reported the recollections of K. G. Knight—a member of the Melbury Estate staff—that inhabitants of Melbury Osmond associated the head with a folk custom known as "Skimity Riding" or "Rough Music". In this custom, someone accused of "husband-beating, scolding, sexual unfaithfulness or irregularity, and cuckoldry" was made to ride on a donkey or horse, facing the direction of the animal's tail, while the assembled crowd made much noise by beating frying pans, kettles, bulls' horns, and bones. In Melbury Osmond, the Ooser was brought out into the crowd at such an occasion. Similar forms of "mob-punishment" were recorded in parts of neighbouring Devon, where the act was termed "Skimmety Riding", "Skimmington", and "Skivetton". As he deemed it too heavy to be carried or worn by an individual, the historian of folklore Peter Robson later suggested that the Ooser might originally have been mounted in a carnival procession. Dewar also recorded the villagers' claims that the Ooser was brought to the door of a tallet in order to scare the local children, and that it was also used to scare adults on some occasions. Knight came across the claim that it was once used to frighten a stable hand, who jumped through a window to escape it, and in doing so "so injured himself that his life was despaired of". Dewar further drew comparisons with the horned masks sometimes worn during Mummers' plays. He noted that in a case of a group of Christmas Wassailers at Kingscote, Gloucestershire, a man was "dressed in a sack, his head in a real bull's face, head and horns complete". Another case highlighted by Dewar was taken from an account provided by G. W. Greening of Dorchester, in which a member of the Bradstock Mummers was dressed as Beelzebub. Given these similarities, Dewar ultimately suggested that the Ooser was "likely enough an off-shoot from the 14th century and later Mummers' plays". The antiquary Frederick Thomas Elworthy expressed the view that the Dorset Ooser was "the probable head" of a hobby horse. The folklorist E. C. Cawte, in his in-depth study of the hobby horse tradition in English folk culture, stated that although both entailed dressing up in an animalistic costume, the Ooser had no clear connection with this tradition. Elworthy suggested that the Ooser was a depiction of the Devil, an idea supported by Dewar, who believed that, as the Devil, its imagery was "intended