or rather the thyng itself." He would have
exterminated it root and branch, but other and perhaps wiser divines
took the maypole into the service of the Christian Church, and still[12]
on May Day in Saffron Walden the spring song is heard with its Christian
moral--

"A branch of May we have brought you,
And at your door it stands;
It is a sprout that is well budded out,
The work of our Lord's hands."

The maypole was of course at first no pole cut down and dried. The gist
of it was that it should be a "sprout, well budded out." The object of
carrying in the May was to bring the very spirit of 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