Culture and Folklore
A long-standing tradition of the town has local dignitaries throwing buns from the roof of the Abingdon County Hall Museum for crowds assembled in the market square on specific days of celebration (such as royal marriages, coronations and jubilees). The museum has a collection of the buns, dried and varnished, dating back to bun throwings of the 19th century. Since 2000, there have been bun-throwing ceremonies to commemorate the Millennium, the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in 2002, 450th anniversary of the town's being granted a Royal Charter in 2006, and the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton on the 29th April 2011.
The centre of town and the whole of Ock Street (half a mile) are closed every October for two days for the Ock Street Michaelmas Fair, once a hiring fair but now maybe Britain's longest and narrowest funfair. The much smaller Runaway Fair, the following Monday, was traditionally for workers who had found their new employers too much to stomach within the first week.
Abingdon has a very old and still active Morris Dancing tradition, passed on by word of mouth since before the folk dance and song revivals of the 1800s. Every year a Mayor of Ock Street is elected by the inhabitants of Ock Street; he then parades through the town preceded by the famous Horns of Ock St, a symbol of Abingdon's Morris Dance troupe.
The Friends of Abingdon's Unicorn Theatre, housed in the old Abbey buildings, is the site of first productions of many stage adaptations of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, by Stephen Briggs.
Old Speckled Hen ale was originally brewed by Morlands of Abingdon to commemorate the MG factory in the town.
Read more about this topic: Abingdon-on-Thames
Famous quotes containing the words culture and, culture and/or folklore:
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The aggregate of all knowledge has not yet become culture in us. Rather it would seem as if, with the progressive scientific penetration and dissection of reality, the foundations of our thinking grow ever more precarious and unstable.”
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“So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio—remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales—we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.”
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