Whittlesey Straw Bear

1882

Recurring Cambridgeshire custom on the Tuesday after Plough Monday, in which a man is encased in straw and led dancing from house to house for food and drink. An 1882 newspaper records a man dressed in straw led through the town 'to entertain by his frantic and clumsy gestures the good folk'. Stopped in 1909 when police enforced the 1824 Vagrancy Act against 'cadging', and revived by the Whittlesea Society in 1980 after seventy years.