Westmoringaland 1150 ‘District of the people living west of the moors’ (alluding to the North Yorkshire Pennines)

'As elsewhere, the celebration of Royal Oak Day was very popular in Westmorland... On that day the flag was always raised on Kendal Town Hall, and a record from 1888 tells us that the carters decorated their horses and wagons with oak twigs. At Kirkby Lonsdale the boy who wore no oak was nettled by his mates, while in Kendal he was beaten with oak branches and called a "Tom Painer."

Not only do I remember wearing spontaneously an oak leaf when I was schoolboy at Windermere in the early twenties, but also a master at my old school told me three years ago that many boys still wore oak leaves on Yak Bob Day that year.

In The History of the Windermere Grammar School an old scholar has described the custom as it was observed in about 1883: "This - Yak Bob Day - was a day that was always looked upon as a holiday, but one year, for some unknown reason, the master decided to hold school. Protest was made without avail. On the morning of May 29th this particular year, some of the elder boys gained admission to the school prior to the master's arrival. They bolted the doors and barricaded the windows. The boys left outside went to meet the master and chanted him up to school with the well-known ditty:

Yak Bob Day! Twenty-ninth o' May;
If you don't give us holiday,
We'll all run away.

After some effort had been made to gain admittance, without success, the holiday was granted, much to our delight."'

Wilson, E.M. (1940) Royal Oak Day in Westmorland, Folklore, Vol. 51, No. 2 pp. 114-116