Wrestling for the boar’s head

At Hornchurch the lessee of the tithes, which belonged to New College, Oxford, provided a boar’s head, dressed and garnished with bay leaves, every Christmas Day. In the afternoon it was carried in procession into the Mill Field next to the churchyard and wrestled for. The winner and his friends feasted on it at a public house. The church also bore the model of an ox’s head, with horns, on the east end of its chancel.