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Dwile Flonking. Dwile Flonking. Dwile. Flonking. Yup, those are two words, alright. Two words that people have supposedly spoken in earnest for hundreds and hundreds of years of history, despite sounding like a lesser spotted Toast of London character.

There should be a sign of what people are talking about when they talk about the languages of “Old” and “Middle” English – people act like Shakespeare plays are hard to understand because the characters in them are speaking Old English, and they absolutely are not, unless you’ve found a Shakespeare play where someone says “Þa on morgen gehyrdon þæt þæs cyninges þægnas þe him beæftan wæron þæt se cyning ofslægen wæs.”

Because that’s what Old English looks like, and trust me, it sounds just as much like modern English. Same with Middle English. They are absolutely different languages from the version of English we know and put up with today, so when you find an “ancient tradition” and discover that it’s called Dwile Flonking, it’s easy to believe that it’s a genuine ancient English tradition dating back over hundreds of years. Especially when you take into account what the sport actually is.

It’s a tradition that boils down to making a drunken tit of yourself while the threat of physical violence looms over you. Combine that with some dancing, and yeah, you’ve got yourself a great English pastime that could go back centuries. If you ask anyone from the counties that supposedly gave the custom life, Norfolk and Suffolk, it’s a part of their local culture and has been for generations, played to this day.

However, the truth might be a little more complicated than that.

What exactly is ‘Dwile Flonking’?

So, according to the rules laid out inYe Olde Book of Suffolk Harvest Rituels (yes, that is supposedly what the book is called), a game of Dwile Flonking is played as follows. Two teams of 12 get together in a field near a pub. The pub is important for reasons you’ll see in a moment. Each player brings along a rag that gets dunked in a bucket of stale beer, then one by one, a member of each team steps up and is surrounded by the other team, that links arms in a circle around them.

That’s when the game really begins. The team make a circle, then begins to dance around the player in the middle, who has balanced their rag on top of a broom handle. Their job is to throw the rag at a member of the opposing team. If they miss twice, the thrower downs a pint of beer, if they hit someone, the person hit downs a pint of beer, and after that, the teams switch out, and the process begins again – there’s also points and terminology for all this, but it’s a miracle anyone remembers them.

Now, ask any dyed-in-the-wool flonker about when this tradition began, and they’ll tell you it dates back to the 1500s. It’s a good thing they’ll tell you this too, because there’s no actual record of games like this going back to that time, the way that there is with something like folk football, the barbaric early version of the beautiful game that was more or less an excuse for villages with a grudge to beat the piss out of each other. No, the first record of anyone flonking a Dwile is in the 1960s.

However, perhaps the specifics of Dwile Flonking don’t need to date back centuries to be part of a truly ancient English tradition, that of getting shit faced, falling over and laughing about it through your broken teeth. Rule Britannia.