Hobby horse

The famous May Day horses at Padstow and Minehead are large constructions, suspended at shoulder level, with only the performer's head emerging; they wear tall, pointed hats and their faces are masked.

[4] In the South of France, in Belgium (the Ommegang de Termonde) and elsewhere, large hobby horses are carried by multiple performers; their hollow frameworks are constructed in various ways.

They are made from a circular framework, tightly covered with shiny black material, carried on the shoulders of a dancer whose face is hidden by a grotesque mask attached to a tall, pointed hat.

The Hunting of the Earl of Rone[6] A hobby horse is depicted in a stained-glass window, dating from between 1550 and 1621, from Betley Hall, Staffordshire, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, directly below a maypole and surrounded by what appear to be morris dancers (accession no.

[7] A painting from c.1620, by an unknown artist, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, shows Morris dancers by the Thames at Richmond; their party includes a hobby horse.

[8][9] The 1621 play The Witch of Edmonton, by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford, features a group of Morris dancers with a hobby horse.

[10][11] A Christmas and New Year custom from the Isle of Man, involving a white-painted wooden horse's head with red-painted snapping jaws, with a white sheet attached.

When the Laair Vane (white mare) caught a girl she would take his place under the sheet to carry the horse back into the house, sitting away from the others while a kind of sword-dance was performed with sticks by six male dancers to the tune "Mylecharane's March" played on the fiddle.

[13] A similar creature, the Mari Lwyd ("Grey Mare" in English), also made from a horse's skull, with a white sheet attached, took part in New Year house-visiting, luck-bringing rituals in south-east Wales.

[16] The custom as now performed in Richmond Market Place around midday on Christmas Eve involves the horse's "death and resurrection" (he crouches down and then rises up when a hunting horn is blown).

In North Lincolnshire, large teams of elaborately costumed mummers, often having some of the characters duplicated, paraded through the village streets, sometimes splitting up into smaller groups to enter houses and perform extracts from their traditional play.

It rarely appears nowadays, being kept in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, along with its companion Hob-Nob, a tourney-type hobby horse, a mischievous character which used to clear the way for the Giant in the processions that were held by the Tailor's Guild on Midsummer's Eve.

The first clear mention of the hobby horse is in 1572 (along with a "mayde Marrians Coate") in the records of the Tailors' Guild (who, in 1873, finally sold both hobby-horse and Giant to the Museum).

The performers are grouped around a mast horse (possibly 'Snap Dragon'; see below) with a shiny black head made from a painted skull set on a short pole.

Its reins are held by a man dressed in a red jacket, and it is closely followed by a boy (who occasionally prods it with a wooden hay-fork) and a blacksmith in an apron (who carries a bag containing a hammer).

An unruly gang of rustically dressed characters, wearing masks or facial disguise, rushes into the dancing area in pairs, with loud cries.

[28] The festival has been recognised by UNESCO since 2005 as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity under the general heading of "Processional Giants and Dragons in Belgium and France".

[29] The finale to the Shrovetide processions in the town of Hlinsko, in the Czech Republic, and six nearby villages (including Hamry, Blatno, Studnice and Vortová), in the Hlinecko region of eastern Bohemia, is a ritual called "Killing the Mare".

[31] At Pézenas there is a huge creature called Le Poulain or Lo Polin (Occitan for "the colt"), carried by nine men and led by another, accompanied by a band of musicians.

[34] Originally the Poulain had no riders; Estieinou and Estieinette (sometimes spelled Estiénon and Estiéneta in the French manner) are meant to recall another royal occasion when Louis XIII visited the town in 1622; the Maréchal de Bassompierre, following the King, was crossing the river Peyne on horseback.

There is a very lively Poulain at Saint-Thibéry and others are (or have been) known at Adissan, Alignan-du-Vent, Florensac, Montblanc and Vias (where it is linked to a local legend of a medieval famine and is known as lo Pouli de la Fabo – the colt of the bean).

The Âne is brought out to open the feast of St Laurent, appearing first at 5pm on the Saturday closest to the saint's day, accompanied by firecrackers and bells, then again on the Sunday morning when it goes to a Mass to be blessed, before its final dance.

[39][40] Their performances are faithfully based on authentic traditions, such as the Chivau Frusc cited by author Frederic Mistral at Aix-en-Provence[41] and folklorist Violet Alford, principally at Brignoles but also "all over southern Provence".

[47] The teams of Irish mummers known as Wrenboys who perform on Saint Stephen's Day (26 December) in pubs and private houses have been known to include a white hobby horse (Láir Bhán – c.f.

[48] At Ballycotton, in Co. Cork, a Láir bhán led a procession of horn-blowing youths at Halloween who collected money "in the name of Muck Olla" (a legendary giant boar).

[51] Dressed in red trimmed with yellow, six tourney horses (xaldiko[51] or zaldiko) take part in the comparsa de gigantes y cabezudos in Pamplona (Iruña) in Navarre, Spain (Nafarroa).

Each "rider" wears a pointed cap with a tassel and used to wield an inflated bladder on a stick; now, like the tricorned big-heads called kilikis who parade with them, they carry a phallic pizzle made of foam-rubber which they use to belabour the onlookers.

Larger figures of mules are also found in several places, carried by two performers whose legs are visible beneath a skirt hanging from the animal's hollow body.

The other creatures that take part are the àliga (eagle), bou (bull), cucafera (coco, a mythical monster), drac de Sant Roc (dragon of Saint Roch), lleó (lion), and víbria (a female wyvern with prominent breasts).

[57][58] A May-Day procession including a Teaser, a Fool, and a Hobby Horse that tries to capture women under its skirts features in the climactic scenes of the 1973 British cult-horror flick The Wicker Man.