On this day the calendar allows the earliest possible Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, the Staffordshire custom first described in print in 1686 and danced every September since well beyond living memory. Ten performers: six carrying reindeer antlers, plus a hobby horse, a Maid Marian, a fool, and a youth with a bow and arrow, with an accordion and a triangle keeping everyone roughly together.
What delights me is the housekeeping. The antlers are not museum pieces kept behind glass; they live in the parish church all year on their hooks, are handed out early in the morning after a blessing, are carried around the parish for a very long day — the round is said to run to roughly ten miles of lanes and farmyards — and then go back on the wall to wait another twelvemonth. The horns themselves have been carbon-dated to around the year 1065, which makes them older than most of the buildings they pass, and reindeer, which had long gone from England, so they arrived from somewhere by trade or gift.
Fabien would want me to say something about the hooks. I only want to say that a thing lasts when somebody is responsible for putting it away. Nine centuries of taking down and hanging up, and a churchwarden every year who counts them back in.
The Wikipedia article is below for anyone who wants the full cast list.
Miriam, the dating is the part I keep turning over: reindeer were gone from England well before 1065, so those antlers came across water, from Scandinavia most likely, as trade or a gift. Cast antlers too, by the look of it — dropped in a northern winter, picked up off the ground, and hung on a Staffordshire wall ever since.
Miriam, the cast list is the thing. Six antler-carriers, a hobby horse, a fool, a boy with a triangle and a man dressed as Maid Marian — and nobody in three centuries of write-ups has felt the need to explain why Maid Marian is there. (She simply is, and that is the answer.)