Four guys from the local PTA, each in school uniform and astride a wooden plank with a horse's head attached, career over the finish line, cheered on by kids in fancy dress - the more cumbersome parts have been jettisoned due to heat and non-suitability for the bouncy castle. Just another eccentric English fete, you might think.

But this race is the climax of Banbury Hobby Horse Festival, an annual event based on the venerable custom of hobby animals in masques and civil pageantry, a tradition which can be traced back at least to the 16th century. Then came the Civil War and the ascent of the Puritans; Hobby Horses, along with similar depravities like Morris dances and mummers' plays, were forced out to remote villages where they could continue hassle-free.

It should be pointed out here that Banbury's Hobby Horse Festival isn't exactly a centuries-old tradition. It was set up in 2000 to promote English folk music and dance. Its founders - frustrated by the neglect of native traditions when more exotic imports such as salsa or capoeira are practised in clubs and leisure centres around the country - settled on the Hobby Horse as a logical peg for their revival, given Banbury's nursery rhyme fame.

Vema Wass (one of the founders and this year's organiser) points out: "A town the size of Banbury in the mediaeval period probably would have hadatraditionof Hobby Horses... or dragons or giants." But the rhyme might not be referring to a Hobby Horse at all. A cockhorse is a type of Hobby Horse (of the head-on-a-stick variety, as opposed to the frame-roundwaist tourney horse or the person-hiddenunder- cloth mast horse). Other definitions of "cockhorse" have been mooted, including a tall horse, two people on a horse, an additional horse attached to pull a coach up a hill and, as an adjective, a horse of proud, imperious attitude. One learned gentleman argued in an 1882 article, with reference to a fragment of Etruscan pottery and Aristophanes's The Frogs, that a cock-horse was a naval symbol, painted on ships, a chimera that was, literally, half cock, half horse.1

In fact, no one really knows where the rhyme comes from or what it's about. Verna's preferred explanation - as she freely admits, completely speculative - is that it was an early example of a marketing jingle. One version of the ditty starts: "Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross to see what Johnny might buy," and then lists all the things he might buy. This would conveniently allow for a Hobby Horse-type cockhorse, upon which you could trot around Banbury enjoying a jolly day's shopping - although it would perhaps not be the most practical form of travel.

Verna's reading demonstrates her enthusiasm for the civic function of the Hobby Horse. Given its role in pre-Puritan civic life, it seemed to the founders an ideal focus for a festival which, as well as reinvigorating old folk traditions, could promote Banbury and bring together its inhabitants. This side of the plan has worked rather well. The weekend-long festival culminates at People's Park on Town Mayor's Sunday (the first Sunday in July), and the majority of those involved are local: kids dressed as knights, seahorses or jockeys, patchwork elephants created by a multicultural community group, CCF (Combined Cadet Force) members helping organise events and, leading the procession, Banbury's misleadingly-titled tourney horse in drag, the Fine Lady.

Ye Olde Englande, however, is less well represented.The procession marches to the rousing drumbeat of the RAF cadets; the music at the park is more 70s than 17th-century; and the Morris dancers who did turn up disappear before they're due to perform. The fancy dress competition is hotly contested, and deservedly won by a sparkly, sequined purple unicorn, but had there been a prize for historical accuracy it might have been harder to find a deserving winner - due, apparently, to a run of bad luck with the organising, the festival is rather lighter on hankies and bells and old-fashioned horses than in previous years.

So, in fact, Banbury's Hobby Horse festival can be more properly described as part of another tradition, that of the notquite- reliable revivalists. This tradition has firm roots in the work of Victorian folklorists-the JamesFrazers and Cecil Sharps - and their attempts to document the 'pagan fertility rituals' of England's pre-industrial, even pre-Christian past, and the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s. So the Banbury Hobby Horse is in good company with recent revivals like the Whittlesea Straw Bear, dating from 1980, or purely modern inventions such as Marsden Cuckoo Day, made up by the National Trust around 10 years ago as a way of generating cash. 2

Like Wicca and Druidry, many of the ancient customs celebrated around Britain today are essentially modem creations. Maybe, then, the lack of authenticity shouldn't be a surprise. The lack of the promised Hook Norton beer tent, however, is. Kids having a laugh in a modern-day bastardisation of an ancient folk tradition is one thing, but to offer cans of John Smiths instead of real ale - 'tis a travesty of what it means to be English!