Widdington's May singers  Essex in 1950 C Henry Warren.
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The Epping Hunt and the Fairlop Fair are Essex customs that have achieved some notoriety: my own preference is rather for the local customs of a simpler, quieter kind. I like to know, for instance, that the villagers of Purleigh used to greet the May dawn with a hymn sung from the tower of the church. I like to hear how in Rochford they held a cockcrow manorial court where the proceedings were conducted in a whisper and the minutes were written with a piece of coal. There is more than whimsy in such things. They are like those fragments of stained glass, vivid and broken and often unintelligible in their present isolation, that are all some village churches have been able to save from the wild glory of picture and colour that shone in their church windows centuries ago. They are the shreds and patches of our island history, and some of them date so far back there is no knowing when they were fresh and ordinary as the daily task. Such, for instance, was the practice in the Saffron Walden district of carrying round May Day garlands in the middle of which was a doll. I know this was done in the little cul-de-sac village of Widdington until the first world war — the date, by the way, when most old rural customs, however tenacious, were dropped. The villagers did not realise that without a doubt their garlanded dolls were intended as representations of the Virgin Mary (“it was just what we always did”) and that their flowery display was therefore a curiously surviving instance of how the Church, in her wisdom, gave the old pagan rite a Christian twist. In the same village the gleaning bell was run as recently as 1912 — as in other Essex villages. For his services in ringing that bell, before the sounding of which nobody might go into the stubble fields and glean, the sexton was rewarded by a collection made among the gleaners, every gleaner contributing a few pence. The bell was rung again in the evening, after which, with sacks and prams and crying children, the gleaners all trooped home.

The May Singers
Daphne Bridgeman (nee Stalley) March 1989
I was born in Widdington in 1931 and lived there until I married in 1955 but came back regularly to visit my mother until she died in 1979.  I still come to the Churchyard to see the graves of my father and mother – James Alfred Stalley and Queenie May Stalley.
…. I was one of the May Singers during the war, and shall never forget the excitement of getting up early to start the singing before we went to school, then again in the dinner break and we finished our visits to every house in the village when we came out of school.  Of course there were not so many houses then.  I don’t know what the doll in the hoop represented.  My Aunt Doris, most years, did the hoops and we made our own crossed.  These were two pieces of wood nailed together, back of which was covered with greenery.  We picked bluebells, paigles (oxlips), cowslips and cuckoos (purple orchids) and made these into small bunches which were tired to the front of the cross.  Later my brother and sister went May Singing… The song was sang went like this:

I’ve been a rambling all this night
And sometimes of this day
And now returning back again
I’ve brought you a branch of May.
A branch of May, my dear I say,
Before your door I stand
Tis but a sprout, but its well budded out
By the works of our Lords hand
The hedges and the fields so green
As green as any leaf
Our heavenly Father watered them
With his heavenly dew so sweet.
And now my song is almost done
I can no longer stay
God bless you all both great and small
I wish you a joyful May.
This is a bit different to that printed in the magazine but it’s imprinted on my mind lie the ABC and my sister remembers my version.
We also remember the tune! I used to live in the house next to Florus House by the Green and I think Mrs Brookman lives there now.

   Daphne Bridgeman (nee Stalley) March 1989