100 years ago

Today was “Plough Monday,” the first Monday after Twelfth Day.

The name was supposed to indicate the resumption of work after the Christmas festivities, but the mediaeval way of keeping the day as a festival was against this explanation.

Before the Reformation the ploughman had collected money to keep candles burning before the shrine of some saint.

The Reformation had put out the candles, but it could not extinguish the festival, which was continued in parts of rural England until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The leader was “Bessy,” a man in skirts, and at the end came the plough dragged by ploughmen.

When they came to a house Bessy rattled the box, the men hopped and shouted and called it dancing, and the inmates contributed their mite. If they did not, the “plough bullocks” pulled the plough to and fro till the lawn assumed the appearance of a ploughed field.


50 years ago

The following week would be an exceptionally good one for films in York, the outstanding attraction being the new Hitchcock.

There was also an anthology of silent screen comedy and the return of two blockbusters - Ben-Hur and The Longest Day.

The Hitchcock, needless to say, was The Birds, and it would be showing at the Odeon. It was one of the most talked-about pictures of recent months, partly due to the director’s great flair for publicity, and partly to its warm reception by the critics, popular and serious alike.

The Birds was based on a story by Daphne du Maurier and told how a Californian community was successively threatened, terrified, and overrun by flocks of gulls, finches, crows and other feathered aggressors.

The Birds (like Psycho) began with a long, slow build-up before plunging into the bloodlust.

Hitchcock, it had been said, was a symphonist who put his slow movement first. Once the feathered fiends got going, however, it was all action and few sensibilities were spared.


25 years ago

The Prince and Princess of Wales would have parted by now if theirs had been an ordinary marriage, said broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy.

And he believed the Queen would be "mad" to abdicate in favour of her eldest son before his marriage problems were sorted out, saying it was difficult to think of two people more different than he and the Princess.

"Are they bound together for the rest of their lives and is it right that they should be if their marriage is to all intents and purposes over?" he asked. Mr Kennedy told Woman's Own magazine: "If this had been an ordinary marriage, they'd have parted by now."