The Oxford Dictionary of English Folk Lore describes a plough jag as, “One of the three main types of mumming play, found only in the East Midlands, and first reported in the 1820s. Performances were concentrated on Plough Monday, but could take place at any time over the Christmas/New Year period, and were typically by teams of male farm workers who, in addition to performing the play around the neighbourhood, dragged a plough with them, and were thus often called by local names such as Plough Jags, Plough Bullocks, and so on. Plough plays invariably include the combat/cure sequence of the more widespread Hero-Combat type of play, but their main feature, which distinguishes them, is a ‘wooing’ section. Either a ‘Lady’ (played by a man) is wooed by a series of suitors or, more commonly, a Recruiting Sergeant entices the Lady’s farm worker lover away and she then accepts the Fool’s advances. Much of the wooing is expressed in sung dialogue.”
Plough Monday was “the first Monday after Twelfth Day (6 January) and in rural communities this was traditionally the day on which farm workers prepared to go back to work after the Christmas break, and to start the all-important task of ploughing the fields ready for sowing later in the year. The day itself had its own customs, including one in which one of the farm lads had to get into the kitchen and place one of the tools of his trade at the screen, or fireplace, before the maid had put the early morning water on to boil (see Tusser, 1580/1878 edn.: 180).
More common, however, was some form of ceremony involving a plough. In many areas there was a ‘common plough,’ housed in the church, which could be used by any smallholder too poor to own one himself. At New Year or Plough Monday the plough would be blessed by the parish priest and then decorated and paraded around the neighbourhood by the ploughboys of the local farms. Money collected by these men went to maintain the ‘plough lights,’ which were candles kept burning in the church to ensure continued divine blessing on this essential operation in the farming cycle. The Reformation of the church in the 16th century abolished both the lights and the plough blessing, and also removed the ecclesiastical sanction for the plough procession, but the latter continued, or was revived, by the farm workers who then collected money on their own behalf—to be spent on drink and merrymaking. The procession and plough were the main focus, but the custom took on divergent forms, with some teams performing versions of plough plays, others simply dancing and singing or reciting rhymes. The first known reference to the plough procession dates from January 1413, in Durham, but it is not until the 18th century that informative descriptions of the custom become available.”
Molly Dancing was “a customary dance tradition performed by men at the Christmas/New Year/ Plough Monday season in East Anglia in the 19th century and up to about the Second World War. It therefore comes under the classification of ceremonial dance, but Molly dancing was not as well developed or complex as other dance forms such as Morris or Sword dancing and has therefore received much less attention. The performance was sometimes dismissed as ‘just jigging about,’ but was loosely based on 19th-century social dances. Molly dancers wore ordinary clothes, decorated with ribbons and rosettes, and usually had blackened faces, and had at least one man dressed in women’s clothes, while in some teams they all wore female clothes. They danced in the village street and collected money door to door and from passers-by, who sometimes joined in.
“The earliest references so far discovered are found in local newspaper accounts for the 1820s, although the word ‘Molly’ in this context does before 1866. There are definite affinities with Plough Monday plough customs, and it is probable that Molly dancing developed from these, and like the ploughboys, Molly dancers had a reputation for being rough and ready, and even somewhat threatening. There has been renewed interest in recent years, and there are now many revival Molly dance teams. There are several possible derivations for the word ‘Molly’. It could well be simply a form of ‘Morris’, as many customary dance or drama customs were locally termed ‘morris dances’. However, ‘Molly’ is also common as a dialect word for a man dressed as a woman.
From the Old Glory: Molly Dancers and Musicians (http://old-glory.org.uk/index.htm), we learn, “There would also be gangs of Molly dancers, sometimes accompanying the plough gangs. Old Glory was formed in 1994 to revive the tradition of Molly dancing in East Suffolk. Molly dancing traditionally only appeared during the depths of winter and is regarded by many people as the East Anglian form of Morris. It is characterized by blackened faces, heavy boots (usually hobnailed) and the presence of a ‘Lord’ and a ‘Lady,’ two of the men specially attired respectively as a gentleman and his consort, who lead the dances. There are other characters in Old Glory, such as the ‘umbrella-man,’ who acts as announcer, a ‘box-man’ carrying a collecting box, the ‘broom-man,’ who clears the way for the dancers, and the ‘whiffler,’ whose job it is to marshal the dancers. Blackening faces was a form of disguise, since the dancers could not afford to be recognised. Some of those people from whom they had demanded money with menaces would have been their employers. Molly dancing is by nature robust and, some would say, aggressive. These qualities are emphasised by the sound of the hobnailed boots worn by the dancers, which were the normal form of footwear for farm workers in the East of England right up until the second half of the twentieth century.
