Hooded Horses use Friends' Shop as a base for Ancient Tradition
April 2023
Maidstone Museum’s latest exhibition is all about the Animal Guising and the Kentish Hodden Horse tradition.
The Hooden Horse can be seen snapping its teeth and causing havoc at many folk festivals. The exhibition unites Maidstone Museum’s two old Hooden Horses with their early surviving cousins like Morris Dancing revival horses and Northern skull horses. It also explores the Christmas house-calling custom of Hoodening and its reinvention as Autohoodening, a new kind of folk performance about the risks of contemporary seasonal working. .
On April 1, re-enactors of the Hooden Horse tradition visited Maidstone and, dressed in black garb, snapped their jaws as they strolled around Fremlin Walk to intrigue shoppers.
The re-enactors needed somewhere centrally to change and leave their things, and the Friends’ Shop was the ideal location. They used an upstairs room which served as their base during the show. MMF was delighted to help them put on a fascinating demonstration of this little-known tradition
