The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

I know that many events have been cancelled in the wake of Queen Elizabeth's passing but, as far as I know, this delicious slice of British eccentricity is due to happen today ...

Today is Wakes Monday, the first Monday following the first Sunday after (but not on) September 4th (got that?). So today is the day of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in Staffordshire. 

The dance, supposedly first performed at the Barthelmy Fair in August 1226, is one of the oldest mediaeval events to have survived to the present day (I'm pretty sure there will be an epic event in four years time to celebrate its 800th year). 

After collecting the horns from the local church at eight o’clock in the morning, the Horn Dancers -  comprising six Deer-men, a Fool, Hobby Horse, Bowman and Maid Marian - perform their dance to music provided by a melodion player at locations throughout the village and its surrounding farms and pubs. It's a good walk of about 10 miles (16km). Then, at the end of a long and exhausting day, the horns are returned to the church in the evening.

   

How do we know that the dance is nearly 800 years old?  We don't for sure - a lot of folk traditions were retired or banned by Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Parliament but have since been revived. And there are no recorded references to the Horn Dance prior to Robert Plot's Natural History of Staffordshire, written in 1686, which would seem an odd omission. However, there are records of the hobby horse being used in Abbots Bromley as early as 1532, and it is possible that the horn dance component of the custom was also present at that time but not commented upon by the writer. 

Meanwhile, chemical analysis has discovered that the antlers used in the dance do date to the 11th century. According to some, the use of antlers suggests an Anglo-Saxon origin and that the dance was connected with the ruling dynasty of Mercia, based some 15 miles away at Tamworth. They owned extensive hunting lands in Needwood Forest and Cannock Chase surrounding Abbots Bromley. 

Based on this theory, the royal forester would have organised sympathetic magic rituals to ensure a plentiful catch each year, a tradition that survived into Christian times and gradually came to be seen as affirming the villagers' hunting rights. Even when the lands were granted to Burton Abbey in 1004 a forester would still need to have been employed. By the 16th century, when the abbey was dissolved, this was a hereditary position with the title 'Forester of Bentylee' (Bentylee being the wooded area of the parish). From then until the 19th century the dance remained the traditional prerogative of the Bentley family, eventually passing to the Fowell family in 1914. The Fowells continue to run it to this day.

   

Such an ancient origin for the dance has been doubted by some folklorists, who point out that while the reindeer antlers date to the 11th century, reindeer were long since extinct in England and Wales (and probably Scotland), and there is no evidence that any domestic reindeer herds remained at that time. Therefore, even more confusingly, the antlers must have been imported from Scandinavia at some point between the 11th and 17th centuries. However, this may lend weight to the theory that the custom originally began with only a hobby horse, and the horn dance component was added later - which would explain why only the former was mentioned by 16th century sources. 

But, at the end of the day, what really matters is that the tradition is being kept alive.