Hocktide Play

The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre | 1996 | 700+ words | Copyright

Hocktide Play, survival of one of the early English folk festivals, given in Coventry on Hock Tuesday (the third Tuesday after Easter Sunday), and revived as a pleasant antiquity in the Kenilworth Revels prepared for the visit of Queen Elizabeth in July 1575. It began with a Captain Cox leading in a band of English knights, each on a hobby horse, to fight against the Danes, and ended with the leading away of the Danish prisoners by the English women. It was intended to represent the massacre of the Danes by Ethelred in 1002, but this is probably a late literary assimilation of an earlier folk-festival custom, traceable in other places (Worcester, Shrewsbury, Hungerford), by which the women ‘hocked’ or caught the men and exacted a forfeit from them on one day, the men's turn coming the following day. The practice was forbidden at Worcester in 1450. This ceremony may have been a symbolic re-enactment of the capture of a victim for human sacrifice.

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PHYLLIS HARTNOLL and PETER FOUND. "Hocktide Play." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 1996. Encyclopedia.com. 30 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

PHYLLIS HARTNOLL and PETER FOUND. "Hocktide Play." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 1996. Encyclopedia.com. (May 30, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O79-HocktidePlay.html

PHYLLIS HARTNOLL and PETER FOUND. "Hocktide Play." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 1996. Retrieved May 30, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O79-HocktidePlay.html

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