Before chocolate eggs and chicks, the Easter holiday was replete with local traditions and festivities. Like today, Easter was not only an important religious festival but also marked the end of winter gloom, the arrival of spring and as one writer put it in 1813, a ‘complete change of garments and temper’.

At this time, Greenwich Fair offered many opportunities for frivolity and entertainment. People from the lower and middle classes would flock to Greenwich on foot, on wheelbarrows and on waggons. Men and women raced each other down steep hills at Greenwich Park and excited comment when they exposed their legs and undergarments. A variety of street stalls offered food to suit all tastes, and games such as Kiss in the Ring and Hunt the Slipper were played. Any unspoken rules governing behaviour and a sense of decorum were relaxed.

In 21st century Greenwich, the old custom of Easter ‘lifting’ (also known as ‘heaving’ or ‘hoving’) has enjoyed a revival. The Blackheath Morris Dancers mark the beginning of their dancing season by lifting willing women in a wooden chair, decorated with flowers and ribbons, and lowering them with a kiss. The Dancers perform an iteration of a custom that, like Greenwich Fair, was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries and which excited comment as a playful – sometimes rowdy – pastime of the masses.

Easter lifting notionally celebrated Christ’s resurrection, and was practised in rural and mining communities in Wales, the border counties, the Midlands and in Lancashire. In general, women were lifted by men on Easter Monday and men were lifted by women on Easter Tuesday. A kiss or money was given in exchange for being released, with some buying their way out of being heaved.

People joined in willingly or unwillingly and one newspaper advised that it was best to ‘submit quietly’ rather than trying to run or hide. In Shakespeare’s Greenwood: The Customs of the Country (1900), George Morley cites Warwickshire folklore regarding the well-known scholar and Whig thinker Dr Samuel Parr, who was minister at Hatton near Warwick in the early 1800s. Parr led local women on a merry dance up hill and down dale until they ultimately caught him and got their kiss. Morley points out that the women only did this in retaliation, since the ‘merry divine’ had lifted and kissed many of them on the previous day. It seems Parr was not shy, but enjoyed the thrill of the chase in later life!

In addition to newspapers, early books on the folklore and customs of a county or region are a great source of information on lifting/heaving and other traditions. From these sources it is possible to glean that Easter lifting took place in the morning until noon, with or without a chair, depending on the customs of the local area. Some people were cradled like a baby and lifted three times into the air, while others were grabbed by all limbs and heaved, or were made to be seated across the arms of a group holding hands.

Perhaps the most innocent manifestation of lifting was in Wales and the border counties, where groups of young people went from house to house in their village carrying a chair decorated with flowers and foliage. In Herefordshire, a posy of flowers was held by a girl, which was used to sprinkle water on the feet of the man or woman being lifted. Groups sometimes played music and sang ‘Jesus Christ is risen again’, and were rewarded with food, kisses, drink or money.

Interestingly, Easter lifting was not a feature of the original Greenwich Fair and there are few accounts of it occurring in the south of England. Yet lifting is closely related to older ‘Hocktide’ customs, which saw men and women holding each other to ransom on Easter Monday and Tuesday in the north and the south. An early record of Hocktide dates to 1406, when it was forbidden for people in London to constrain anyone else on ‘Hokkedays’. In the 1500s, however, it became a means of raising income for a parish. Those who were successful in extracting money were rewarded by local officials.

The fall
Easter lifting was popular in the 18th century, before fading into memory at the turn of the 20th. By 1879, it was regarded as a degenerate and ‘absurd’ custom by those with the power to discourage the practice. As early as 1825, lifting was being written out of history. The writer William Hone regarded it a mindless ‘Romish ceremony’ which ought to be stopped at every opportunity through education of children and mild persuasion. Newspaper articles throughout the Victorian era linked it with public disorder and drunkenness. Greenwich Fair was viewed similarly as a source of vice and crime and suppressed by magistrates in 1857.

