The Holderness Historian

Author: lucybrooke

  • May Day! May Day!

    Happy May Day! The first day of May in the 21st century rather passes us by, but it was cause for a fine celebration in Holderness for centuries. After the miserable winter we’ve had, it’s a joy to see the fields and hedgerows bursting into life; before the days of electricity and central heating, this sunny, green month must have felt like heaven after the seemingly interminable darkness of winter.  It has its roots in the Greek and Roman worship of the goddess Flora and the ancient Celtic ritual of Beltane, but from the medieval period onwards May Day was fêted as the official beginning of summer and became a festival of greenery, flowers and communal jollities. It’s had its ups and downs over the years. Its heyday was during the 1500s, but actual parish accounts from Holderness are rare. This is probably because most surviving records come from the church, whereas May Day was essentially a secular occasion and the trees and flowers needed for it grew freely and abundantly in the surrounding fields.

    The only mention I’ve found in the Hedon ecclesiastical records is a payment of 5 shillings for a Maypole in 1660, the month of the Restoration of the monarchy1. The 17th century Puritans and evangelical Protestants had stamped out the fun (“a relic of the shameful worship of the strumpet Flora”, said one disapproving Christian), so it’s possible this timing isn’t a coincidence. Maypoles fell out of fashion during the 1700s and wasn’t until the early 1900s that the custom was revived. A letter from a Hornsea lady named Lois to the East Riding Telegraph in 1899 says that “It is a source of the keenest regret that the dear old May celebrations are dying out… the May pole no longer graces the village green.”2 But she does mention that John Ruskin is bringing the festival back to life, evidence of the early 20th century Folk Revival, and this influence can clearly be seen in various villages across Holderness during this period.

    May Day is essentially a celebration of the return of greenery to our countryside. The Gregorian Calendar was adopted in Britain in 1752; prior to this, we had the Julian system which was 11 days ahead, so flowers and trees were in bloom earlier. “Bringing in the May” (gathering greenery and flowers) was first mentioned in Lincoln in 1240, and the most important plant was the hawthorn. This grows well on clay soil, and as such is common in Holderness marking ancient meeting points and Enclosure Act field boundaries. It’s colloquially known as May: the only British plant to be named after the month it flowers. Readers of a certain age might also know it as “bread and cheese’, as the leaves and berries were eaten throughout Yorkshire. Hawthorn blossom, dog roses and cow parsley were gathered to make garlands, and particularly for the headdress worn by the Lady of the May.

    Hawthorn bursting into life today (Lucy Brooke)

    But in Holderness and many other rural areas, hawthorn garlands were never allowed inside the house. They were said to have a “deathly smell” and thought to be unlucky, even a portent of death. While some folklorists believe this is due to the tree’s association with Celtic human sacrifice (although there is little evidence for this), there is a more scientific reason. Hawthorn flowers give off triethylamine, the chemical produced by corpses and rotting flesh which, prior to modern embalming and funeral practices, would have been a smell well-known to country folk.

    The Lady of the May became known as the May Queen, and many of our villages crowned a local girl. She and her attendants were bedecked with white flowers, personifications of the summer, and their white dresses symbolised purity. There seems to have been a connection with the Virgin Mary, who was particularly venerated during May, and Holderness had many old Catholic families who followed this practice. Pre-Reformation, hawthorn was used to dress domestic shrines to the Virgin which might explain why its presence indoors was frowned upon once the persecution of Catholics took hold. Conversely, the white flowers of May also represented fertility and rebirth and, again, there is a scientific reason behind this symbolism; these early-blossoming plants are mainly pollinated by flies (the association with death once more rears its head) and white or pale yellow is more visible to insects than the more vibrant colours of summer flowers.

    In later times, however, much of this symbolism was forgotten and the May Queen was really an excuse to dress up. You can see from the photographs of Burton Pidsea’s May Day that the girls are all in beautiful white frocks with a tractor and trailer as their horse and carriage.

    Burton Pidsea May Queens (from Bill Marwood’s collection)

    Gladys Beadle of Keyingham recalled that the honour always fell upon the eldest girl at the village school, and her turn came during the Second World War when clothing was “on coupons”. Gladys went to Hull Market where she bought a bag of lace scraps, and a talented seamstress in the village made a dress out of them for her3.

