Source: AT

OXFORD–As it has for over 500 years, the Magdalene College Choir sang the Hymnus Eucharisticus from a tower high above this university town on the first day of May, followed incongruously by a dirty Elizabethan ditty about nymphs in Spring. An Anglican vicar blessed the bedraggled revellers crowding the surrounding streets. Most of them had tippled through the night.

Undergraduates for centuries celebrated May Morning by jumping off Magdalene Bridge into the shallow and frigid River Cherwell, but this year police barriers made the stream inacessible. Risk aversion has trumped tradition even in Oxford, once the last redoubt of British bloodymindedness. Whether one thinks the British Empire organized rapacity (mostly) or a civilizing influence (occasionally) or both (mainly), the men who made it evinced a madcap daring. The once-adventurous British no longer wish to leap into the unknown, except perhaps in the fantasy world of Harry Potter.

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