January: In with the Plough

Christmas is a time for looking back. We remember the excitement of childhood, the people no longer with us, and the year that’s passed. Perhaps this is why we’ve always loved ghost stories at midwinter: that sense of melancholy for the dying year, when we feel the presence of the past more than at any other time.

But there’s something about a January sunrise that warms the heart, even when the toes are frozen. It’s the promise of a new day, a new year… maybe even a new — or at least different — life, if those resolutions stick…

In Holderness past, January marked the beginning of the agricultural year. As rural people whose livelihoods, and indeed lives, depended on decent harvests, we have had rituals honouring the plough for centuries. Ploughing season began immediately after the Christmas holiday well into the 20th century and the festival of “Plough Monday” fell on the first Monday after Twelfth Night (traditionally the 5th of January). This festival was an important one in arable areas such as Holderness, a region at the forefront of agricultural development from the 18th century onwards, and the first written mention of it in England dates to 1413¹.

Before the Reformation in the 1500s, many villages would have had a communal plough and this was often blessed in churches before the work began. There are accounts from other northern counties of the communal plough being dragged around villages to raise funds for the parish and, despite the lack of local documentary evidence for this earlier period, I see no reason why this wouldn’t have happened in Holderness too given that plough rituals were firmly embedded in the local culture during the Georgian and Victorian eras.

By this time, the Plough rites were for personal — rather than parish — gain, rather like the Christmas “begging” customs. The East Riding folklorist John Nicholson describes gangs of “Ploo Lads” ‘demanding money and drink in such a way as to terrify women who have been left at home’², a custom that existed well into the 1900s although in some places (for example, just over the Humber in Alkborough) the practice was banned due to drunk and disorderly behaviour. If the housewife was feeling generous, then she’d give cash, booze and the traditional cheesecakes to the marauding men. If she wasn’t, she might wake the next day to find her garden ploughed up…

In Holderness, these gangs did at least dance for their dinner in the literal sense. The Morris Dance scholar Paul Davenport has identified a routine particular to the Holderness Plough Monday celebration³. This was a single line of dancers waving little flags or rattling bones known as “knick-knacks”.

The dance seems to have been associated with a rough sort of play, the type we might call “mumming”. These had basic plots involving combat, courtship, death and resurrection and were often performed during Midwinter by actors wearing specific costumes. Some scholars believe that these tropes indicate a pre-Christian origin for the play, specifically that of a fertility rite. Although this is disputed by many historians, I certainly think that the idea of honouring the plough must involve some level of sympathetic magic to ensure a good harvest.

The Holderness Plough play had all of these distinctive elements. There was always a man dressed as a woman and wielding a broom, who was known as Besom Bet, and one of the actors carried an inflated bladder on a stick to whip everyone with, hence his name of Blether [Bladder] Dick. Bet and Dick are the comedy duo of the troupe: the Basil and Sibyl Fawlty of Holderness. In his 1814 book The Costume of Yorkshire⁴, George Walker describes the Plough play as ‘a ludicrous procession’ and Nicholson tells us that by the later 1800s they rarely even had a plough with them, the play having become simply an excuse to get drunk, make a racket and earn a few pence. So more a case of sticking two fingers up at polite society than anything to do with a good harvest!

Sadly, the Plough Monday play has long since been forgotten in Holderness; in the interests of carrying the Christmas revelry on a bit longer, perhaps we should bring it back. Ladies, have your cheesecakes ready for next year if you value your lawn…

1. Hutton, Ronald, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, Oxford, 1994 ↩︎
2. Nicholson, John, The Folklore of East Yorkshire, London and Hull, 1890 ↩︎
3. Davenport, Paul, Forgotten Morris, 1993 ↩︎
4. Walker, George, The Costume of Yorkshire, London, 1814 ↩︎