The origins of wassailing

The word is the securest part of the story. Wassail derives from an Old English health-wish, and by the medieval period it functions in English writing as a drinking salutation with an expected reply. Twelfth-century Anglo-Norman writers already treat it as a distinctively English usage and supply an origin legend for it, which is itself evidence that it was old and recognisable by then. None of this is evidence about orchards; it is evidence about a phrase.

The wassail bowl and the house-visiting custom appear in later medieval and early modern records, including churchwardens’ accounts and household material, in contexts that make clear a communal vessel was carried and drunk from at midwinter. Again, this is the house-visiting form.

For orchard wassailing specifically, the earliest unambiguous references are seventeenth-century and English. Robert Herrick’s Hesperides, published in 1648, contains a direct instruction to wassail the trees so that they will bear plums and pears — brief, but unmistakably about trees rather than about doors. Seventeenth-century antiquarian notes describe orchard visiting in comparable terms. The great bulk of detailed description, including almost everything about the toast, the gunfire and the songs, comes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It is worth being clear about what that dating does and does not mean. A custom first described in 1648 may well have been practised for some time before anyone thought it worth writing down; rural custom enters the record when an educated observer takes an interest, not when it begins. The honest position is that orchard wassailing is at least seventeenth-century, may be older, and cannot be shown to be very much older.

The claims routinely made for orchard wassailing are that it descends from Roman rites associated with the goddess Pomona, from Anglo-Saxon or Norse tree veneration, or from an undifferentiated pre-Christian fertility religion. These claims are made in newspaper articles, event programmes, tourist material and a large proportion of popular cider writing, generally without a source and generally in a form that treats the descent as settled.

No documentary chain supports any of them. There is no Roman, Anglo-Saxon or Norse text describing the practice; there is no medieval English text describing the practice; there is a gap of a millennium or more between the asserted ancestor and the first description. The argument offered in place of evidence is one of resemblance: the custom looks agricultural and propitiatory, therefore it must be ancient and religious.

Pomona is a particular red herring. The Roman deity was attached to the cider world in the modern period by pomologists, who used the name for illustrated fruit books — a pomona became the standard word for a descriptive orchard volume in English and French. That literary borrowing is nineteenth-century scholarship, not evidence of ritual continuity, and it is very likely one of the routes by which the pagan attribution attached itself to orchard custom in the first place.

The conflation has an identifiable intellectual history. Nineteenth-century folklore studies worked under what was called the doctrine of survivals: the proposition that rural customs were fossilised remnants of earlier religious stages, preserved by the conservatism of country people and recoverable by collecting them. Under that assumption, a custom did not require documentary ancestry to be assigned one. Its form was taken to reveal its age.

The comparative anthropology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most influentially The Golden Bough, generalised this into a system in which every seasonal custom in Europe could be read as a vegetation rite. Applied to an orchard custom involving drink, noise and an offering placed in a tree, the reading was close to automatic and was made repeatedly. It then passed out of scholarship and into general circulation, where it has stayed.

Academic folklore abandoned the survivals model during the twentieth century. Its successors work from documented transmission: when a custom is first recorded, in what form, by whom, and what can be shown about the gaps. On that method, a great many British calendar customs turn out to be considerably younger than their reputations, several are demonstrably eighteenth- or nineteenth-century inventions, and a good number of apparently ancient details were introduced by revivalists who believed they were restoring something older.

The popular account has not caught up, and there is a structural reason why it has not. An ancient pagan ancestry is a better line in a press release than a seventeenth-century first attestation, and the people writing the copy are usually not the people who would check it. The result is that the most-repeated single fact about cider culture in Britain is one that its own evidence does not support.

Dating the custom honestly does not diminish it. A practice attested from the seventeenth century, spread across the English cider counties, reshaped by the calendar change of 1752, collected and altered by Victorian folklorists, largely lapsed in the mid-twentieth century and then deliberately revived from the 1970s onwards by people trying to save orchards is a richer object than a static relic. It has a history in which things happened.

The revival phase in particular tells you something about the present. Orchard wassailing came back at the same time as, and often through the same organisations as, the community orchard movement and the campaign against traditional orchard loss. The custom was picked up because it was useful: it gathers a village in an orchard in the dead of winter, at exactly the point in the year when the case for keeping the orchard needs making.