A couple of days ago, we talked about Distaff Day — the day when women went back to work after the 12-day Christmas celebration. Well, men have their own way of celebrating the occasion of returning to work — called Plough Monday — the first Monday after Epiphany when men are supposed to get back to work. It didn’t happen this year, but every few years Distaff Day and Plough Monday fall on the same day.
Dating back to the fifteenth century, the first Monday after Epiphany marked the start of the agricultural season — when the fields were plowed for crops to be sown in the spring. But like Distaff Day, not much work was actually done on that first day.
Basically, Plough Monday’s tradition is to trail a plough around local houses to collect money to pay for a community feast. Often the men from several farms joined together to pull the plough through all their villages. They sang and danced their way from village to village to the accompaniment of music. In the evening, each farmer provided a Plough Monday supper for his workers.
Originally, if a person or household was unwilling to contribute to the “supper fund” then the ploughmen and ploughboys would turn their doorstep over with the plough or cut a deep furrow in front of their door. That practice has pretty much gone away today, but Plough Monday is still celebrated in some parts of England — I’m not sure it ever made it to the “colonies.” But you might want to look our your front door just to be sure….
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