Horkey

"[3] Among additional details in The English Dialect Dictionary, it is mentioned that the last load of the harvest was brought in decked with festive boughs or decorated with a corn dolly woven of stalks.

Archbishop Parker's rhyming translation of Psalm 126, published in 1560, ends with the reassurance that Further literary evidence points to a number of customs established around the final gathering of the harvest at this period.

Its second stanza, repeated throughout the scene, contains the call "Hooky, Hooky", on which the text's Victorian editor commented that the refrain "is still heard in some parts of the kingdom, with this variation, Near the start of the following century, Sir Thomas Overbury invoked the custom while describing the honest yeoman who "thinks not the bones of the dead anything bruised or the worse for it, though the country lasses dance in the church-yard after evensong.

A cake of a richer kind was later mentioned in a couplet from Poor Robin's Almanack for 1676, a publication originally associated with Saffron Walden: "Hoacky is brought home with hallowing, /Boys with plum-cake the cart following.

A correspondent in the New Monthly Magazine, describing a similar festivity he attended at a farm near Bury St Edmunds in 1820, appealed to Bloomfield's poem as his touchstone.

[13] The author noted that his description was from his native Saffron Walden; it differs from Bloomfield's in the detail that the "largess" call follows the payment of wages on the day after the feast.

[15] By 1934, the artist Thomas Hennell was commenting that "since the passing of the Agricultural Wages Bill, the Horkey has been generally abandoned, though one or two landowners in the eastern counties are still generous enough to give a supper each year".