What is "hoodening"

alt. An old English tradition of ploughing teams, who would carry a wooden horse's head on a pole and ask for money from local landowners. n. An old English tradition of ploughing teams, who would carry a wooden horse's head on a pole and ask for money from local landowners.

Hoodening , also spelled Hodening and Oodening, is a folk custom found in Kent, a county in south-eastern England. The tradition entails the use of a wooden hobby horse known as a hooden horse which is mounted on a pole and carried by an individual 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 the British Isles.

As recorded from the eighteenth through 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 horse on its travels around the local area, and although the makeup of such groups varied, they typically included an individual 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 which 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 the term "hooden" was related to the pre-Christian god Woden, and that the tradition therefore originated with pre-Christian religious practices in the Early Medieval Kingdom of Kent, however this approach has not found support from historians or folklorists studying the tradition. Most scholars to have commented on the custom have thought it most likely that the term "hooden" relates to "hooded", a reference to the sackcloth worn by the individual carrying the horse.

The earliest textual reference to the hoodening tradition comes from the first half of the eighteenth century. A number of scattered references to it appeared over the next century and a half, many of which considered it to be a declining tradition that had become extinct 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 a number of modern Kentish folk traditions.