The Daily: 13 January 2025

Plough Monday

Plough Monday is an ancient rustic holiday that became attached to the Christmas holiday tradition. Plough Monday may trace its descent back to the Roman Compitalia, celebrated by slaves when plowing was over. But by the mid-15th century it became the traditional end to the Christmas season, the end of the season of no plowing, no work. Christmas concluded on Epiphany, and the week that followed saw a reversion to normal time, normal work time. So that week’s beginning, that Monday, became Plough Monday. Also known as Fool Plough or Fond Plough, Plough Monday was observed in England up through the late 1800s with music, dancing, processions, mumming and other forms of ritualized begging. It was not notably productive work time.

However, for medieval farmers the end of the winter holiday season was, in fact, the beginning of the plowing season. Arable fields would have been left in stubble from the previous harvest. The soil, wet through by autumn and winter rains, would then be turned under by the plow as soon as the ground was accessible. By January, the soil was ready, though maybe not accessible. It was time to start thinking about beginning that work — though it was mostly thinking, not doing. Plough Monday was a celebration of the work that had not yet started.

As early as the 13th century, this return to work was presaged with a plow race or in some cases the drawing of a plow around a bonfire. In typical celebrations, a group of farmers — or plow-men, as they were called — would hitch themselves to a plow and drag it through the village streets, accompanied by dancers and musicians. The plow-men would shout the refrain “God-speed the plough” and beg for money or gifts. There was often an element of coercion to this begging. One late 18th century observer noted “If you refuse them, they plough up your dunghill”. At times spurned plow-men would leave an even more conspicuous message by digging up the front yard. Thus even the poorest cottagers dropped a coin or two into the donation box.

The custom of blessing the plow is still followed in some English villages. A plow is decorated and brought into the village church on the day before Plough Monday to receive blessings that confer fertility on the plow. Some communities even maintained a ceremonial plow for Plough Monday ceremonies — an elaborate creation, several times larger than a functional plow and often made of wood even after metal blades were in use.

Only the richer landowners could afford their own plow. Poorer folks took turns borrowing a communal one. In some communities, money was lent with the town plow to enable farmers to begin the work season. This money was collected through the custom of maintaining plough lights, often under a local guild dedicated to the cause. Plough lights, special candles, were kept burning in churches before images of saints to ensure a successful harvest. The plough lights were largely extinguished with Henry VIII’s ban on candles and lamps in churches. However, even after the 16th century Reformation wiped out saint veneration, the celebration of Plough Monday remained. The money originally raised for plough lights and community charity now paid for for ale in the local tavern.

From the beginning, dances were performed around the plow. The dance sometimes acted out the revival of the earth in spring. One tradition had it that the year’s grain would grow as high as the dancers could leap, leading to rather wild dancing. Some villages would also drag the plow or a heavy log over the winter fields, symbolically plowing the fallows to ensure fertility in the coming year. But the most typical dance was some form of the Morris or Sword Dance, accompanied by mumming a very roughly standardized “Plough Play”.

The processional characters varied in dress and name across England, though the whole group itself was commonly known simply as Plough Boys, or sometimes Plough Bullocks and even Plough Witches. Several stock characters were included in the pantomime. One man known as “the Bessy” would dress in women’s clothing (the Maid Marion character of Morris Dance). The Bessy is a stock character in pantomime and mumming, but she is particularly associated with Plough Monday as she normally carried the donation box.

Another character known as “the Fool” wore animal skins or a fur hat and tail. In the Sword Dance versions, the Fool was often “decapitated” at the climax of the dance. The other dancers would then call for a doctor who would appear and proceed to revive the Fool with “medicine” from a bottle. The death and resurrection of the Fool of course symbolized the harvest and then miraculous rebirth of grain in spring.

In some variants of the play, one of the plough men would woo a lady (sometimes the Bessy, others merely a generic woman, usually a lad in drag) who would invariably choose the Fool over the amorous farmer. In some localities, another coarser transvestite named “Dame Jane” would show up to accost the Fool and accuse him of fathering her child. This wooing element was believed older than any combat or resurrection motifs though there is scant evidence for any of the Plough Play themes before the mid-16th century. Mumming seems to have been grafted onto the plough procession when the original reason to hold that procession — to raise money for the poorer farmers through the custom of plough lights — was suppressed by the Reformation.

