The Village of Lower Hardres
There is an Upper Hardres (pronounced, like it's nether neighbour, Hards) as well. They are both just east of the distinctively Roman Stone Street which, except for a rather curious kink around Horton Park at the south end, runs arrow straight due south from just outside Canterbury to within a couple of miles of Hythe.
But despite their origins, the two are separate and distinct villages. Lower Hardres is perhaps less visually favoured than Upper Hardres, with a 19th century church. Pevsner described the church as 'conceived, outside anyway, as a humble village church, and imaginative leap before Pugin's example made such attention to appropriateness commonplace.'
Lower Hardres featured in the first reported case of the wrecking of steam threshing machines in Kent during the 'Captain Swing' disorders in 1830. Two magistrates and a posse of constables backed up by thirty dragoons were sent out from Canterbury to try to catch the gang of about four hundred wreckers, but without success.
It was at Lower Hardres, too, that a rather curious little incident was reported at Christmas 1859 that had to do with the old Kent custom of hoodening. Percy Maylam, in his book Hooden Horse, published in 1909, said in bygone days it was probable that the hooden horse was to be found at Christmas in every village and hamlet and on every large farm in East Kent. By this time, though, it had died out almost everywhere, surviving only in Thanet and Walmer.
The custom was for hoodeners to go from house to house collecting (demanding with menaces might well be the term we would use today) money or goodies for a Christmas feast. The band was made up of a Waggoner with whip who led the horse, the Rider, who tried always unsuccessfully to get upon the Horse's back, and Mollie, a man in 'drag' who went behind the Horse with a besom broom.
The Horse was a man, known as the Hoodener, who held a usually rather crudely carved wooden horse's head on a stick. Attached to the head was a sort of hood of coarse sacking which more or less hid the man. The head itself was made so that the man could jerk a piece of string to make the loosely hinged jaws open and shut with a vicious clacking sound. Sometimes the jaws were lined with nails to represent teeth and altogether the creature was pretty fearsome.
The whole performance was known as hoodening, and it was accompanied bu some fairly licenced horse-play and rustic ribaldry.
Maylam himself dismissed suggestions that the ritual was descended from some Saxon Woden worship rites and thought it had more to do with morris dancing. However, the custom came under censure from the church, which saw it as a pagan survival that ought not to be encouraged, and it lost a lot of support from ordinary people too when it became rather too robust a frolic for comfort.
His story concerned the visit in 1859 of a group of hoodeners to Lower Hardres Rectory, where a German and his wife were spending Christmas with the rector. The German lady was an invalid and has not walked for seven years. She was wheeled out to the lawn in her invalid chair to see the hoodeners' performance and when the Horse (a man named Henry Brazier) pretended to jump at her, the jaws snapping viciously close to her face, the lady was so frightened that she sprang out of her chair and ran indoors, and was able to walk perfectly well from then on/
The story ended that her husband was so delighted that when the hoodening season was over he bought the Horse and took it back with him to Germany.
The hooden horse is still very much an East Kent custom today and enjoying something of a revival, not just at Christmas time but more especially as an attraction at summer fetes.