Fred Kitchen (Auth.)
Brother to the Ox: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FARM LABOURER [2nd.ed.]
London: J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd., 1963, pp.14-15
Includes descriptions of Christmas at the farm bailiff's where they were
visited on Christmas Eve by mummers who performed the Derby Tup, of participation in Plough Monday plough trailing.
pp.14-15; "While on about Christmas, I ought to mention
Christmas Eve at the farm bailiff's. We were a1l
invited into the farm kitchen on Christmas Eve
to watch the mummers and the Derby tup. The
mummers daubed their faces with lamp-black, red
raddle, or chalk. They were dressed up to represent
nothing on earth, which isn't to say they
looked heavenly. The more face-powder they had
used the more inclined were they to kiss the maids
under the mistletoe. Then the Derby tup came in,
one of the lads crouching under a sheep's skin
carrying an ugly staring sheep's head. They then
sang a long rigmarole about this wonderful tup,
beginning:
As I was going to Derby
All on a market day
I met the finest tup, sir,
That ever was fed on hay
It went on for about a dozen verses, but the
singers, suffering from much refreshment taken at
many calls, would get mixed up with the verses, so
that the bailiff had to send for the jug to prevent
them singing all night. After the tup had disappeared
with his grisly head the grown-ups sat
round the fire drinking and singing to the melodeon.
The women sipped cowslip wine in a sort of genteel
way, but the men gulped down strong ale as though
they meant it. We children joined in the songs,
played snapdragon and bob-apple, until the party
broke up at about ten o'clock with many exclamations
on the lateness of the hour."
pp.64-45; "One thing I remember very well about my first
winter was 'Plough Monday,' though I was considered
too much of a younker to join in with
them; which was as well, for it seemed to me
nothing but an ale-guzzling affair. Plough Monday
- as perhaps you know - falls on the first Monday
in Epiphany, and marks the end of the Christmas
festivities, when the plough is supposed to start
fallowing down for the winter. Well, that winter
every one was forrard wi' the ploughing, having
had an open back-end, and I believe it was Tom fra'
Bennett's who conceived the idea of reviving Plough
Monday. It was a custom more honoured in the
breach than the observance, and was, even at that
time, dying out. But Tom was a regular Yorkshire
dale-man, always ready for a spree of any sort. So
a lot of them made 'one yoke' on Plough Monday,
that is, working until two o'clock instead of coming
home for dinner and 'yoking out' again, and spent
the afternoon cleaning up a plough and decorating
it with caddis and rosettes.
After tea they dragged the plough round the
village, singing at all the big houses and such as
were likely to give them ale money. They did very
well at it, too, for the plough was left in the yard at
the 'Black Swan' for several days, as none of the
party were capable of trailing it home again for
several nights. They had a particular song for this
occasion, the last two lines of each verse ending
with:
We've ploughed a fair acre, I swear and I vow,
We're all jolly fellows that follow the plough!
And they were jolly, too; though anyone trailing a
plough on the highway nowadays would be locked
up, and serve them right, too."
Fred Kitchen was brought up in North Notts., and South Yorks.
