No one relishes the return to work after the holidays. But back in the day, people in rural England had a way to sweeten the deal: a holiday called Plough Monday, celebrated on the first Monday after Epiphany (January 6th). With disguises, trick-or-treating, and inebriated revelry, Plough Monday seems like the Christmas season’s answer to Halloween.
Imagine you’re hanging out at home somewhere in Yorkshire, 1814. You hear a knock and open the door to find a motley procession. At the head marches a dignified pair dressed in their best clothes: the “King and Queen.” Behind them come a company of sword-bearers dressed in military-style uniforms and dancing a practiced routine to the sound of a fiddle.
After that, things get a little stranger. A crew of men play the role of oxen, dragging a plough down the street. A teamster behind them carries a whip with a sheep’s-bladder rattle at one end to make it sound as if he’s really cracking leather over their backs.
Somewhere in the mix there might be a “Hobby Horse,” a man with an elaborate puppet-horse constructed around his waist such that it appears he’s in the saddle. He pulls a hidden string to make the horse’s jaw snap and its tail twitch. Word to the wise—don’t grab the tail: there are fishhooks and nails hidden behind the hairs.
Bringing up the rear is a crew of comic characters: a Fool dressed all in skins, with a tail hanging down his back, and an old couple dressed in tatters. Last of all comes the collector, with a box for donations.
This group of comedic rogues implores your largesse:
Good master and good mistress,
As you sit around the fire,
Remember us poor plough boys,
Who plod through mud and mire,
The mud is so very deep,
The water is not clear,
We’ll thank you for a Christmas box,
And drop of your best beer.
You’d do well to offer a penny or a treat. Otherwise, they just might take the plough and dig up your garden or toss around your dung-heap out back.
Even should you pay for the play, you’d still have to be on your guard: pranks were a Plough Monday tradition. Young men might go around in the night removing everyone’s gates so that the cattle would escape, or they might take a jug of water and lean it up against your stoop so it would spill everywhere as soon as you opened your door.
This is just one theoretical iteration of Plough Monday. The holiday has existed since at least the 1400s, and it continues to be celebrated in some areas to this day. In all that time, its components have continually evolved and changed, and like all folk traditions, it’s always varied from community to community.
In earlier days, there was a religious component. The plough might be dragged into the church to be blessed, and the collection might be put towards paying for “plough-lights”: candles to adorn a ploughman’s altar in the church. With the arrival of the Reformation and the consequent movement towards religious austerity, officially sanctioned Plough Monday celebrations came to an end. But without the oversight of the Church, other elements of the holiday—the “plough-witching,” as it was sometimes called—thrived. You might consider it survival of the most mischievous.
My personal favorite element is the Straw Bear: a man covered entirely in straw until he looks kind of like a walking haystack, as recollected by Kate Mary Edwards, who grew up in the fenlands in the mid-1800s. According to Edwards,
a party of men would choose one of their gang to be “straw bear” and they’d start a-dressing him in the morning ready for their travels round the fen at night. They saved some o’ the straightest, cleanest and shiniest oat straw and bound it all over the man until he seemed to be made of straw from head to foot, with just his face showing. When night came they’d set out from pub to pub and house to house, leading the straw bear on a chain. When they were asked in, the bear would go down on his hands and knees and caper about and sing and so on.
If you’d like to honor Plough Monday this year but don’t feel like covering your entire body in straw, why not make a Plough Pudding? To wash it down, make the drink that householders traditionally shared with their visitors: hot beer, syrupy-sweet with brown sugar and ginger.
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