Hooden Horse, Hoodeners’ Horse

There used to be a pub at Wickambreaux, near Canterbury, which had the unusual name of Hooden Horse, and there is still one called The Hoodeners’ Horse at Great Chart, near Ashford (Kent). These names refer to the old Kentish custom of ‘hoodening’ on Christmas Eve, when a small group of farm labourers would go from house to house, escorting a ‘horse’. This was a figure manipulated by one of the group, consisting of a wooden head with a hinged clacking jaw, mounted on a short pole and decorated with ribbons and horse brasses; the man who carried it was hidden by a cloth fixed to the pole and walked bent double, to represent the horse’s body. The rest of the group would be ringing hand-bells, or playing a fiddle or melodeon, or singing. There would probably be one man dressed as a woman with a broom (the ‘Molly’), and another pretending to be a jockey. When they called at a house, the horse would behave comically, pretending to kick and bite, while the ‘jockey’ tried to mount it, and the ‘Molly’ swept the floor. The group would be given beer and cakes, and perhaps money.

‘Hooden’ was originally pronounced ‘ooden’; it probably means ‘hooded’, or just possibly ‘wooden’. It is very unlikely to refer to the pagan Saxon god Woden, though this romantic idea was put forward in the pamphlet issued when the Wickambreaux pub adopted its name in 1956. Leslie Dunkling and Gordon Wright, in Pub Names of Britain, link the custom to the hop harvest; they say that to ‘hooden’ the hops means to put them in the oast-house to dry, and that the ‘horse’ was celebrating this. It is an attractive idea, but unfortunately the hop harvest is in September, and all records of the Hooden Horse custom place it on Christmas Eve.

The custom was first clearly described in 1809; it was known in about thirty places along the north and east coasts of Kent up to the beginning of the twentieth century, but died out around 1910. After the Second World War it was revived in many places, sometimes with the addition of Morris dancing.

Jacqueline is the author of Green Men and White Swans, an enchanting guide to the stories and legends behind Britain's traditional pub names.