As mad as a March hare

This month has long been linked with the madness of the March hare. Hares have been thought, incorrectly, to behave strangely and excitedly only during March.

This includes boxing other hares, jumping vertically for seemingly no reason and generally displaying abnormal behaviour.

Though such antics are indeed observed in March, they occur throughout the hare’s breeding season, which extends over several months.

The first written record of the hare’s strange behaviour occurred in about 1500 in the poem “Blowbol’s test”, reprinted in William Carew Hazlitt’s 1864 ‘Remains of the early popular poetry of England’, where the original poet is quoted as saying: “Thanne [th]ey begyn to swere and to stare, / And be as braynles as a Marshe hare.”

Some people have referred to this text and suggested that the hare was in fact a marsh (not March) hare, with marsh referring to a place where various factors such as damp, lack of covering and difficulty burrowing caused unpredictable behaviour.

An early use of the phrase “mad as a March hare” occurred in 1529 in Sir Thomas More’s ‘The supplycacyon of soulys made by syr Thomas More knyght councellour to our souerayn lorde the Kynge and chauncellour of hys Duchy of Lancaster. Agaynst the supplycacyon of beggars’. The text includes the words:  “As mad not as a March hare, but as a madde dogge.”

The phrase has been in continuous use since the 16th century, but was made most famous by Lewis Carroll in ‘Alice’s adventures in Wonderland’, in which the main character, Alice, in preparing for a tea party, says: “The March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won’t be raving mad — at least not so mad as it was in March.”