    The May pole also made a comeback around 1900, no doubt much to Lois’s joy! The Hornsea Band of Hope, a teetotal organisation, celebrated their May Day in 1900 with a garlanded May Queen and attendants, children dressed as flowers, and the highlight of the day: “the braiding of the May poll”. This photograph of the maypole dance is from Hollym in 19084.

    This picture has an eerie Folk Horror quality to it: the white dresses and intense stares. The girls look like they’re about to be sacrificed — or watch someone else be…  The ribbons to braid while dancing were a modern embellishment. The earliest poles were a simple tree, usually hawthorn (of course) or birch, although people always danced round them.

    Another Holderness custom was the “May geslin”, or gosling. This is our equivalent of an April fool, and the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1791 tells us that ‘A May Gosling… is made with as much eagerness in the North of England as an April Noddy.’ You might fall for being sent to the chemist’s to buy a penn’orth of pigeon’s milk, but if your tormentor plays the trick after midday then:

    Twelve o’clock is past and gone

    So you’re a fool for making one.

    So if someone caught you out on the first of April, you can get your own back today!

    Whether it’s with garlands or geslins, May Day is still a cause for celebration: light, warmth and life are returning to our countryside and this deserves to be honoured. This weekend, go for a walk, hug a hawthorn and marvel at the beauty of Mother Nature as she wakes and basks in a new dawn.

    1. Poulson, George, The History and Antiquities of the Seignory of Holderness, R. Brown, Hull, 1840 ↩︎
    2. East Riding Telegraph, 5th May 1900 ↩︎
    3. East Riding of Yorkshire Archive ↩︎
    4. Sumner, Ian & Margaret, Holderness, Sutton Publishing, 1995 ↩︎

  • The Grieving Tide

    Rain, rain, rain. It feels like that’s all the sky has done for sixth months, although Spring finally seems to be on its way. The countryside has been awash: trackways calf-deep in mud and whole fields underwater, reminding us that humans’ clever drainage projects will never quite vanquish the prehistoric meres of Holderness.

    This has always been an area particularly at the mercy of Mother Nature. All that mud is boulder clay, deposited here by Ice Age glaciers. It’s sticky, soggy and soft — clarty, as Holdernessians would say — and gives us the dubious honour of having the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe. The cliffs here have the colour and texture of a dark chocolate Digestive dunked in a cup of very strong tea (the only type of tea worth drinking). And again, for all our Cnut-like efforts, we are fighting a losing battle.

    In February, the Cold War monitoring post at Tunstall was finally claimed by the waves and this is just the latest addition to Poseidon’s property portfolio. Approximately three miles of land have been lost since the Roman era, land that once held over twenty towns and villages which now lie at the bottom of the North Sea.

    From Sheppard, 19121

    Ravenser Odd, which was founded in the 13th century to the east of modern Spurn Point, is the most famous. This bustling port was once more prosperous than Hull, but its importance was no defence against the tides. In 1362, it was completely flooded by a fearsome storm wonderfully-titled the Grote Mandrenke, an ancient Scandinavian name meaning ‘the Great Drowning of Men’.

    After previous inundations, the town had already been abandoned by the living. The dead could not escape so easily. Numerous bodies, whose owners had no doubt expected an undisturbed eternal rest in Ravenser’s graveyards, began to wash up on the Holderness shores. In July, 1355, the Abbot at Meaux Abbey ordered the corpses to be gathered up and re-buried in the churchyard at Easington. Not a pleasant task in the summer heat, one suspects…

    Meaux Abbey was far from the sea but Burstall Priory, near Skeffling, eventually suffered the same fate as Ravenser. Established in 1219 and dissolved during Henry VIII’s Reformation, it crumbled into the sea in the early 1800s. Relics from Burstall were found occasionally on the beaches, including a large lead button imprinted with the seal of an Abott, and “other vestigia of early days”2. This period saw the loss of several more Holderness churches that both made the news and were the origin of eerie local legends.

    Old Withernsea and Old Owthorne churches were the most celebrated. These were known as ‘the Two Sisters’, or ‘the Sister Kirkes’ (Kirke meaning ‘church’ is another word displaying our Scandinavian or Old Germanic heritage). The story went that two sisters — whose identity is a mystery — resolved to build a church for the villages, but argued over whether it should have a spire or a tower. To resolve the dispute, a diplomatic monk suggested they should build one each.

