Jack-in-the-Green

A Jack-in-the-Green is a man covered from head to foot in a mass of leaves fixed to a wooden conical frame seven or eight feet high, so that he looks like a walking column of greenery. In London and other large towns, chimney sweeps used to make such a Jack and escort him through the streets on May Day morning, together with other costumed figures, all dancing to a fiddle and drum. They hoped to be given beer and money for this performance. This urban custom dates from the late eighteenth century; it was quite widespread in Victorian times, but died out in the early twentieth century. In recent decades, however, there has been a strong revival of folk customs, and the Jack-in-the-Green appears once again at May Day festivals at Hastings, Oxford, Knutsford, Rochester and elsewhere.

In recent years, there have been Jack-in-the-Green pubs in Winchester (Hampshire) and Rockbeare (Devon), though their signs do not show the wholly leaf-covered mummer of the sweeps’ parade. Instead, it shows a young man whose jacket is decorated with tufts of leaves on the shoulders and at the waist, as is his hat; he carries a posy of flowers in one hand and a short pole topped with leaves and flowers in the other. This reflects a passage in William Hone’s Every-Day Book (1827) describing the Jacks he remembered seeing in Paddington in London, around 1800: ‘A Jack-o’-the-Green always carried a long walking stick with floral wreaths; he whisked it about in the dance and afterwards walked with it in high estate like a lord mayor’s footman.’

An earlier painting on the Rockbeare sign, mentioned by Leslie Dunkling and Gordon Wright in Pub Names of Britain, was of ‘a boy garlanded with ivy leaves’. It is a charming idea, but it misled these authors into assuming that it was normal for a sweep’s boy to take the central role, ‘concealed in a wooden framework covered with leaves and branches’ – on the contrary, a Jack needs a grown man to carry it, being far too heavy for a boy’s strength. Sweeps’ boys did accompany the parade, but only to make ‘music’ by clattering brushes and shovels, and to collect pennies from onlookers.

Jacqueline is the author of Green Men and White Swans, an enchanting guide to the stories and legends behind Britain's traditional pub names.