Origins

Plough Monday is the first Monday after January 6th, so called because it was formerly the day on which work on the farm was resumed after the Twelve Days of Christmas, and spring ploughing began.

The ‘Fool’ or ‘White Plough’

It rather conjures up a picture of industrious ploughmen hard at work on countless farms at the beginning of the season. But how much actual work was ever done on this anniversary is very uncertain because, in England at least, the principal feature of the day was not ploughing, but the ritual dragging about of a decorated plough, called the Fool or the White Plough, by bands of young men variously known as Plough Stots, Bullocks, Jacks, or Jags.

In Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire they were called Plough Witches. They wore fanciful costumes of various kinds, usually adorned with ribbons, jewellery, and any sort of ornament available, including in some districts, horse-brasses. With them went a man dressed in women’s clothes, who was called the Bessy. and carried a collecting-box. There were also sword-dancers in areas where the sword-dancing tradition existed, and, in some counties, the colourful characters of the Plough Plays, the ancient folk-plays which belongs to this season, and one of which was often acted on the Plough Monday festival.

The ‘Plough Play’

The most common is the ‘Recruiting Sergeant’ play, which ‘Tom Fool’ introduces. A three-way operatic scene follows this introduction, between a Recruiting Sergeant, a Farmer’s Man, and the Lady. Basically the Farmer’s Man foreswears his sweetheart and joins the army, so the Lady decides to marry the Fool instead. There next follows a scene between Old Dame Jane and Beelzebub or ‘Eezum Squeezum’, which ends up with Dame Jane being knocked to the ground. A quack doctor is then brought in to perform an intricate comic cure. The performance ends up with a song. Sometimes, King George and other hero/combat characters are also inserted into these plays.

The Village Gift-Giving, and the Punishment of Niggards

On the morning of the day itself, the ‘Fool Plough’ was drawn through the streets and up to the doors of houses, where gifts of money, or of food and drink, were demanded from the householders. If these were given, as almost invariably they were, the young men shouted ‘largesse!’ and danced round the plough; if they were refused, the ground in front of the house was roughly ploughed up by way of punishment for the tenant’s want of generosity.

This probably happened rarely, but the knowledge that it could happen may often have acted as a powerful stimulus to generosity. “I have a vivid recollection,” wrote an observer seeing the Plough Monday mummers with their plough, “when I was a small boy at Parwich, near Ashbourne, in 1847, and was taken in to see the havoc made by the plough in the small front garden of a well-to-do but niggardly resident.”

The ploughmen themselves were all convinced that they had an inalienable right, based upon an ‘old charter’ of which no details were ever given, to act thus when the occasion arose; and although it is doubtful that the victims shared this belief, it is a curious fact that none ever seems to have attempted any retribution, apart from lively remonstrance. In a way, although the ploughmen’s behaviour may seem akin to ‘demanding money with menaces,’ it was in reality no worse than the ‘trick or treat’ pranks played by youngsters today on householders who do not reward them.

The Plough Light in the Parish Church

In the middle ages, part of the money collected was used to support the Plough Light maintained by the Ploughmen’s Guild in the parish church. This light burned before the Guild altar, and was never allowed to go out. After the Reformation, the Plough Light disappeared, and the money once gathered for it was given to the church wardens to help with parochial expenses, or went with the rest to provide a convivial evening for the performers.

The Day after Plough Monday and the ‘Straw Bear’ Tradition

In some areas of the country, the day following Plough Monday featured the ‘Straw Bears’ whereby selected individuals were dressed from head to foot in layers of straw, in a crude attempt to resemble a bear. In this garb they were led around the village, and the spectators invited to contribute money or goods.

Survival Today – the Plough Sunday Church Services

The lively secular celebrations of Plough Monday died out gradually at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, though their memory still lingers on in many rural communities. This was partly due to the decline in the agricultural workforce, especially after the Great War, and the over-reaction of the local constabulary in some cases. But Ploughtide was one of the seasons of the Church’s agricultural year, and an occasion for the blessing of tillage and the ploughing of the soil, and of that fact we are reminded today by the Plough Sunday services, which have become increasingly popular in many agricultural districts since.

Typically, on the day before the old festival, farmers and ploughmen who come, in the words of the service, ‘to offer the work of the countryside to the service of God’, bring a plough into the church. Prayers are offered for a plentiful harvest, that the people may be fed, and finally the plough is blessed, and with it the ploughmen and all who work in the local community.
Saffron – January  2003