Why is Oak Apple Day being celebrated?

All together now: “Grovely! Grovely! Grovely! And All Grovely!”

Oak Apple day or Royal Oak Day is the 29th of May. On this day all English citizens used to celebrate the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660. They HAD to celebrate it, because it was a public holiday with a special service required in the Book of Common Prayer.  It was only removed in 1859 by the Anniversary Days Observance Act (which also removed the 5th November, Guy Fawkes Night). It is called Oak Apple Day because Charles II successfully evaded his pursuers by hiding up an oak tree, not a feat of courage that everyone would want to have commemorated publicly, but there you go.

Coincidentally, or maybe not, the villagers of Great Wishford celebrate on Oak Apple Day their ongoing right from a Charter of 1603 to gather green wood from the local Grovely Woods. They get up early – waking the whole village in the process – gather wood up to the prescribed maximum size, and march with sprigs of oak to Salisbury Cathedral where they perform a (slightly embarrassed) commemorative dance, are blessed by a (somewhat surprised) Vicar of the Close, and have their rights read out and affirmed with a shout of “Grovely! Grovely! Grovely! And all Grovely” inside the cathedral.

The 50p bookstall in Salisbury Market often has a box of local history booklets which are well worth leafing through.  One has the entire charter printed out:

“Item the lords freeholders Tennants and Inhabitance of the Mannor of greate Wisheford or soe many of them as would in auntient tyme have used to goe in a daunce to the Cathedrall Church of our blessed Ladie in the Cittie of newe Sarum… and theire made theire clayme to theire custome in the Forrest of Grovely in theis words: Groveley Groveley and all Groveley.”

 

 

It is much more restrained than rolling a cheese down a hill, and the commercial opportunities remain unexploited.

The book “Old Church Lore” by William Andrews mysteriously doesn’t mention this particular ceremony in its chapter on Royal Oak Day although the requirement in Yorkshire to pelt with eggs anyone not wearing oak leaves does stick in the memory.

PS What is the link between Oak Apples and the Magna Carta and Jane Austen?