Happy Plough Monday!
Plough Monday, which happens to be the first day of our spring semester, is celebrated in the northern and eastern parts of England and dates back to the fifteenth century. Plough Monday is the first Monday after Epiphany; Epiphany, which is celebrated on th, marks the end of the Christmas season, so Plough Monday marks the return to work after the festivities are over—just as you are now returning to class after the holidays.
Ancient customs and religious practices were used to protect and safeguard the plough which was so vital for the coming year’s crops. ‘Plough lights’ were kept burning in the parish church and feasts were held to celebrate the plough
(Cole, ). The celebration of Plough Monday involved pulling a decorated plough through the streets and asking for money, and anyone who failed to contribute might find a furrow cut through his doorstep! The collected money was then used to maintain the local church’s plough light.
According to a nineteenth-century handbook of English holidays:
The first Monday after Twelfth-day is called Plough Monday, and appears to have received that name because it was the first day after Christmas that husbandmen resumed the plough. In some parts of the country, and especially in the north, they draw the plough in procession to the doors of the villagers and townspeople. Long ropes are attached to it, and thirty or forty men, stripped to their clean white shirts, but protected from the weather by waistecoats beneath, drag it along. Their arms and shoulders are decorated with gay-coloured ribbons, tied in large knots and bows, and their hats are smartened in the same way. They are usually accompanied by an old woman, or a boy dressed up to represent one; she is gaily bedizened, and called the Bessy.
One variation on the Plough Monday celebration, still in use today, is found in Whittlesey, in Cambridgeshire. There, on the Tuesday after Plough Monday, a boy would dress as a “straw bear” with a heavy coat and hat made of straw (Figure 1). Formerly, this boy went door to door to demand food and money, but today, the straw bear appears in a big parade (Whittlesea Straw Bear, n.d.).