    The Withernsea Sister Kirke was swept away in 1444, and another church was built. However, this was ruined by a dreadful storm in 1609 and was left abandoned and unloved, fit only for dogs to play in. A letter-writer told his correspondent that:

    ‘The church is deserted of the parishioners, and its roof all ruinous and uncovered, for my spaniels had sport here with a rabbit.’3

    Withernsea (spot the spaniel!) & Kilnsea, early 19th century (private collection)

    Perhaps it was the very dog depicted in this Regency engraving!

    This second church also succumbed to the sea in the early 19th century, along with its Owthorne neighbour.

    Owthorne, too, had been undermined by the billowing ocean for many years. The slumbering inhabitants of its churchyard were frequently disturbed, their whitened bones projecting from the cliff and falling to the sand. It was said that:

    ‘After a fearful storm, old persons tottering on the verge of life, have been seen slowly moving forth and recognising on the shore the remains of those whom in early life they had known and revered.’4

    In 1796, part of the Owthorne Sister Kirk was dismantled by villagers who could see that its end was nigh and in September 1799, a meeting was held by John Snaith, the Vicar of Owthorne, at the Dog and Duck pub on Scale Lane in Hull to discuss pulling down the rest of the church and using the stones to build a new one5. This didn’t happen soon enough, and Owthorne’s final, fatal demise was reported in the London Chronicle on the 28th February 1816:

    ‘The ancient land-mark on the coast of Holderness, Owthorn Church Old Spire, better known by the name of the Sister Church, was destroyed by the tide on Friday week, and fell to the ground with a tremendous crash, to the great alarm of the inhabitants of the village.’

    Owthorne church circa 1800, and its fate (Nicholson, 1890/Hull Packet, 1844)

    Once again, the dead made their way back to land. Many coffins and bodies in various states of preservation were strewn upon the shore. This ghoulish spectacle drew a morbidly curious audience, including Dr Raines, a surgeon-apothecary who lived in Graysgarth House at Burton Pidsea. 

    One body in particular caught the surgeon’s attention. It was wrapped in cloth bandages, then in a thin sheet of lead with remains of gilding and painting, and had been interred in a thick leaden coffin, no doubt before being placed in a stone sarcophagus (although this could not be found); this was most unusual for a rural burial, leading Dr Raines to suggest that the body was that of an early, high-status founder of Owthorne. The unwrapped corpse gave off a strange and not unpleasant smell, which Raines described as the fragrance of spices and aromatics, leading him to believe that it had been carefully embalmed.

    The head had also been wrapped but in a flimsier material than the body, causing it to become detached at the cervical vertebra. Although the rest of the venerable man’s remains were re-interred at Rimswell church, Dr Raines took the skull home with him for closer examination and was excited to see that it still had greying black hair on it. He was no doubt disappointed when, on the day following the discovery, the hair fell off after exposure to the air6. Apparently, Raines kept the skull and hair in his possession — perhaps they are still hidden somewhere in Graysgarth House…

    It’s no surprise to find that such grim sights on the Holderness beaches inspired legends of ghostly underwater congregations. The sighing and sobbing of the waves was known in local dialect as “suthering”. (I nearly called this piece Suthering Heights, but I thought everyone would assume it was a typo!) This mournful sound was also named “Aubro Dol”, which I suspect is a bastardised form of Latin from averro, meaning sweeping or waving away, and dol, meaning grief or sorrow. Thus, in my translation, the Grieving Tide.

    John Nicholson, the great Victorian folklorist of East Yorkshire, wrote of the belief that beneath the waves, Owthorne’s long-dead inhabitants still gathered:

    “Previous to a storm, as the sea comes suthering up to the beach, there comes also another sound, the mournful dirge of the ghostly choir, who still chant their low-voiced psalms from their usual seats in the engulfed channel; and anon may be heard the slow tolling of the bells, calling the hearer to join in their services.”7

    Phantom bells also ring from beneath the waves at Withernsea and Aldbrough, so listen out for them next time you’re having a stroll along the Holderness coast. But do not be tempted to paddle through the waves to find the source of that eerie noise, lest Poseidon claim another member of his spectral congregation.

