At the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on Tuesday 17 March, Dr Sarah Wride of the University of York and the Institute of Historical Research, will be discussing the political memory of medieval parliaments in debates about parliamentary reform between 1769 and 1886.

The seminar takes place on 17 March 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

One thing not up for debate in the current programme of local government reorganisation is the election cycle. Elections for the new combined and unitary authorities, as for parish and town councils, will take place in May every four years.

The 1972-73 Local Government Acts specified that polls should be ‘on such day in the month of March, April or May as the council may fix’ for England and Wales. For Scotland, the legislation specified ‘the first Tuesday in May’. The ‘first Thursday in May’ became the chosen day nationwide in 2013. Earlier statutes had already nudged polls in this direction. The 1948 Representation of the People Act and the 1962 Election Law Act (Northern Ireland) mandated May (or June) polls for all councils, except county councils in England and Wales.

These statutes certainly offer an explanation for why two recent satirical cartoons (two of many) feature May Day practices. Rob Murray’s follow-up to the 2 May 2024 local elections, featured in the Telegraph four days later, records the Conservative Party’s heavy losses. In the cartoon, a blue candy-striped maypole trimmed with rosettes is sending out ribbons to grab and pinion Rishi Sunak and his cabinet: Sunak is pinned flush to the maypole, while Michael Gove lies supine in the grass, both completely immobilised.

But it is Jeremy Corbyn who lets out a distress call from his sinking ship in Martin Rowson’s ‘Mayday!!’, produced in the lead-up to the 5 May 2016 local elections. In the foreground of the cartoon – circling a maypole, each holding a blue ribbon – merrily dance (or collapse) Zac Goldmith, Jeremy Hunt, and Nicky Morgan.

The same logic undoubtedly holds for Graham Water’s 2010 portrayal of Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Nick Clegg, which was published one day before the 6 May 2010 general election. In the drawing, they grasp colour-coded ribbons labelled ‘ECONOMY’, ‘UNEMPLOYMENT’, and ‘IMMIGRATION’ as they skip around a Union Jack-topped maypole. This example is, however, more unusual.

33.3% of general elections held since 1970 have taken place in May. While they can now be scheduled for any month within five years of a parliament first meeting, the 2011 Fixed-Term Parliaments Act – which was repealed in 2022 – briefly designated the ‘first Thursday in May’ as the default polling day. Even then the provision kicked in only for the first, first Thursday of May after five years (7 May 2015). This did not apply in later years as the elections of June 2017 and December 2019 were called early.

Before 2011 no statute regulated the specific day(s) or month(s) as to when polling should take place, and polling was not fixed to a single day until 1918. As a result, the proportion of general election polls that happened on a date during or throughout May since 1715 fluctuates: 43.5% between 1715 and 1831; 5% (or just one election) between 1832 and 1910; and 14.3% between 1918 and 1966.

How, then, can we account for the other examples of electoral visual culture that have drawn from May Day traditions, from William Dent’s ‘The Countryman’s Dream of Coalescing Virtue and Vice’ (20 March 1784) to Leslie Illingworth’s ‘Round the July Poll’ (4 July 1945)?

International Workers’ Day was proclaimed by Second International to commemorate, first, American strike action that began on 1 May 1886 in support of an eight-hour working day, and, second, the demonstration in Chicago on day 4 at which an unknown person detonated a dynamite bomb. 1 May was appropriated by socialist organisations, trade unions, and the Independent Labour Party in Britain from 1890 as an annual opportunity for activism. May Day traditions (including maypole dancing) featured in iconography, most famously by Walter Crane, and were practised by these organisations.

For the historian Ronald Hutton, this development only by ‘fortuitous coincidence’ went hand-in-hand with a shift during the mid-nineteenth century in why May Day traditions were re-introduced or invented. To paraphrase Hutton, a May Day that had previously reinforced socio-economic inequality gave way to a May Day that reaffirmed people power from the bottom-up. If so many of the satires predate even 1886, can whatever was behind Hutton’s shift hold the answer?  

A crucial clue may be found in a much earlier text: the Leges Edwardi Confessoris, a twelfth-century record of the laws in force under Edward the Confessor – one (as John Hudson diplomatically puts it) ‘only occasionally … based on written texts’. Among its claims is that a folkmote – a gathering of ‘all the people’ – could be summoned to address national emergencies and should meet annually ‘in the beginning of the Kalends of May’, that is, on 1 May, for citizens to swear to act in defence of their country and king.  

Henry Spelman’s repackaging of this (and other) claim(s) in his glossary Archæologus (1626) was an important source for David Williams, who from 1782 viewed the folkmote as a model for contemporary parliaments. Williams’s folkmote was a direct – and later representative – democratic body that scrutinized Anglo-Saxon kings and their nobles.

A version of his thesis was popularised from 1793 by Joseph Gerrald and Henry Redhead Yorke, leaders of the radical London Corresponding Society and Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information. They sought in the folkmote a legal precedent for an alternative House of Commons: a body elected directly by all men. Or, in Gerrald’s words, ‘the great body of the people themselves’ must ‘elec[t] deputies in whom they can confide, and impar[t] instructions which they must injoin to be executed’. Such an assembly, it was argued, would compel Parliament to heal itself.

The detail that the folkmote supposedly met on 1 May was not addressed by Williams. Yet, in 1795, his source was sufficiently recognisable for William Cobbett to poke fun at the idea of ‘the eight millions of people who inhabit Great Britain … assembl[ing] every May-day … on Salisbury plain, to settle the affairs of the nation!’.

That the folkmote, so understood, remained a persistent feature of parliamentary reform debates until as late as 1886 suggests this post has been asking the wrong question. The key question is not why satirists used May Day traditions to depict elections at all, but why they did so only for some of them. Were these the moments when arguments over who constituted ‘the people’ – and over the relationship between that body, the electorate, and MPs – came most sharply into view? And, if so, how might we make sense of political satirists’ interest in May Day traditions beyond the context of elections?

Sarah’s seminar takes place on 17 March 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

SW

Further Reading

W. Cobbett, Part II. A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats (1795)

J. Gerrald, A Convention the Only Means of Saving Us from Ruin (1793)

J. Hudson, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vol. 2 (2012)

R. Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996)