In a remarkable photograph by Benjamin Stone, from around 1899, six men in breeches of a criss-cross floral pattern hold up great reindeer antlers. (Carbon dating of these objects produced the year 1066, plus or minus 80.) A man in a bowler hat holds a squeeze box and on the right a serious-faced boy stands with a hobby-horse head emerging from the cloth that swathes him.
The photograph features in the exhibition Making Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain. It shows the Abbots Bromley horn dance, performed annually on the Monday after Old St Bartholomew’s Day (4 September). Never mind that the breeches were made in the 1880s by Mrs J. Manley Lowe, wife of the vicar of this Staffordshire parish. The origins of the mysterious antlers are anyone’s guess, and the hobby horse immediately connects it with otherworldly horses in folk performances that spectators like to think date from time immemorial.
With false eyes inserted and the jaw made to snap, the perambulating horse skull presented a ghastly aspect
Take the famous Padstow hobby horse, which comes out every May Day.
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