Dorset Ooser
The head was hollow, thus perhaps serving as a mask, and included a humanoid face with horns, a beard, and a hinged jaw which allowed the mouth to open and close.
Although sometimes used to scare people during practical jokes, its main recorded purpose was as part of a local variant of the charivari custom known as "skimity riding" or "rough music", in which it was used to humiliate those who were deemed to have behaved in an immoral manner.
The Dorset Ooser was first brought to public attention in 1891, at which time it was under the ownership of the Cave family of Melbury Osmond's Holt Farm.
Since then, various folklorists and historians have debated the origins of the head, which has possible connections to the horned costumes sometimes worn by participants in English Mummers plays.
The folklorists Frederick Thomas Elworthy and H. S. L. Dewar believed that the head was a representation of the Devil and thus was designed to intimidate people into behaving according to the local community's moral system.
Conversely, the folklorist Margaret Murray suggested that it represented a pre-Christian god of fertility whose worship survived in Dorset into the modern period, although more recent scholarship has been highly sceptical of this interpretation.
A wooden head, the Dorset Ooser had been cut from a single block of timber, with the exception of the lower jaw, which was movable and connected to the rest of the mask by leather hinges.
[1] The historian Ronald Hutton described the Ooser as "a terrifying horned mask with human face, staring eyes, beard, and gnashing teeth".
[4] Hutton instead proposed that Osser possibly derived from Wooset, a term used in the dialect around Wiltshire to refer to a pole upon which a horse's skull with deer's horns was affixed.
This Wooset was recorded as having been paraded by youths in the Marlborough district until the 1830s, where it was used to mock neighbours whose partners were suspected of marital infidelity, the horns being a traditional sign of cuckoldry.
[6] Mayo noted that it was "possibly the only example now in existence, or at any rate from one of the very few which may still survive in the County",[1] adding that Cave was "willing to dispose of this mask to a lover of objects of antiquarian interest".
[6] At some point before 1897, another member of the family, the doctor Edward Cave, left Holt Farm and moved to Crewkerne in Somerset, taking the Ooser with him.
[2] In 1897, he relocated to Bath, leaving the Ooser with his family coachman; when Edward Cave subsequently tried to recover the head, he was informed that it had been "disposed of", with some suggestion that it had found its way to the United States.
[1] The following year, the curator of the Dorset County Museum, Henry Joseph Moule, published a note in the same journal relating that their childhood nurse, who was from the village of Cerne Abbas, had talked about the head, and had referred to it as the "Wurser".
[9] As he deemed it too heavy to be carried or worn by an individual, the historian of folklore Peter Robson later suggested that the Ooser might originally have been mounted in a carnival procession.