Plough Monday parades and plays have experienced a renaissance, riding on the renewed interest in folk traditions which took hold in the 1960s. Colorful festivals can now be found in many localities throughout the UK. While these are not notable for their ancient pedigrees, they are quite like the original Plough Monday parades in that they support and derive from the entire community and lack the tension between a special group coercing money from the rest of the villagers.

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The Wolf Moon is full this evening at 5:26pm in my part of the world. It is full for you at the same moment, whatever 5:26pm EST is in your time zone. Hence, it might actually be full on January 14th. For example, in Beijing, the Wolf Moon is full at 6:26am on the 14th. This is sometimes hard for people to wrap their heads around, but the phase of the moon is not relative to the viewer and their local time. It is the precise point in the moon’s orbit when the the full face of the moon is illuminated by the sun. That point is the same all around the world. So when I say that it is happening at 5:26pm all over the world, I mean at that moment, whatever time that is where you are, not at that time. For me, the fullness is reached at 5:26pm, so the full Wolf Moon is also very close to moonrise here in central Vermont. Moonrise is relative to the viewer’s position on this planet. Moonrise today is at 4:07pm here in my town and for everyone at my latitude. Beijing, which is south of central Vermont, sees moonrise at 4:12pm today and 5:22pm tomorrow. So moonrise is not very close to peak fullness in Beijing, neither before the full, nor after. The moon rising over the eastern horizon will not look as full in Beijing as it will here in Vermont.

Can you tell that I am feeling a bit annoyed by moon ignorance and, indeed, time ignorance? I grind my teeth when I read an almanac that says that the moon is full at such and such a time, giving no indication that that time is contingent on where you are located. This is a subtle — though irritating — effect of privileging peoples and places. The almanac is saying that the moon is on my time. My time is normal. You all just have to adjust yourself to that. Now, there is a certain degree of difficulty in the language we use to name time. (Itself a product of normalizing privilege…) I can’t say the moon is full at “this moment whatever time that is around the world”. There are no words for that moment in my language, which is all about normalizing one privileged group and making everything else the Other. So I have to give my clock time and hope that you can interpret that properly, though I do regularly talk about moon time and hopefully have made it clear that clock time is not the measure of the moment. Hopefully… though sometimes I do feel that I have to go all pedantically precise and spell it all out again, just to assuage the guilt I feel about the language that I am using.

Language and privileging are sort of at the forefront of my mind right now. In my language, the Wolf Moon is a predatory time. Wolves are evil and bloodthirsty. Darkness is wrong. Winter is death, and not merely rest. And that all may actually be the intent behind the choice to name this moon cycle after the wolves in my language, but I don’t believe that was the intention of our ancestors — who did not speak English when they named this lunation. No doubt, they had more reason to fear wolves and darkness and cold winters than we do with our artifice and separation from the world. But in their time, wolves were respected. Wolves were clan totems for the most powerful clans. Our ancestors venerated and emulated the wolves — wolves as they are, not wolves as our culture portrays them. Similarly, darkness and winter were celebrated. Darkness and winter were set apart as holy times of rest and recuperation. This lunation was not time for work, not even time to hunt, but time for joyful play, for dreaming, for sleep — which also was not a synonym for death, but a vital and important aspect of living, as essential to all pursuits as waking time and possibly more vital to creation and creativity than the conscious, daylight hours.

It’s important to be aware of these language barriers and screens. My language is significantly younger than most of the traditions within my own culture. The meanings and use of these words are foreign to many of the things these words represent. Furthermore, English has never existed outside the paradigm of dominance and privilege and the separation from and distortion of reality that privilege engenders. The choice of naming a time after wolves has a very different connotation in my language than it did for the peoples who chose that name. For one thing, my language hides the principal activity of wolves at this time, the reason wolves are prominent at this time of year. It’s not because wolves ate more humans and their livestock in the winter. It’s because wolves were breeding in the late winter. This was the season of love, the time when our canine friends were creating families, the moon of burrowing and turning away from the pursuits of the outside world to focus on procreation. Even the howl of a wolf means something different to those who know what this time means for wolves — and for humans. English-speakers hear a threat. Those who listen to the world hear a love-song.

The singer is similarly altered in my language. In my culture, wolves are violent males, bent on dominance, because that is what we equate with strength — and wolves are undoubtedly strong. But those singers in actuality? In a natural, low-density distribution of wolves, females make up as much as 70% of the population. The Wolf Moon singer is very likely a female, a mother, signaling her intention to mate, to create a family, not a male marking hunting territory. That does happen, but it is statistically less probable whenever you hear wolf-song in winter.

