The history of wassailing

Wassail comes from Old English wes hāl and the Norse ves heill, both meaning approximately ‘be healthy’ or ‘be well’. It was a greeting, and specifically a toast, answered with drinc hāl. By the later Middle Ages the noun had transferred to the drink itself and to the vessel it was served from, and then to the occasion.

That etymology is settled and is worth holding onto, because it anchors the custom in a Germanic drinking greeting rather than in ritual of any other kind. Wassailing is, at root, wishing health while drinking.

Two distinct customs later carried the name. House-visiting wassail — going from door to door with a decorated bowl, singing, and receiving drink or money — is well attested across England over a long period, and survives in the carol repertoire. Orchard wassail is the visiting of fruit trees, and is regionally confined to the cider counties.

The recorded practice is consistent in outline across the accounts. A party goes to the orchard in the depth of winter, at Twelfth Night or on Old Twelfth Night in January. A principal tree is selected and toasted; cider is poured at its roots; cider-soaked bread or toast is placed in the branches; a health is drunk and sung to the tree; and a great noise is made, by shouting, by beating pans and in many accounts by firing guns into the branches.

The stated purpose in the accounts is a good crop. The explanations given by participants, where they were asked, generally run to waking the tree, encouraging it, driving off something harmful, or simply that it is what is done. Accounts sometimes mention birds, and the toast in the branches is often explained as an offering to robins.

The date matters and is itself evidence. Wassails held on 17 January follow the Julian calendar as it stood before the calendar reform of 1752, which is a clear indication that the custom in that form was established before the middle of the eighteenth century and that its date was fixed by the church calendar rather than by anything older.

The documentary trail for orchard wassailing becomes clear in the seventeenth century. Robert Herrick’s verses of 1648 instruct the reader to wassail the trees so they may bear plums and pears, which is an unambiguous reference to the orchard custom; John Aubrey and other seventeenth-century writers describe related practices. Earlier references have been proposed and are debated, and the earliest secure attestation is a matter on which specialists differ.

The custom is then documented steadily through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Devon, Somerset, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Kent, in parish records, newspaper reports, antiquarian collections and later folklorists’ fieldwork. This is a well-recorded custom by the standards of English folk practice.

What is entirely absent is any evidence connecting it to pre-Christian religion. There is no textual, archaeological or comparative evidence for orchard wassailing before the medieval period, and no continuity can be traced. The gap between the last documented pre-Christian practice in England and the first documented wassail is on the order of a thousand years.

The explanation is a nineteenth-century intellectual fashion. Antiquarian collectors of popular customs, and later the comparative anthropology associated with The Golden Bough, worked from an assumption that rural customs were fossils of ancient religion, and that a practice which looked ritual and made no obvious modern sense must be a survival. Applied to wassailing, that assumption produced tree spirits, fertility rites and offerings, none of which the participants had mentioned.

The idea was attractive for reasons beyond scholarship. It gave rural custom dignity and depth at a time when rural life was visibly disappearing, it flattered the communities that kept the custom, and it made a good story. Twentieth-century writers on cider inherited it wholesale, and it now circulates as general knowledge.

Modern folklore scholarship has largely dismantled the survivalist framework, showing repeatedly that customs assumed to be immemorial can be dated, that many are considerably younger than claimed, and that they change continuously. Wassailing is a good example: it is genuinely old, genuinely interesting, and not what the pagan story says it is.

Orchard wassailing declined through the twentieth century along with the farm cider culture that carried it, surviving in a small number of places with continuous practice. What exists now is largely a revival, dating from the 1980s and 1990s onwards and connected to community orchard movements, county orchard groups, cider producers and the establishment of Apple Day in 1990 as a focus for orchard events.

Revived wassails borrow their form from the nineteenth-century accounts and add freely: costume, mummers’ plays, Green Man figures, morris sides and torchlight. Some elements now treated as traditional are recent, which is exactly how living custom behaves and is not a criticism of it.

The honest description is therefore layered. A drinking greeting of Germanic origin; an orchard custom documented from the seventeenth century and probably somewhat older; a nineteenth-century interpretive overlay that has become inseparable from the thing itself; and a modern community revival that is now a generation old and still growing.