CHRIS KOENIG looks at the origins of some of Oxfordshire's quirky and often rowdy traditions

Quaint customs live and die in Oxfordshire, and occasionally get revived after long periods of dormancy. Sometimes their original significance has long been forgotten, like people commemorated on historic village gravestones.

Beating the bounds of parishes in Oxford and surrounding villages, for instance, still goes on, commemorating the fact that the exact extent of boundaries was once of profound importance to residents, who, of course, needed to know to whom they owed money in the form of tithes and taxes.

The months of May and June, in the wake of May Day and Whitsun, are particularly rich in traditional festivities.

In the 17th century there was May Day singing from the top of New College's tower, as well as from Magdalen. After the New College singing, members of the college would march to St Bartholomew's Hospital in the Cowley Road, still singing and playing drums, fifes and flutes.

However, the contemporary historian Anthony à Wood recorded that the New College ceremony got changed to Ascension Day "because Magdalen College men and the rabble of the town came on May Day to their disturbance". The custom then seems to have died out.

St Bartholomew's Hospital continued to feature, though, in a Whitsun custom called Bringing in the Fly which continued well into the 18th century. It began with a sermon in Oxford, then all the Oxford college cooks would process off to the hospital chapel. They would catch a cranefly at the nearby well and bring it back in a cage in order to mark the beginning of summer. Needless to say, the march became famous for rowdiness.

Some say that such summer frolics had pagan origins. Be that as it may, however, some midsummer celebrations have a Christian significance. At Magdalen College, for instance, a sermon is still preached from the open-air pulpit each year on the Sunday following St John the Baptist's Day, June 24. The occasion commemorates the fact that the college, founded by Henry VII, is built on the site of a hospital dedicated to St John the Baptist.

The business of bedecking the quad with greenery, with its overtones of old May Day and Whitsun fun, died out in the mid 18th century. Then the sermon became more formal, with chairs being placed in the quad for such dignitaries as the university Vice-chancellor.

But as late as 1749 the historian John Pointer wrote that the walls were adorned "with green boughs and flowers, and the ground covered with green rushes and grass" to commemorate St John the Baptist's preaching in the wilderness.

In the previous century, though, as Anthony à Wood noted, even this event had been rowdy, with much "grinning and laughter", and the congregation being squirted with water.

St John the Baptist's Day is celebrated outside Oxford, too - at Burford. Here a 'dragon ceremony' is celebrated each year by the children of Burford School. The celebration died out in the 18th century but was revived in 1971. Some say the celebration dates right back to a battle of 750 in which a Saxon king defeated a Mercian one and captured, in the process, a banner upon which a dragon was depicted. More probably, though, according to Christine Bloxham's book Mayday to Mummers (The Wychwood Press, 2002) it commemorates the Merchant Taylors' Guild. In the Middle Ages the town obtained its wealth from the Cotswold wool trade and St John the Baptist was the patron saint of the guild. In any case, it was (and is) an excuse for a summer festival - even if its origin has been forgotten.