East Budleigh's maypole, Thomas Morton and Merrymount
It’s not so long ago that the tradition of maypole dancing was revived in East Budleigh. An ancient English tradition which Roger Conant’s family would have enjoyed? Unlikely. In the increasingly puritanical England of the 1640s, maypoles were condemned by the Long Parliament as ‘a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’, and were banned outright, along with Christmas and other ‘ungodly’ practices. Well before then, Roger would have had problems had he tried to introduce it in New England at the settlement of Naumkeag, later to become Salem. With the arrival of Governor John Endicott and ‘godly’ Puritans in Naumkeag in 1628, such ‘pagan’ practices were viewed with horror. Shocking news was received by Puritan leaders around that time of May Day events taking place just over 20 miles away from Plymouth Colony, in the settlement once called Merrymount and now known as the town of Quincy. Governor William Bradford in his History of Pl...
