Hocktide

Hocktide, Hock tide or Hoke Day is a very old term used to denote the Monday and Tuesday in the second week after Easter. It was an English mediaeval festival; both the Tuesday and the preceding Monday were the Hock-days. Together with Whitsuntide and the twelve days of Yuletide the week following Easter marked the only vacations of the husbandman's year, during slack times in the cycle of the year when the villein ceased work on his lord's demesne, and most likely on his own land as well.

Early folk celebrations of Hocktide are undocumented, though as a term day, it appears often in documents. Hock-Tuesday was an important term day, rents being then payable, for with Michaelmas it divided the rural year into its winter and summer halves. Some evidence allows us to see that Hocktide was considered an important festival in some parts of Late-Medieval England, and was a chance for the women of the parish to raise money for the local church. Katherine French's work has allowed us to see that women would capture and tie up local men, and release them in exchange for a release fee, which would then be donated to the church.

George C. Homans notices the parallel pattern as at Yuletide, of a solemn feast of the Church, that of Christmas itself, followed by a festive holiday, with the agricultural round beginning anew after Epiphany, with the folk customs of Plow Monday. Until the 19th century in England, Plow Monday, the first Monday after Epiphany, occasioned the antics of the gang of young plowmen, calling themselves the "plow-bullocks", who went door to door with the caparisoned "white plow", collecting pennies; when these were withheld they might plow up the dooryard

At Coventry there was a play called The Old Coventry Play of Hock Tuesday. This, suppressed at the Reformation owing to the incidental disorder that accompanied it, and revived as part of the festivities on Queen Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth in July 1575, depicted the struggle between Saxons and Danes, and has given colour to the suggestion that hock-tide was originally a commemoration of the massacre of the Danes on St. Brice's Day, 13 November 1002, or of the rejoicings at the death of Harthacanute on 8 June 1042 and the expulsion of the Danes. But the dates of these anniversaries do not bear this out.

...
Wikipedia