Category: History

Wassail: Some Historical Reports and their Contexts

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5710196-MHave you been dying for some historical sources for the custom of wassail?  Come on, I know you have.  Lucky for you I am the folklorist with the super folklore library collection a mere 30 minute walk from my doorstep.  So I made my way over to the stacks at the Wells Library at Indiana University to forage for some old folklore collections that document Wassail (and then I found some handy online google books versions to share with you!)  Some of the questions a folklorist asks when researching a custom like wassail are:

  • Where was this custom previously documented?
  • Why did people want to document it in the first place?
  • What does this tell us about the meaning of the custom?

So, a little history here: the study of folklore emerged at a time when the rationalism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras (roughly the late 1500s-1800s) created a class of educated men who, infused with the new scientific method, began to wonder why many of their fellow countrymen still believed in or practiced ‘superstitious’ customs.  Early on, this study was called Popular Antiquities, and some of the scholars engaged in collecting and documenting these customs were Protestant clerics, clergymen who were particularly unsettled by the continuation of superstitious beliefs and practices of Roman Catholicism.  They concluded that many of these beliefs and practices weren’t grounded in biblical texts at all (and therefore, not properly Christian), but leftover pagan customs that had been adopted into the Catholic Church.  Sometimes their aim was to discover the origins of these pagan customs in order to root them out.  It is interesting today that many of our modern popular interpretations of folklore customs still hinge on an explanation of their pagan origins, even though the original impetus of Protestant reform has long since disappeared. (For some other ways to interpret wassail other than pagan fertility ritual, stay tuned for my next post)

What does this mean?  Knowing this goes a little way to understanding the perspective of those who documented wassail in the early days of folklore and popular antiquities study.  It answers some of questions 1 and 2 above.

So what does this tell us about wassail, and what it meant to those who documented it?  It means we should always be a little wary of taking their descriptions at face value.  Is wassail actually a relic of a pagan fertility custom?  Or is that what the observers in the Enlightenment wanted it to be, due to their own biases of class, religion, and education?  Further, could their informants – the regular folks telling them about the customs – be yanking their chains or manipulating the information given to these early scholars for any reason? It is impossible to know anything for certain, but by reading between the lines, we can make more nuanced interpretations about the place of this custom in history.  History is not a case of fact and fiction, but of documents and interpretations of the content and creation of those documents.

Here is one selection from John Aubrey’s early collection of popular customs Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme written between 1687 and 1689.

Writing slightly later, the antiquarian John Brand, one of the rationalist Protestant clerics, documented these wassail customs in his book Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions, which was first written in 1777 enlarged and edited by Sir Henry Ellis in 1813.There’s lots more in the library, and you can wend your way around Google Books for many of the older texts.  For more information about the early Antiquarian folklorists in England, check out The British Folklorists: A History by Richard Dorson.

Wassail story from Radio Program: Living on Earth

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We’re right smack in the middle of wassail season.  Twelfth Night (Jan 5) passed last week.  And Old Twelfth Night (Jan 17) comes this Friday.  I’m a bit behind on posts due to moving into a new house, but I will be posting a series of stories about wassail, including links to some guest posts I’ve been working on elsewhere on the web.  First up, I wanted to post a link to a wassail story I heard on the radio program Living on Earth, a weekly environmental news program that airs on my public radio station, and which I listen to fairly regularly and highly recommend.  I was excited to hear something about wassail, and  I’m happy to re-post it here.  Though I must say I’m not a fan of the accent the American storyteller attempts, and her interpretation of wassail is rather different than my own.  But all in all, how great to see wassail out and about in the American media in various interpretations!  The Wassail story, starts at 08:30 on the segment Stories of the Night Sky and an English Wassail (not the full show) and is preceded by another lovely Native American tale.  The whole broadcast is well worth listening to, especially if you are snowed in as I was last weekend.  Enjoy!

The 17th Century is the Best Century

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Back at my desk in Indiana, I have been reading and taking notes on a really lovely chapter in a book called A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-century England.  The chapter “Drinking Cider in Paradise: Science, Improvement, and the Politics of Fruit Trees”, by Dr. Vittoria Di Palma, has lots to offer the historically minded and those cider and orchard enthusiasts who have delved into the texts on the subject by the likes Evelyn, Beale, Worlidge, and Austen.  I had the opportunity to go to the British Library during my stay in England, and I signed up for a reading room card, checked out a period copy of Eveyln’s Pomona, and spent a lovely afternoon turning its seventeenth century pages, replete with beautiful fonts and prints.  Di Palma’s chapter analyzes the many works on cider in the 17th and 18th centuries within the context of the larger discourse of “Improvement.”  Citing one of the earliest tracts during this era advocating the planting of fruit trees, a letter by Sir Richard Child written to Samuel Hartlib, Di Palma says:

“…fruit tree cultivation and the production of fruit wines became central to the advancement of English husbandry.  In the 1650s, Child’s letter acted as a spur to other publications by members of Hartlib’s circle; in the 1660s it was used as a blueprint for early scientific efforts to describe, understand, and exploit the English landscape by Fellows of the Royal Society.  And although orchards and cider had only formed a small part of Child’s enterprise, they soon became subjects of a plethora of specialized publications, recognizable components of the seventeenth century discourse of improvement.” (Di Palma,164)

I’ve always thought the 17th century was one of the most interesting periods in English and North American history – arguably the birth of modernity as social and political life transitioned out of the medieval era and towards the world as we know it today, a world which privileges individualism, scientific method, and representative government. 

Many authors who write on cider today often refer back to this era as a golden era for cider, when it was the drink of gentlemen, a subject to be discussed in the high circles of scientific inquiry.  In my studies, I am interested in teasing out the meanings embedded in the way we talk about and represent cider.  As Di Palma’s lovely paper shows, the 17th century writers were invested in a rhetoric of improvement, a rhetoric which ultimately positioned “England as Eden”:

“The widespread cultivation of apple trees would mean, in effect, recreating paradise in England, redeeming the country’s sins, and populating it with moral, healthy, and wealthy denziens, drinking cider in their very own Elysium Britannicum.  Not merely fit for Adam and Eve, or the heathen gods for that matter, through the discourse of improvement, cider was proclaimed the tipple of choice for the English citizen” (Di Palma 177)

It’s interesting to think about how similar the 17th century discourse of improvement is to many of our modern concerns about sustainability, localized economies, and ecologically sensitive agriculture.  There are many differences, of course, but that is where interesting analysis can be made.  Just how do people who want to make arguments about these contemporary issues borrow from older texts to make their points?  But also, how does this obscure some of the differences between contemporary and historical realities?  This is something I will be looking at in greater depth as I write the dissertation. 

Take a look at the rest of the articles in this book for other scholarly approaches to drinks of all sorts in 17th century England.