The Upside Down: Mummers The Word

I was recently discussing the new and unnerving film adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley’s 2015 folk horror novel Starve Acre with my son. We both liked it, but he regretted the fact that the folkloric elements – centred around a vengeful local spirit called Jack Grey – had been invented. The story wasn’t ‘real’ and that annoyed him.

This got me thinking about traditions and rituals generally. After all, this is the time of year for them. 

As a child, torn away from what I felt was my imaginative birthright by my parents’ decision to emigrate to New Zealand, I became a zealous student of the stories of old England and Christmas traditions in particular. 

Despite it being midsummer, I had my family wassailing apple trees and playing the fine old game of snapdragon in which a dish of brandy containing raisins is set alight and players must pluck the fiery orbs and swallow them. I still play it at Christmas. 

My bible was a gazetteer called British Popular Customs Present and Past compiled in the 1870s by the Rev. T.F. Thiselton Dyer, with the attractively Ronseal subtitle “illustrating the social and domestic manners of the people”. I pored over its slightly-foxed pages to discover what lost rituals I could single-handedly revive. 

It is telling that the book sounds an elegiac note – “an account of customs which, if not already obsolete, are quickly becoming so” – a theme that was to animate the turn-of-the-century folk revival led by scholars and collectors such as Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp.

Some of the customs my research unearthed still baffle me. 

On Christmas Day, the butcher of Merton College, Oxford (which was I later to attend) would invite the scholars to his house where he would “provide a bull for the steward to knock down with his own hands, whence the treat was called The Kill-Bull”. Evidence of ritualistic animal sacrifice and the survival of the Mediterranean bull cult in medieval Oxford? Or just ye olde Oxbridge version of a meat raffle? In any event, no trace of the custom survives today.

Which is rather the point about traditions. They wax and wane according to usage. 

Years later, when I discovered Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s 1983 classic, The Invention of Tradition, I was struck by the distinction they made between invented traditions, which were largely used to prop up the agendas of populist nationalism, and “the strength and adaptability of genuine traditions”. The challenge, then as now, is who gets to choose what is genuine?

Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the vexed history of the mummers’ play. 

The English version is a masked folk play that was popular across southern England and usually (though not always) performed at Christmas. 

Its cast changes from county to county, but the action revolves around Father Christmas, who introduces the other characters, and St George, who fights either a Turkish Knight or a soldier braggart called Slasher. A doctor administers a special medicine which revives the slain soldier. Other characters include a fool playing music, Beelzebub (who carries a club and frying pan), a poor man, and Little Devil Doubt (a money collector). The costumes are made from strips of cloth or paper and the actors collect money from the audience once the action is over. 

Trying to source the deep origins of the drama became an obsession for a generation of folklorists, most of their digging inspired by James Frazer, who in his influential 1890 “study in magic religion”, The Golden Bough, suggested that the plays might be the record of pre-Christian, possibly prehistoric, fertility ritual. 

The truth is that there is not a single mention of mummers’ plays in any extant literature before the early 18th Century, and their maximum period of popularity was in the years before the First World War, when eager field collectors were busy recording and ‘reviving’ the tradition across England.

Why were they so popular? There is a simpler explanation than pagan survival.

Mummers’ plays were the work of working men and artisans. As the historian Ronald Hutton puts it, “their wide and speedy dissemination can only be explained by the facts that the presenters were in need of food, drink, or cash, and the audiences found the drama acceptable entertainment”.  

Who knows what bits and pieces of old lore and half-remembered ritual went into the original ‘scripts’, often circulated in chap-books. The plays offered a chance to dress-up and earn a bit of extra cash.

This feels like a Christmas tradition we all understand. 

I’ll give the last word to Hutton, who reports a conversation he had with a performer of a contemporary Cotswold mummers troupe: “I asked him if he regarded it as a ritual. He answered that anything becomes a ritual if you have to do it 10 times in a single night.”