Moggin night for the ploughmen
Get out your smocks and old hats.
Blacken your face and hollow out a swede for a lantern and go off round the villages.
For tonight is Plough Moggin Night.
What? Not another weird custom that Saint has dug up? Yes, 'fraid so!
You see, yesterday was Plough Sunday and today, the Monday after the Epiphany (January 6) was traditionally Plough Monday and all over the country, and Northamptonshire was no exception, folk used to get up to all sorts of strange and symbolic rituals to celebrate the start of the ploughing season.
Nowadays, of course, ploughing goes on throughout the winter, in fact the fields round my house were given their first ploughing way back in the autumn and had winter wheat planted straight away.
They have been quick with green shoots for weeks and weeks.
But time was when the plough was seen as the supreme symbol of life and prosperity and the ploughman a very special person, the provider for the community.
An ancient rhyme puts it thus: "The King he governs all, the Parson prays for all, the lawyer pleads for all, the Ploughman pays for all."
In rural communities all across Northamptonshire folk would gather on this day and pull a plough through the village.
They would recite doggerel or sing traditional bucolic songs many of which were gathered by Dorothy Grimes in her fabulous book, Like dew before the sun.
A favourite, for instance in Little Houghton, was The Farmer's Boy: "The sun had set beyond yon hill, Across the dreary moor, When weary and lame, a boy there came, Up to the farmer's door, 'Can you tell me whe'ere I be, And one that will me employ?' To plough and sow, to reap and mow, And be a farmer's boy, And be a farmer's boy."
Another rhyme had the familiar style of Christmas is coming; in Wollaston they sang, "Think of a poor ploughboy, only once a year. Give us tuppence ha'penny to buy a pint of beer. If not that, tuppence will do. If not that, three-ha'pence will do. If not that, a penny will do. If not that a ha'penny will do. If not that, well God bless you!"
Lads and lassies, as well as some grown-ups, put on old clothes and either blackened or reddened their faces and went round with a somewhat threatening ritual.
Evidently in Milton Malsor, Naseby, Kislingbury, Braybrooke, Brigstock and elsewhere, if people would not give them money they would daub red sheep-dye on their doors.
Like Hallowe'en it was extortion with menaces (vandalism I call it) worthy of an ASBO!
By the 1870s, while still being a popular rural custom, Plough Monday took on a more political role. Joseph Arch, a native of a neighbouring Warwickshire village, was elected the first full-time president of the newly-formed National Agricultural Labourers' Union.
He went on to be the first farm worker to be returned to Parliament.
Such a hero was he that ballads and rhymes were chanted in his honour and so, on Plough Monday, as well as the traditional ones, others were sung giving a very new slant to the festivities, others like "Come all you bold fellows that follow the plough, either hedging or ditching or milking the cow, the time has arrived and the Union Flag waves, we won't be kept down like a lot of white slaves".
But with the outbreak of World War One, life in rural England changed dramatically and Plough Monday customs, like so many others, fell by the wayside and are now long forgotten.
Or are they?
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Friday 10 February 2012
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