    1. Sheppard, Thomas, The Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast, London, 1912 ↩︎
    2. Poulson, George, The History and Antiquities of the Seignory of Holderness Vol. II, London & Hull, 1840 ↩︎
    3. Poulson, ibid. ↩︎
    4. Poulson, ibid. ↩︎
    5. Hull Advertiser, 14th September, 1799 ↩︎
    6. Hull Packet, 31st May, 1844 ↩︎
    7. Nicholson, John, The Folklore of East Yorkshire, London & Hull, 1890 ↩︎

  • Old Flames

    If anyone is in a romantic mood tonight, my Hedon History Talk this month (tenuously linked to Valentine’s Day) is Old Flames: Love & Lust in Holderness Past.

    Although there is a bit of romance, I’m not really the hearts-and-flowers type, so expect more scandal than soppy stuff: Hedon’s medieval sex workers, our own version of the Tinder Swindler, and a 19th century antiquarian with a dangerous secret life…

    WARNING: contains “adult” language (one word in particular that might cause offence) and subject matter. If this sounds like your sort of thing, come to the Hedon Royal British Legion (Magdalen Lane), 7pm, Thursday 26th February. £5 on the door.

  • The Ghost of a Broken Heart?

    The Ghost of a Broken Heart?

    Happy Valentine’s Day! Perhaps you’re sifting through a mountain of cards, or you might be cocking a cynical snook at the poor saps with their M&S meal deals and red roses. Or maybe you are in the miserable depths of heartbreak: one of the most painful of human afflictions, and one that only time can heal. Sometimes, though, time doesn’t provide a cure and the victim is doomed to a tormented life… and a tormented afterlife.

    Holderness has many stories of ill-fated lovers whose ghosts still walk our lands. Some took their own lives (like Brother John Coomber, the sinful monk of St Sepulchre’s at Hedon — a story for another post) while others simply faded away and died a lonely, quiet death. One such quiet death resulted in a notably unquiet haunting at an old manor house in the isolated village of Easington on the Holderness coast.

    Easington Hall (sometimes called Easington Manor) was a large country house in the centre of the village. Probably built in the 16th century to replace the old manor which was demolished in the 1400s, it had a central section flanked by two wings, ten hearths, and oak-panelled rooms. Despite this grandeur, by the 1600s the Hall was struggling to hire and retain servants due to something very odd afoot in the house.

    The events were documented by Reverend Edmund Spencer in the later 1600s in a letter to the famous Nonconformist minister Richard Baxter, who preached before Cromwell during the English Civil War. This manuscript was in the collection of Sir Tatton Sykes of Sledmere Hall under the heading ‘Divers Superstitious Practices and Observances in use in Holderness in the 17th century’. The letter itself is undated but it tells us that 17 years prior to writing it, Spencer was installed as private chaplain to the staunch Republican Colonel Robert Overton of Easington Hall and while living there, Spencer became aware of a strange disturbance in the household.

    The haunting had already begun when Spencer arrived. He learnt from locals that the house had a sinister reputation, and the Hall’s servants told him what had been happening. It had started with peculiar knocks and thumps from the attic and upper chambers (between which was Spencer’s room). Disembodied groaning was then heard in the cellar. The occupants also said that “they have some seldome times seen the spirit”. The water in a copper boiler had frequently been found to have blood in it the next morning, the milk too. Spencer was sceptical, telling the Overtons and their frightened servants that the tainted milk was caused by the cats lapping at it with bloody tongues (?!), and the noises were just “the greyhounds walking up and down the Garret”… until he heard them himself.

    In admirable Ciaran O’Keeffe fashion, Spencer decided to solve the mystery. He and the lady of the house covered the milk with a heavy lid and shut it in a closed room. Once again, it was found to be bloodstained. An undaunted Spencer continued his investigation. One night, he put the unfortunate dogs outside, secured all the internal and external doors and pocketed the keys then, with a servant lad as witness (and possibly for moral support!), stayed awake in his locked room until dawn to listen.

    As he wrote to Baxter, “That night the noise in the garret was more than ordinary, such a jumping and lumbering, as if the floor would come down on my head.” It was as if the thing was performing its best tricks to its literally captive audience.

