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The name horkey was applied to end of harvest customs and celebrations, especially in the Eastern Counties of England, although the word occurred elsewhere in England and also Ireland. Since it is found in dialect, there is no standard spelling and other versions include hawkie and hockey.See under its Essex form, HOCKEY, in Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, Oxford 1898, p.190 Mentioned from the 16th century onward, the custom became less common during the course of the 19th century and was more or less extinct in the 20th. It is chiefly remembered now because of the poem dedicated to it by Robert Bloomfield in 1802.
A later account of Cambridgeshire celebrations mentions that, "as the wagon rolled along the street, the locals would pelt it with buckets of water. This was a sign that, since harvest was now over, it didn't matter if it rained. Then came the meal itself: mountains of roast beef, vegetables and plum puddings - washed down with locally brewed strong ale. All paid for by the farmer. In some Cambridgeshire villages, the revelers performed a dance in which they wore stiff straw hats on which they balanced tankards of ale." Cambridgeshire Times, 8 September, 2006 Among additional details in The English Dialect Dictionary, it is mentioned that the last load of the harvest was brought in decked with festive boughs or decorated with a corn dolly woven of stalks. Accompanying it came a procession of farm labourers 'crying the mare' with the song
Further literary evidence points to a number of customs established around the final gathering of the harvest at this period. They include the reapers accompanying a fully laden cart; a tradition of shouting "Hooky, hooky"; and one of the foremost reapers acting as 'lord' of the harvest and asking for money from onlookers. Several of these features appear in Thomas Nashe's play Summer's Last Will and Testament, which seems to have been first performed in 1592. There a character personifying Harvest refers to himself as the "master" of the reapers accompanying him and goes begging the audience for a "largesse". In addition the reapers sing a nonsense song similar in form to the Essex song quoted in the dialect dictionary. Its second stanza, repeated throughout the scene, contains the call "Hooky, Hooky", on which the text's Victorian editor commented that the refrain "is still heard in some parts of the kingdom, with this variation,
Near the start of the following century, Sir Thomas Overbury invoked the custom while describing the honest yeoman who "thinks not the bones of the dead anything bruised or the worse for it, though the country lasses dance in the church-yard after evensong. Rock-Monday, and the wake in summer shrovings, the wakeful catches on Christmas eve, the hoky or seed-cake, these he yearly keeps, yet holds them no relics of Popery."Quoted in Notes and Queries, May 11 1850 The final item refers to the sweet foods, and later puddings, served at the harvest feast. A cake of a richer kind was later mentioned in a couplet from Poor Robin's Almanack for 1676, a publication originally associated with Saffron Walden: "Hoacky is brought home with hallowing, /Boys with plum-cake the cart following."Quoted in John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities, London 1813, p.441 Similar harvest customs in mid-17th century Devon are described in Robert Herrick's poem "The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home". Select poems from the Hesperides, p.42
It was Bloomfield’s poem which established these particular customs in the national consciousness, although they were in fact only a regional variant of harvest celebrations common across Europe.James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, Chapter 45, "The Corn-Mother and the Corn-Maiden in Northern Europe"; John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, London 1841, “Harvest Home”, Vol.2, pp.11-19 Bloomfield put his account of the feast in the mouth of an old family friend as a remembrance of life in the middle of the 18th century. A correspondent in the New Monthly Magazine, describing a similar festivity he attended at a farm near Bury St Edmunds in 1820, appealed to Bloomfield's poem as his touchstone. New Monthly Magazine, 1 November 1820, pp.492-7 During its course, he quoted one stanza of a song in praise of the givers of the feast which still survives elsewhere in the Cambridgeshire village of Whittlesford. Enid Porter Project Another poetical reference to the Horkey was included in John Player's Home or The Months, a poem of domestic life (1838).Google Books, p.125-7 The author noted that his description was from his native Saffron Walden; it differs from Bloomfield's in the detail that the "largess" call follows the payment of wages on the day after the feast.
By 1934, the artist Thomas Hennell was commenting that "since the passing of the Agricultural Wages Bill, the Horkey has been generally abandoned, though one or two landowners in the eastern counties are still generous enough to give a supper each year". Change in the Farm (1934), quoted in Village Life and Labour, an anthology, Cambridge University 2011, pp.92-3 There was, nevertheless, one revival at the end of the 20th century by the Morris Dance of the Suffolk village of Glemsford. The Morris Men of Little Egypt
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