Abbots Bromley Horn Dance
Six of the dancers carry reindeer horns; the remaining four take the roles of a hobby horse, Maid Marian, a fool, and a youth with a bow and arrow.
The earliest written record of a hobby-horse performance at Abbots Bromley dates to 1532 and the first mention of the reindeer horns is from 1686.
The earliest written mention of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is in Robert Plot's Natural History of Staffordshire, published in 1686.
[1] According to an annotation by Sir Simon Degge in his copy of Plot's book, he had seen the dance being performed before the English Civil War (1642–1651).
[9] Parallels have been drawn to the prehistoric deer skull headdresses from Star Carr in Yorkshire, or the "Sorcerer" cave-painting from Trois-Frères in southern France,[a] as well as references in William Shakespeare's As You Like It to a deer-hunter being awarded the deer's "leather skin and horns to wear", and in Anthony Munday's The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon to Friar Tuck "carrying a stag's head dauncing", both from the end of the sixteenth century.
[7] In the seventeenth century, the dance was performed in the Christmas period[12] – according to Robert Plot, "on New Year, and Twelfth-day"[1] – but it now takes place on the Monday following the first Sunday after September 4.
[5] In the Tudor period, the use of hobby horses to raise money for the parish at Christmastime seems to have been widespread in the north Midlands.
Along with Abbots Bromley, it is attested at Stafford and at Culworth in Northamptonshire; a hobby-horse performance at Holme Pierrepoint in Nottinghamshire also probably took place in the winter.
[1] The dance starts at 8 a.m. at St Nicholas's Church in Abbots Bromley and travels around the parish before returning to the village at the end of the day.
[22] According to Robert Plot's account, in his day the dancer with the hobby horse also held the bow and arrow; Violet Alford doubts that it was possible for one person to do both.
[30] The eighteenth-century Staffordshire antiquarian Richard Wilkes claimed that the Abbots Bromley horns were brought by William Paget, the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
In the second, the dancers face off in two rows, dancing together and apart before crossing over, turning around, and repeating the process to return to their original place.
[43] A series of pencil drawings by Dave Pearson, In the Seven Woods, also depict the Abbots Bromley dance.
[44] In 2019, Royal Mail issued a set of stamps depicting unusual British customs and festivals which included the Abbots Bromley horn dance.
[46] The dance has been featured in exhibitions including Mummers, Maypoles, and Milkmaids: A Journey Through the English Ritual Year at the Horniman Museum in 2012,[47] and Making Michief: Folk Costume in Britain at Compton Verney in 2023.