    The noises intensified. Spencer heard footsteps on the stairs, and an eerie swishing or rushing sound as if skirts were sweeping the floors. Then, the footsteps began in the locked room next to his. These terrifying phenomena continued all night, resulting in a rather less sceptical Reverend Spencer by breakfast time.

    Upon further questioning, an elderly servant who had seen the apparition told Spencer that the staff recognised the figure: a former maid of the Hall. This maid had fallen deeply in love with a man, and requested the permission of the previous Master Overton to marry him. Overton refused (what a bastard). The girl was devastated. We all know the insomnia, loss of appetite and utter wretchedness that are the symptoms of a truly broken heart, and it seems that the girl simply stopped eating and gave up on life until eventually, the servant told Spencer, “she pin’d away and dyed”.

    The haunting continued for several years, certainly for the duration of the Reverend’s stay, only ceasing after the death of Colonel Overton. This timing was taken as having some sort of significance by the occupants of the Hall. To me, though, all of this suggests the behaviour of a poltergeist rather than that of a girl who died of heartbreak.

    The Easington Hall case bears all the traits of a poltergeist infestation. It began with strange thumps and knocks, then followed the classic escalation pattern to groans, interference with material objects (the bloody water and milk), and increasing severity of phenomena ending with a sudden cessation. This sequence is seen in the majority of such cases, including the most famous (for example, Enfield, Battersea and Rosenheim). Another aspect that implies poltergeist activity is the way the Easington “thing” appeared to show off; the night that Spencer set about debunking the spook, it put on a great performance for him, as if to say, “Ha! Believe in me now, don’t you!”

    I take the reports of an apparition with a pinch of salt, and a large spoonful of salt with the “recognition” of the grieving maid. Identifying this girl as the source of the haunting was a convenient explanation, one that the desperate household could accept more readily than a terrifying, inexplicable demonstration of supernatural power.

    Poltergeists are often associated with young people, particularly teenage girls and particularly teenage girls that are unsettled or unhappy. Many of the servants at the Hall would have been very young women, often away from home for the first time — and perhaps far from their family, given the Hall’s difficulty in hiring local people — and nigh-on prisoners of their employers once the contract had been signed. Imagine having to get your boss’s permission to marry!

    Now, this could be taken as proof of a hoax (a miserable, homesick girl deliberately playing up for attention) but I think there is too much solid evidence in many poltergeist cases to be written off as mere cons. Various theories have been put forward regarding the association between a single individual and poltergeist activity, the most plausible (to me) — after a hoax — being the RSPK phenomenon: Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis, where the person at the centre of the poltergeist outbreak is, involuntarily and unwittingly, producing the manifestations via some sort of psychological energy source. Perhaps one of the living, breathing maids was actually at the root of the Easington haunting, whether by way of attention-seeking symptoms of unhappiness (knowingly or otherwise), or as the focal point of an unknown force? Perhaps the truth of this phenomena is not “out there”, but “in here”.

    The Reverend Edmund Spencer, an educated, sensible man of the cloth, was certainly baffled by the case despite his attempts to find a rational explanation or unmask a hoaxer. And he was so affected by it that he still remembered everything almost two decades later.

    Easington Hall, from Poulson, 1840 (author’s collection)

    But there’s no point dragging your Valentine to Easington Hall to do a paranormal investigation of your own; it was demolished in the late 1800s, although an Overton Cottage and Overton Villas now mark its former location. Perhaps a heartbroken maid — or whatever strange thing manifested itself at the old Manor — still wanders these houses 400 years after her death, waiting for a single red rose from a forbidden lover.

    References

    The map of Easington is the Ordnance Survey plan from 1855.

    Although I have been unable to find the current location of Edmund Spencer’s letter (if indeed it still exists), it was reprinted in County Folklore, Vol VI edited by Mrs Gutch (The Folklore Society, 1912).

    For details of Easington Hall and its history, see Poulson, George, The History and Antiquities of the Seignory of Holderness, (Brown, 1840).

    And if you’d like to read more about poltergeists and the theories behind them, there is no better book than Poltergeists by psychologist Dr Alan Gauld and the late, great paranormal researcher Tony Cornell (London, 1979): highly recommended!

