Old Glory Molly at The Green Dragon

As the sun sets earlier and earlier in this dark season, the Old Glory Molly are out and about ‘demanding money with menaces’ at many of our local hostelries, including Bungay’s Green Dragon.

The tradition stems from out of work ploughboys, their faces darkened to avoid recognition by their employers, going around local towns to  make up for the lack of wages they were able to earn in the summer months.

These are definitely not frolicking morris dancers!   This from the Old Glory website:

The term ‘molly’ is an old word that refers to a man dressed in women’s clothing. Old Glory’s molly appears as the ‘Lady’ and is accompanied by an appropriately dressed ‘Lord’. These two characters, parodying the local gentry, lead the dances. There are other characters in Old Glory, such as the “umbrella-man”, who acts as announcer, a “box-man” carrying a collecting box, the “broom-man”, who clears the way for the dancers, and the “whiffler”, whose job it is to marshal the dancers.

Molly dancing is, by nature, robust and, some would say, aggressive. These qualities are emphasised by the sound of the hobnailed boots worn by the dancers, which were the normal form of footwear for farm workers in the East of England right up until the second half of the twentieth century.

There is very little known about the dances that Molly dancers of the early part of the twentieth century would have performed, other than that they resembled country dances, but danced using a slow, heavy step, and with much swinging about in pairs.  We have constructed our own dances, based on such information as we have, and we have developed our own distinctive style. The Molly dancers of Old Glory are all men, whilst the musicians are all women. The musicians play a variety of instruments, which may include at least one four-stop melodeon in the “Suffolk key” of C, recorders, drums, trombone and “tea-chest” bass.