Hoodening
Hoodening, also spelled hodening and oodening, is a folk custom found in Kent, a county in South East England. The tradition entails the use of a wooden hobby horse known as a hooden horse that is mounted on a pole and carried by a person hidden under a sackcloth. Originally, the tradition was restricted to the area of East Kent, although in the twentieth century it spread into neighbouring West Kent. It represents a regional variation of a "hooded animal" tradition that appears in various forms throughout Britain and Ireland.
As recorded from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, hoodening was a tradition performed at Christmas time by groups of farm labourers. They would form into teams to accompany the hooden horse on its travels around the local area, and although the makeup of such groups varied, they typically included someone to carry the horse, a leader, a man in female clothing known as a "Mollie", and several musicians. The team would then carry the hooden horse to local houses and shops, where they would expect payment for their appearance. Although this practice is extinct, in the present the hooden horse is incorporated into various Kentish mummers plays and Morris dances that take place at different times of the year.
The origins of the hoodening tradition, and the original derivation of the term hooden, remain subject to academic debate. An early suggestion was that hooden was related to the Anglo-Saxon pre-Christian god Woden, and that the tradition therefore originated with pre-Christian religious practices in the early medieval Kingdom of Kent. This idea has not found support from historians or folklorists studying the tradition. A more widely accepted explanation among scholars is that the term hooden relates to hooded, a reference to the sackcloth worn by the person carrying the horse. The absence of late medieval references to such practices and the geographic dispersal of the various British hooded animal traditions—among them the Mari Lwyd of south Wales, the Broad of the Cotswolds, and the Old Ball, Old Tup, and Old Horse of northern England—have led to suggestions that they derive from the regionalised popularisation of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fashion for hobby horses among the social elite.
The earliest textual reference to the hoodening tradition comes from the first half of the eighteenth century. Scattered references to it appeared over the next century and a half, many of which considered it to be a declining tradition that had died out in many parts of Kent. Aware of this decline, in the early twentieth century the folklorist and historian Percy Maylam documented what survived of the tradition and traced its appearances in historical documents, publishing his findings as The Hooden Horse in 1909. Although deemed extinct at the time of the First World War, the custom was revived in an altered form during the mid-twentieth century, when the use of the hooden horse was incorporated into some modern Kentish folk traditions.
Description
Surviving sources testify to the fact that while there was some variation in the hoodening tradition as it was practised by various people in different parts of East Kent, it was nevertheless "on the whole remarkably uniform". The hooden horse, which was at the centre of the tradition, was usually made out of a wooden horse's head affixed to a pole about four feet long, with a hinged jaw that was moved by a string. This horse was then carried aloft by a person concealed beneath a dark cloth.As part of the hoodening custom, a team of "hoodeners", consisting of between four and eight men, would carry the horse through the streets. This team included the horse operator, a "Groom", "Driver", or "Waggoner" who carried a whip and led the horse by a bridle, a "Jockey" who would attempt to mount the horse, a "Mollie" who was a man dressed as a woman, and one or two musicians. All of the men were farm labourers, usually being those who worked with horses.
The team performed the custom at Christmas time, and usually on Christmas Eve. The team would arrive at people's houses where they would sing a song before being admitted entry. Once inside, the horse pranced and gnashed its jaw, while the Jockey attempted to mount it, and the Mollie swept the floor with a broom while chasing any girls present. Sometimes they would sing further songs and carols. Upon being presented with payment, the team would leave to repeat the process at another house.
Regional distribution
Historians have catalogued 33 recorded instances of the hoodening tradition extant in Kent prior to the twentieth-century revival. These are clustered in a crescent shape along the eastern and northern coasts of the county, and all were found within the area historically defined as East Kent, the tradition being unknown in neighbouring West Kent. More specifically, the folklorist Percy Maylam noted that there were no records of the tradition having been found west of Godmersham.This region was "a well populated area" during the period in which the hoodeners were active, and Maylam noted that all of the areas in which the tradition was found contained the East Kentish dialect. The folklorist E. C. Cawte analysed the historical distribution of the hoodeners and found that it did not correspond with the areas of early Anglo-Saxon settlement in Kent, nor did it accord with the county's coal mining areas. He concluded that "there is no apparent reason why the custom did not spread further afield".
Hoodening was part of a wider "hooded animal" tradition that Cawte identified in various forms across Britain. Features common to these customs were the use of a hobby horse, the performance at Christmas time, a song or spoken statement requesting payment, and the use of a team who included a man dressed in women's clothing. In South Wales, the Mari Lwyd tradition featured troupes of men with a hobby horse knocking at doors over the Christmas period. In an area along the border between Derbyshire and Yorkshire, the Old Tup tradition featured groups knocking on doors around Christmas carrying a hobby horse that had a goat's head. The folklorist Christina Hole drew parallels between hoodening and the Christmas Bull tradition recorded in Dorset and Gloucestershire. In south-west England, there are two extant hobby horse traditions—the Padstow 'Obby 'Oss festival and Minehead Hobby Horse—which take place not at Christmas time but on May Day.
