Dancing in the hog’s trough

A clergyman writing to Chambers about marriage customs among East Anglian labourers said that when a younger sister married before the elder, the elder had to dance in the hog’s trough. In the case he knew of a few years before, a brother danced too, and the pair danced so hard that they knocked both ends off the trough and broke it in two. In the West of England, he added, the rule was that the elder sister must dance in green stockings.