Liz Davies writes about the history of St Neots and this month, her focus is the origins of plough Monday.

Huntingdonshire was a very rural county during the Victorian period and as soon as the new year celebrations were over, it was time for farmers and agricultural workers to begin preparing the land for planting crops.

However, before the hard work began, the new year started with a Plough Monday festival which always took place on the second Monday in January which fell just after twelfth night.

The festival had its roots in ensuring the fertility of the land for the coming year, but by the Victorian period, the event involved local men, known as ‘plough witches’, who dressed up and pulled an old plough around the village collecting ‘donations’.

Anyone who refused to make a donation would be threatened with having a furrow ploughed before their front door.

Originally the money from the collection probably went towards the upkeep of a ‘plough light’ in the local parish church, to bring blessings on local farm land throughout the year.

Traditionally, the plough witches dressed in women’s clothes, disguised their faces with black or white makeup and played musical instruments to accompany their singing and dancing.

Mr Tebbutt records that in St Neots around 1880 the plough boys would dress in bright clothes, black their faces with soot and dance in St Neots High Street singing songs.

At Great Gransden part of the song they sang recalled the hard lives of the agricultural workers: ‘Remember us poor ploughboys'.

Other local Plough Monday songs recalled the poverty of the farmer workers and talked about 'a hole in my stocking' and 'a hole in my shoe'.

A postcard from about 1900 in St Neots museum’s collection shows a group of men and boys disguised in fancy dress and make-up, outside the Lock-Up at Eaton Socon, and that photograph may be the last evidence of the Plough Monday customs in the St Neots area.