It is possible that the campaign to stop Easter lifting and other popular amusements was influenced by wider concerns about the social order. These fears were heightened by the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the rise of the Chartist movement, as well as revolutions in France in 1789 and 1848. Indeed, an 1881 newspaper article draws clear lines between respectability and a ‘populace playing the part of chartered libertines under the pretext and sanction of ancient custom.’ This was an unusually direct attack on the working classes and Easter lifting.

Another factor in the fall of Easter lifting was its spread to ever-growing towns in the 19th century, where it was harder to manage and where entire roads and streets might be held to ransom. Writer and antiquarian Frederick William Hackwood was annoyed by women placing a rope across the road in West Bromwich on Easter Tuesday, forcing male passengers to alight from their vehicles.

Newspapers reported urban crimes associated with Easter lifting. In 1865, an outraged husband wrote to a newspaper complaining that his wife had been set upon by a man in Birmingham while she was walking home on the evening of Easter Monday. She had been lifted and carried down a street to a secluded entry, before struggling free and escaping. In Wolverhampton, in 1876, two women were fined 20 shillings for assaulting a man who refused to be lifted in a pub. This case questioned the ‘supposed right’ to heave ‘anyone’ of the opposite sex on Easter Monday, and thus we can see here the authorities protecting the rights of the unwilling.

Clearly the custom could be abused, but there were cases whereby the link between assault and Easter lifting was less obvious. In Telford, Shropshire, a woman was fined for attacking a man in a pub with a pint cup on ‘heaving day’ in 1864 and knocking out his teeth, apparently without provocation. Yet, from this public account, it is difficult to prove a link between the assault and heaving. No mention is made of the woman attacking the man because he refused to be lifted, only that there was an atmosphere of ‘lark’ because it was heaving day. These reports allude to lifting or heaving in cases of drunken assault to promote the custom as immoral.

Many men of position and education frowned upon Easter lifting as a ‘money job’, though arguably it was an opportunity to be generous to those who laboured on the land and in industry. The Reverend William Vance observed how men and women working at the pit in the Black Country enjoyed the custom. The men of the colliery walked around in ‘gangs’, lifted women as high as they could and lowered them with a salute. On Tuesday, the women would have their ‘revenge’ on men regardless of their rank and age – even the manager was approached. Those who did not ‘enter into the fun’ had to purchase exemption by ‘a ransom proportionate to their station’.

Easter lifting was a particularly fascinating custom because it crossed gender and class divides, often both simultaneously. It was common, for example, for a group of servant women to heave their master, or male guests at an inn, and extract a tip. Vance’s account is unusually sympathetic to lifting, and he does not judge the women for their pit work or their participation in what he regards a ‘fun’ custom that lightens the spirits of those involved in hard labour. But many men writing in the 19th century disapproved of women taking part in lifting, or described the women lifting on a Tuesday in different terms to the men.

Gender bias is overt in an article of 1881 which condemned women as disporting themselves in ‘an outrageous manner’, shouting, gesticulating and singing while lifting their man, while men of the ‘sterner sex’ escape scrutiny. In general, these writers are silent on the conduct of men, or portray the men’s lifting as more ‘gallant’ and courteous. In 1893, one writer states that men, ‘the stronger sex’, are to be pitied on Easter Tuesday when lifted by the ‘coarser’ and more ‘masculine’ of women who spend their spoils instantly in the taverns.

Indeed, women were described in a variety of patronising and insulting ways, depending on their appearance and attractiveness. These labels ranged from a ‘bevy of nymphs’, a ‘band of brawny pit-bank wenches’, ‘jolly matrons’, ‘stalwart viragoes’, ‘designing dames’ to ‘amorous Amazonians’. Writers, illustrators and reporters were fascinated by the tactics women used when they lifted men, particularly those who were heavy, or conversely, fleet of foot. One writer observed that women lifting in Worcestershire were ‘admirable stoppers’, adopting an old cricketing term to describe how they could corner escapees. He also notes how groups of women would ‘hustle the breath out of a fat man’ before lifting him by leg and limb.

It seems some women enjoyed the tables being turned in a society that considered them socially inferior. It was one of many reasons why educated, white men in the Georgian and Victorian era viewed Easter lifting increasingly as an unwelcome uprising against the status quo, rather than a cherished tradition. {