Although the origins of these "hooded animal" traditions are not known with any certainty, the lack of any late medieval references to such practices may suggest that they emerged from the documented elite fashion for hobby horses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this, the hooded animal traditions may be comparable to England's Morris dance tradition, which became a "nation-wide craze" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before evolving into "a set of sharply delineated regional traditions".
Etymology and origins
Maylam noted that most nineteenth-century sources describing the tradition had spelled the word as hoden, but that he favoured hooden because it better reflected the pronunciation of the word with its long vowel. He added that "the word 'hooden' rhymes with 'wooden' and not with 'sodden' as some writers appear to think". Given this pronunciation, Cawte suggested that oodening was a better spelling for the tradition's name. Maylam also noted that none of the hoodeners with whom he communicated were aware of the etymology of the term, and that similarly they were unaware of the tradition's historical origins.The term hoodening is thus of unknown derivation. One possible explanation for the origin of hooden was that it had emerged as a mispronunciation of wooden, referring to the use of the wooden horse. Maylam was critical of this idea, expressing the view that such a mispronunciation was unlikely to emerge from the Kentish dialect. A second possibility is that the name hooden was a reference to the hooded nature of the horse's bearer. The historian Ronald Hutton deemed this to be the "simplest" derivation, while folklorists Cawte and Charlotte Sophia Burne also considered it the most likely explanation. Maylam was also critical of this, suggesting that the cloth under which the carrier was concealed was too large to be considered a hood. In his History of Kent the antiquarian Alfred John Dunkin suggested that Hodening was a corruption of Hobening, and that it was ultimately derived from the Gothic hopp, meaning horse. Maylam opined that Dunkin's argument could be "ignored", stating that it rested on the erroneous assumption that Hodening began with a short vowel.
Maylam concluded that the hoodening tradition was "a mutilated survival" of a form of Morris dance. Noting that some medieval Morris dancers had incorporated games devoted to the English folk hero Robin Hood into their custom, he suggested that hoodening might have originally been a reference to Robin Hood. This idea was challenged by Burne, who noted that in his legends, Robin Hood was always depicted as an archer rather than a horse-rider, thus questioning how he had come to be associated with the hooden horse. She further noted that the medieval games devoted to Robin Hood all took place in May rather than at Christmas, as hoodening did. Cawte also criticised Maylam's argument, noting that there was no evidence of Morris dancing in Kent prior to the twentieth century, and that neither hoodening nor Robin Hood had a particularly close association with the Morris dance to start with.
Possible Early Medieval origins
In 1807 an anonymous observer suggested that the term hoden was linked to the Anglo-Saxon god Woden, and that the tradition might be "a relic of a festival to commemorate our Saxon ancestors landing in Thanet". In 1891 it was suggested that the custom had once been known as "Odining", a reference to the early medieval Scandinavian god Odin. The author of this idea further suggested that the custom had begun either with the ritual wearing of the skins of horses sacrificed to Odin, or as an early Christian mockery of such Odinic practices.Maylam noted that he was initially attracted to the idea that the term hodening had derived from Woden—an Old English name that he thought a more likely origin than the Old Norse Odin—but that upon investigating this possibility found "no sufficient evidence" for it. He added that it would seem unlikely that the W would be lost from Woden in the Kentish dialect, citing the example of Woodnesborough, a Kentish village whose name is often interpreted as having derived from Woden and which clearly retains its use of W. He concluded that "one feels that the theory is based on inferences and analogies not strong enough for a foundation to carry the building erected on them". The idea of linking the tradition to Woden was also dismissed as unlikely by both Burne and Cawte.
Believing it likely that the hoodening tradition "substantially pre-dates" its earliest textual appearances, the folklorist Geoff Doel suggested the possibility that it had originated as a Midwinter rite to re-energise the vegetation. As evidence for this claim, Doel noted that other English winter folk customs, such as the Apple Wassail, have also been interpreted in this manner. He also suggested that the use of the horse in the tradition may have some connections to either the use of the white horse as the symbol of Kent, and the use of Hengist and Horsa as prominent characters in the origin myths of the early medieval Kingdom of Kent. However, the white horse did not become commonly associated with Kent until the beginning of the eighteenth century, and James Lloyd regards any suggestion of an ancient connection with hoodening as "wishful thinking and in defiance of all historical evidence".