Penglaz owes its origins to the descriptions of the hobby horse that once accompanied the Christmas guisers in their perambulation of Penzance during the nineteenth century. The classic, contemporary account of the guisers’ horse was given by Richard Edmonds who described the horse as being:

"represented by a man carrying a piece of wood in the form of a horse’s head and neck, with some contrivance for opening and shutting the mouth with a loud snapping noise, the performer being so covered with a horse cloth, or hide of a horse, as to resemble the animal whose curvettings, biting, and other motions, he imitated."

The horse was a character associated with 'Old Penglaze' in the guisers' games of forfeiture, described by William Sandys:

"Another essential character is Old Penglaze who has a blackened face and a staff in his hand, and a person girded round with a horse’s hide … to serve as his horse … The master then goes up to the delinqent and, taking up his foot, says: “Here is my seal, where is old Penglazes’s seal?” … Old Penglaze then comes in on his horse which winces and capers about grotesquely … The shoe of the “colt” is taken off and Penglaze gives him one or two hard blows on the sole of the foot, after which he rides off again, his horse capering more than ever before and sometimes throwing the old gentleman off."

© Jane Cox 2007

Barbara Spooner in her work on the Padsto 'Obby 'Oss further describes the 'Obby 'Oss associated with "Old Penglaze".

"The Hobby Horse that went with the Land's End mummers not so very long ago was the sort that consists of a horses skull held up on a stick by a hide covered or sheet draped man, and had its own name in the Cornish Language Penglas or 'Grey head'"

Her description is of the 'mast' type of hobby horse, and Spooner followed Robert Morton Nance in expressing the view that ‘the May Day games an morris dances, with their own type of hobby-horse, which includes a rider, had been brought in from England too recently to have acquired Cornish names.’ It became imperative amongst the Celtic revivalists of the early twentieth century that the Tourney horse (with its rider) should be seen as English, or foreign, whereas the mast horses were to be understood as native, Celtic beasts, complete with Celtic names. In fact, as Edwin Cawte demonstrated in his study of British and European hobby horse practices, the mast type of horse developed during the eighteenth century and was particularly popular during the nineteenth, whereas the Tourney variety predated it by several centuries.

In his Cornish dictionary, Robert Morton Nance believed the character of Old Penglaze to be the horse and believed that Penglaze was a genuine Celtic noun for a hobby horse, something one of the above mentioned quotations contradicts. Moreover the writer of Bewnans Meriasek, the life of St. Meriasek (or Meriadoc) of Camborne, writing in Cornish, understood the hobby horse as feminine in gender, whereas Penglaze is masculine, potentially undermining its status as an example of Cornish language.

Regardless of the accuracy of its linguistic origins and accuracy of naming etc the modern Golowan festival's Penglaz takes its appearance from the later quotations descriptions and resembles strongly the Mari Lwyd of Welsh tradition and was first introduced in 1992 at the second revived Golowan festival by Merv Davey Hon piper of Gorseth Kernow. The original horse now forming part of Cornish music group Pyba's Guise dance program being renamed "Penguise". The current "Oss" being used for the first time in 1993.