Our ancestors knew this. They spent considerable time watching wolves. There is reason to believe that our earliest human ancestors were domesticated by wolves, or at least reason to believe that we learned how to be a family, a pack, from the social structures we observed in wolf society. We are not very like other primates (though our understanding of the social structures of other primates is also distorted by our languages and ideas of privilege). We are, however, very like canines, particularly when we are left to our own devices, as was true for most of our ancestors. So they knew the breeding cycle of the wolf. They knew what the songs meant. They knew who was singing and why. And they very likely found joy in that song. At the very least, there was wonder under the Wolf Moon.

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And now here is a strange little tale for the Full Wolf Moon… the Full Wolf Moon as it is…

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Soothsayers

It began with attention, a habitual awareness of the world. My grandmothers noticed, generally, they consciously observed, they saw and heard and felt the world as it unfolded around them. They found patterns that led to logical deduction. They understood causes and effects. But they also knew enough of the world to recognize the limits of their understanding. They knew of outliers and originals, things outside all pattern or predicate. And they determined to be as prepared as they might be for what had never been.

Foresight is nothing more than the ability to draw conclusions from the past. It is assimilation of experience and history into an expected order and the sensibility to know when the order does not apply. My ancestors had foresight. To their past-blind peers, my grandmothers seemed magical, uncanny, witches, and for their knowledge they were ostracized and persecuted. It is hard to understand in these latter days, but prediction based upon observation was deemed suspicious and unsavory, criminal even. In those days, it was necessary to cloak the lived experience in baseless ideologies and beliefs. Privileged interpretations and even outright untruths were the common store of knowledge. Attention was discouraged, if not punished.

So my grandmothers might have been punished for their sight, but that very sight usually allowed them to slip away from their oppressors, to live in the edge-spaces, to travel the hedges. Not that hiding from the blind is terribly difficult. The self-absorbed and self-satisfied can be mocked to their very own faces. But it did take a bit of ingenuity to build a durable life in the midst of the crumbling fantasy. And their ability to transcend, to see beyond its confines and strictures, is why I can tell you stories today. We would not be without their agile vision.

They named the likeliest effects of present causes and planned accordingly, building a shadow culture that had more structure and basis than the dominant customs. Their shadows were real, shadows only in obscurity, not in solidity. Their sight was true, magical only relative to those who could not perceive the world. Their lives were grounded, and so the culture they built was durable even in the face of disaster. By design, of course.

And all this magic was the result of nothing more than seeing the world as it is rather than as it would be in the minds of the few. They did not believe in those airy minds. They knew the world of form and existence and being as it danced around them. They participated in that dance, let it enfold them into the steps and patterns. No, it was not magic, nor was it particularly unusual. They knew that the world lived and followed its own music, and so they learned how to sing. In harmony. This is customarily known amongst most living beings. Most…

At times they found the need to explain their sight to those who needed vision but did not trust their own senses, never mind those of a witch. My grandmothers spread cards and pointed to the stars. They engaged in theatre to mask the plain fact that they just paid closer attention than most people. Most people needed to feel that these were special skills and no deficiency on their own part. So my grandmothers obliged with chicanery and obfuscation. I am sure this did not endear them to the authorities. But it did give them a voice. And occasionally that voice was heeded. Though sometimes the speaker was burned — for the theatrics as much as what was said.

But look around you now. What do you see? Firm foundations and sound connections. These are the work of the people who paid attention, who saw the solid ground and the woven web of the world. These are the fruits of their foresight, which is naught but awareness, though perhaps awareness tempered by a reluctance to name themselves exceptional or exemplary. There was so much special in their day, so much privilege and entitlement. It is hard to see through such things, hard to know place when you don’t want to understand that your feet are touching the ground, hard to plan on the future that does not include your own esteemed self. But such was the talent of my ancestors. Of yours as well.

Because the world winnows out the sightless and their unfounded beliefs. Reality is the measure and the rod. Those who ricochet blindly from one delusion to the next will crash up against the truth of the matter eventually. It has always been so. So better to be aware of the truth and able to understand it, predict its outlines even. Better because those who are so intimate with the past will survive the future. Better because you and I are possible for their apparent prescience. The deluded do not leave a legacy. They are as formless and traceless as the ideas they espouse and so can create nothing of substance.

So, I say, praise be to the practical solidity of my grandmothers. They lived and endured, and their endurance led to all of what I know.

And it all began with attention… the ability and the desire to sense and experience the world as it is.

— written on the 14th day of the Wolf Moon in the year 2525

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025