The Hobby Horse of Paget’s Bromley

Plot’s Natural History of Staffordshire records a Twelfth Day custom at Paget’s Bromley, now Abbots Bromley, which had gone out by the seventeenth century. A man came through the village with a mock horse fastened to him, dancing and making a snapping noise with a bow and arrow. With him went half a dozen villagers wearing deer’s heads painted with the arms of the chief landlords, who danced the Hays and other country dances to music. A great pot of ale and cakes was raised by the village, and the surplus paid for church repairs and the poor. The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is still danced, now in September.