Abbots Bromley is typical of the quiet, generally affluent, villages scattered across the gently hilly, lighted wooded countryside of south east Staffordshire between the Trent and the Dove.
In some circles at least Abbots Bromley has great national prominence. This is solely for one reason: the annual Abbots Bromley Horn Dance.
Taking place over one day each year in early September the horn dance is a distinctive custom, quite different from the folk customs practised elsewhere in the village.
For 364 days of the year, the Abbots Bromley horns are stored safely in the village church. Then on the day of the dance they are retrieved at 7:30 in the morning, where the priest blesses them, before they are taken out ahead of the day’s dancing.
The six horn carriers are dressed in colourful vaguely Tudor looking costumes (though apparently they only date from the 1850s…) including wide flat caps. They are accompanied on their journey by a fool, a man dressed as Maid Marion (we are north of the Trent here after all), a hobby horse and a small troupe of minstrels including a boy carrying a triangle.
Over the course of the day this possession covers around 10 miles. Following a route which runs roughly around the village. Along the way the troupe makes 12 stops where they dance.
The rhyme or reason for why the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance began are obscure. Some see it as an ancient pagan survival, others, due to the fact that it is not recorded in any form until an entry appears in Robert Plot’s Natural History of Staffordshire, published in 1686. Although there is an earlier account of a hobby horse at Abbots Bromley from 1532 which may suggest an earlier origin.
Ever since it was first written up by Robert Plot, folklorists of all descriptions have been fascinated by the strangeness and unique qualities of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. It was extensively documented in the 19th and early 20th Centuries with the earliest photographs of the dancers dating from around 1900.
Naturally this has led to all sorts of sloothery in an attempt to unpick the mystery. One of the most interesting of these in the recent past was the radiocarbon dating of the horns. The results of this – of course – do nothing to authenticate the age of the dance, but it does shed light upon when the horns grew on a living animal.
It transpires that they are reindeer horns, dating back to the 11th Century, so nearly 1,000 years. How they came to be in a small Staffordshire village is a mystery, they were presumably traded for at some point in the last millenium, because just like today the only place where reindeer lived in the 11th Century was Scandinavia.
Does this point to a Norse origins for the horn dance, contrary to it often being assumed to have been an Anglo Saxon rite? Potentially given that the area Abbots Bromley sits in was amongst the westernmost reaches of Viking control in the Midlands. Although personally I think it is as likely that the dance is later medieval and or early modern and some antique reindeer horns got incorporated into it at some stage.
But of course, we’ll never know. Only that the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is a longstanding Midlands custom, one of the region’s most distinctive, its origins shrouded in mystery. Long may it continue to be adapted and performed.