Wassailing

The word covers two things that are related by name and by season but not by activity. House-visiting wassailing is a door-to-door custom: a bowl, often decorated with ribbons and greenery, is carried around a settlement, a song is sung at each house, and the household is expected to contribute drink, food or money. Its songs survive in quantity, several of them named for the counties where they were collected, and the custom is recorded across a wide area of England and Wales.

Orchard wassailing is a different shape of event. It takes place in an orchard rather than on a street, it is addressed to trees rather than to householders, and its actions are agricultural in reference: the tree is greeted, cider is poured at its base, bread or toast dipped in cider is set in a fork of the branches, and a noise is made — shouting, banging, and in many recorded instances the discharge of shotguns into the branches.

The two customs overlap in date and occasionally in personnel, and nineteenth-century writers frequently ran them together. Keeping them apart matters, because the evidence for each is of different depth and the conclusions usually drawn about orchard wassailing rest on evidence that actually belongs to the house-visiting form.

The core sequence recorded across southern and western English orchard districts is consistent enough to describe, though no two accounts agree in every particular. A tree is chosen — sometimes the oldest in the orchard, sometimes one designated for the purpose year after year. The company gathers around it. A quantity of cider is poured over the roots, and bread or toast that has been soaked in cider is placed in the branches, an act very often explained in the sources as an offering to robins.

Noise follows, and is the element every account agrees on. Pans are beaten, horns blown, and where firearms are lawfully held and the setting permits, shots are fired upward through the branches. The explanation attached to the noise in the folklore record is that it drives off malign influence, though as with much of the custom the explanation is recorded later than the practice and may be a rationalisation supplied by observers rather than by participants.

A song is usually sung. The texts vary regionally and many were collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in versions already reshaped by their collectors. Some versions address the tree directly and specify what is wanted of it — hatfuls, capfuls and bushels of fruit — which is the clearest indication of what the custom is understood by its participants to be for.

A wassail bowl or cup circulates in many versions of the custom, and in several documented forms a person is nominated to a ceremonial role: a Butler, a King, or a Queen who is lifted into the branches to place the toast. These roles are unevenly distributed across the record and should not be described as universal features.

The custom is concentrated in the English cider counties — Somerset, Devon, Dorset, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire — with recorded instances in Kent, Sussex and parts of Wales. Within that area the details diverge. Somerset accounts emphasise the tree-addressing and the placing of toast; Herefordshire and the Welsh border carry a separate but related midwinter fire custom, in which a bush or wreath of hawthorn is burned in a field and carried around the ground, sometimes performed on the same night as an orchard visit and sometimes in place of one.

The date is usually Twelfth Night, but which Twelfth Night depends on the parish. Britain moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and a number of communities went on keeping the old date. Where a wassail is held on 17 January rather than 5 or 6 January, that eleven-day offset is the reason, and the older date is often locally called Old Twelfth Night or Old Twelvey. Carhampton in Somerset is the best-known instance of a parish that kept the old reckoning.

Some places hold their wassail on other winter dates entirely, including New Year and dates fixed for the convenience of the organisers. A modern wassail scheduled for a Saturday in January is not thereby inauthentic; it is a straightforward illustration of how a custom accommodates the working week, which is a thing customs have always done.

The great majority of orchard wassails currently held in Britain were started or restarted after 1970, and a substantial number after 1990. They are typically organised by community orchard groups, county orchard trusts, museums, parish organisations and cider producers, and they frequently serve a second purpose alongside the custom itself: raising funds for orchard planting, recruiting volunteers, or drawing attention to the loss of traditional orchards in the surrounding parish.

Continuity is claimed more often than it can be demonstrated. A handful of parishes have a plausible case for near-continuous observance across the twentieth century; rather more have a documented gap of decades between an old record and a modern revival; most have no pre-revival record at all in that specific place. This is normal for calendar custom in Britain and is not a criticism of the events. It does mean that a claim of unbroken descent from any particular century should be checked against the parish record rather than accepted from a programme note.

The modern form has also acquired features the older record does not show, including formalised processions, costume drawn from other English calendar customs, and a fixed running order announced in advance. Folklorists describe this as ordinary customary drift rather than as fabrication: customs that are performed change, and a custom that never changed would be the anomaly.