  • A Tomb with a View (of rubble)

    A Tomb with a View (of rubble)

    This is a little companion post to the one that the lovely Folly Flâneuse and I have recently collaborated on. You can read her fantastic piece and subscribe to her blog here:

    Albina’s Tomb, Hedon, East Riding of Yorkshire.

    While Albina’s Tomb is still in a precarious condition, it’s in a vastly better state than it was a couple of years ago and I thought people might be interested in this early stage of the restoration process. 

    I am not unbiased when it comes to this site; it’s my favourite place in Hedon. Once a country squire’s magnificent, mad garden ornament, now a ravaged and haunting spectacle, these stones have an undeniable presence. I first saw Albina’s Tomb up close in 2020 when the new owner of Ivy House, Greg Butterworth, opened the garden for Heritage Open Day (until then, I’d had to make do with trying to stick my head through the hedge on Ivy Lane) and lo, I was smitten.

    Before: spot the Tomb… and the floor (clue: you can’t)

    When Greg bought the house, the folly was completely hidden by a thicket of ivy, elder, brambles and nettles. Decades of neglect, vandalism and Mother Nature had resulted in the roof and upper storey caving in and, after a heroic Greg had removed all the vegetation from the facade, it was clear that Albina’s memorial was in a sorry state. The interior — open to the elements since the collapse — was filled with fallen masonry, broken branches and weeds. So, with naive enthusiasm, I offered to help clear the site… how hard could it be?

    Ah. Very hard, as it turned out. Inside the tomb, the debris was a dismaying thigh-high jumble of stones, roof slates, bricks and glass. It was immediately obvious why no one had yet attempted to tackle it! We had no idea what was underneath the rubble, so it was painstaking work that took many weeks. We didn’t want to miss anything that might be hidden in there and every scrap was carefully sorted.

    First up were the roof slates, which we collected and stacked up outside the Tomb. Then the bricks: again, stored for future use. Any interesting pieces of stonework were put aside and our care paid off, as you will see. The remaining debris was put through a giant sieving machine. It was backbreaking graft shovelling it all in to the sieve and then shovelling the resulting piles into wheelbarrows; the brick fragments etc were collected to use as hardcore and the remaining topsoil and leaf mould were dug into the herbaceous borders. That sieve was the bane of my life and there were definitely moments when my muscles deeply regretted taking this on. We stopped for a lot of tea breaks during this stage!

    Sieving machine on left, tea-stealing machine on right

    But it was worth it. Our first glimpse of the floor was a real highlight (I think we had beer instead of tea that day).

    Finally, we found the floor!

    As work continued, we uncovered the beautiful Norman carved pillar bases, and the steps at the rear entrance. Once the internal ivy was removed, the gap where the early 18th century Pulteney plaque — rescued by Hedon Museum after the roof collapse — had been became visible, and we found Iveson’s ivy leaf crest that was originally set into the archway opposite that of Drogo de Bevrière. 

    Our major discovery among all that smashed stonework was the amazing medieval rose window. Greg brought his jigsaw puzzle skills to the table here and we managed to piece it back together. James Iveson didn’t mention this feature in his manuscript (see the Folly Flâneuse’s piece for more details) so I suspect it was a later addition to the rear of the upper extension of the Tomb. It’s plausible that the window came from a demolished section of St Augustine’s church, just across the green from Ivy House (thanks to Dr Martin Craven for his thoughts on this).

    Some wonderful discoveries

    This is merely the beginning of what is undoubtedly a daunting journey towards restoration, a journey that will require a lot more time, aching muscles and, of course, money. Ironically, the Tomb as it looks today — a simple arch with an open interior — is far closer to Iveson’s original vision than the grand two-storey edifice that it became. To the Georgians, the whole point of a Gothic folly was to conjure an atmosphere of ancient stones, long-dead tales and ruined beauty… an atmosphere that Albina’s Tomb still carries, and I hope it can be preserved it for generations of future Romantics.

    Thanks to Greg and Bruce Butterworth, The Folly Flâneuse, Tony Porter and Dr Martin Craven. And big up to Dr Stephen Campbell for the title — I’d gone for “Tomb Aider” but his idea was better!

  • January: In with the Plough

    January sunrise (Lucy Brooke)

    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.

    Plough Lads, Walker, 1814

    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 ↩︎