There is very little known about the dances that Molly dancers of the early part of the twentieth century would have performed, other than that they resembled country dances, but danced using a slow, heavy step, and with much swinging about in pairs. We have constructed our own dances, based on such information as we have, and we have developed our own distinctive style – the ‘Waveney Valley’ tradition. The Molly dancers of Old Glory are all men, whilst the musicians are all women. The musicians play a variety of traditional instruments, invariably including at least one four-stop melodeon in the ‘Suffolk key’ of C.”
The word ‘mumming’ causes confusion, as it can refer to a number of relatively distinct customs, and many visiting custom have borne the name, but by far the most widespread is the mumming play. In late medieval times, it was the fashion amongst the nobility to stage elaborate ‘mummings’ which involved dressing up or disguising, such as wearing dragon, peacock, and swan heads, or dressing as angels. Other reports show that it was not only at court that people liked to disguise themselves at Christmas, and there were several occasions when attempts were made to ban mummings and disguisings to prevent masked young men roaming the streets getting up to mischief. A New Year custom, apparently confined to the Yorkshire area, involved parties of disguised people entering people’s houses on New Year’s Eve, without knocking as the doors had generally been left unlocked. The residents had to guess their identity, and once they did so offered food and drink to the visitors before they moved on to another house. The custom was almost exactly the same as that which is still going strong (also called mumming or mummering) in Newfoundland. ‘At Wakefield and Stanby (Yorkshire) the mummers enter a house, and if it be in a foul state they proceed to sweep the hearth, and clean the kitchen range, humming all the time “Mum-m-m”’ (Henderson, 1866: 54). In Barton, Cambridgeshire, up to about 1914, boys with blackened faces, calling themselves ‘mummers’, paraded the village singing a verse which has echoes from the mumming play (Porter, 1974: 72); and, in addition, some Christmas Eve carol-singers in the West Riding of Yorkshire were also called mummers, as were those who carried the wassail cup around in the Cleveland area.”
Enquiries with the North Lincolnshire Museum yielded the following information. (http://www.folkplay.info/Forum/TD_Forum_6_Burton_upon_Stather.htm)- Burton upon Stather Plough Jags: A Photographic Query
The photo of plough jags from Burton-upon-Stather has appeared in three publications. The first is North Lincolnshire. A pictorial history by Kevin Leahy and David Williams published by North Lincolnshire Council in 1996 on page 61 with the following caption, and is probably where the scanned image came from;
“Burton-upon-Stather Plough Jags, 1907. Plough plays, representing death and resurrection, have their roots in the village culture of the Middle Ages. This simple ceremony was an allegory of the burial and growth of seed. The plays were preceded by a procession which included the terrifying hobby-horse, and Besom Betty. They were performed on Plough Monday which was the first Monday in January. Newspaper reports of the 1870s and 1880s record the decline of the plays, although some, as at Burton-on-Stather, lingered on into the twentieth-century.”
The second was in 1996 in The Parish of Burton upon Stather with Normanby and Thealby by Geoffrey Robinson M.B.E., on page 60 with the following caption;
“The annual Festival of the Plough Jacks (corrupted to Jags) took place on or about Monday, January 9th. Its origin was embodied in the idea of invoking a blessing on the ploughman and his plough. In the 1850/60’s the Sheffield family took a prominent part in encouraging the entertainment when a plough was drawn through a large fire kindled in the courtyard of Normanby Park. Jarvis writes that ‘many a barrel of beer was given by the squire on these occasions, but like many a good thing, got out of hand’. A fatal accident occurred in connection with the event and the glamour of the Plough Festival ceased.”
He has since given his large collection of photographs to the Museum. The third was Twentieth Century Lincolnshire in the History of Lincolnshire Series edited by Dennis Mills on page 354 in 1989 with this caption;
“The Burton-upon-Stather (or Burton Stather) Plough Jags, 1907. They are said to have been ‘a double gang, who often split up to work a village quickly, gathering together at the best and likeliest houses’. According to Mrs.E.H.Rudkin, they were ‘Four Hat Men, two Besom Betties, two Niggers, two Hobby Horses, one Doctor, one Soldier, one Lady’. Source: D.N. Robinson Collection.”
