hoodening
hodening
oodening

Writing in 1967, the folklorist Barnett Field claimed that at some point after Maylam's book was published, hoodening had "died out."

In addition, she noted that the Medieval games devoted to Hood all took place in May rather than at Christmas, as hoodening did.

The village is best known locally for the local custom of Hoodening, a type of mumming, as well as for its prolific potato production.

Berlin Hoodening: Nagual for Bjørn Nørgaard (Performance fiction for video)

In this manuscript, Pegge noted simply that "Hoodening (huod.ing) is a country masquerade at Christmas times", comparing it to Mumming and the Winster Guisers of Derbyshire.

In a January 1868 edition of the Kentish Gazette, an anonymous author mentioned that hoodening had taken place in Minster, Swale on the Christmas Eve of 1867.

Noting that some Medieval Morris dancers had incorporated games devoted to the English folk hero Robin Hood into their custom, he suggested that hoodening might have originally been a reference to Robin Hood.

The oldest known textual reference to hoodening comes from the Alphabet of Kenticisms, a manuscript authored by Samuel Pegge, an antiquary who served as the vicar of Godmersham in Kent from 1731 to 1751.

Cawte also criticised Maylam's argument, noting that there was no evidence of Morris dancing in Kent prior to the twentieth century, and that neither hoodening nor Robin Hood had a particularly close association with the Morris dance to start with.

At the prompting of local residents, in December 2014 a pub named The Hungry Horse, located on the corner of Haine Road and Nash Road in Broadstairs, was renamed as The Hoodening Horse after the folk custom.

In the century following his death, Maylam's book on hoodening became difficult to obtain and expensive to purchase, and so to mark the centenary of its first publication, it was republished under the altered title of The Kent Hooden Horse in 2009 by The History Press.

Writing in 1951, local historian and folklorist Fred Hando described the traditional journey through Caerleon of the Mari Lwyd or "Venerable Mary", a tradition similar to that of Hoodening found in Kent, Padstow and Cheshire, and involving a man dressed with a horse's skull.

Folk plays such as Hoodening, Guising, Mummers Play and Soul Caking are generally verse sketches performed in countryside pubs in European countries, private houses or the open air, at set times of the year such as the Winter or Summer solstices or Christmas and New Year.

This is called, provincially, a Hodening.

Maylam, however, opined that Dunkin's argument could be "ignored", stating that it rested on the erroneous assumption that Hodening began with a short vowel.

It is a scene reminiscent of the palaeolithic cave paintings and the much later Hodening and Horn dancing which survived until recent times, but today only at Abbotts Bromley, Staffs.

In his History of Kent, the antiquarian Alfred John Dunkin suggested that Hodening was a corruption of Hobening, and that it was ultimately derived from the Gothic hopp, meaning horse.

Maylam noted that he was initially attracted to the idea that the term hodening had derived from Woden - an Old English name that he thought a more likely origin than the Old Norse Odin - but that upon investigating this possibility found "no sufficient evidence" for it.

Given this pronunciation, Cawte suggested that oodening was a better spelling for the tradition's name.