It is lucky to be the first to open the house door on this festival, and in my youth I was once persuaded by my nurse to get up with her before anyone of the family, that we might divide this luck between us, she throwing open the door that led to the offices [i.e. the back door], while I admitted Christmas by the front door, saying, as I had been instructed by her, ‘Welcome, Old Father Christmas!’
Christmas was a lucky time in other ways too, as well as being a holy season; for instance, those born on this day would never be drowned or hanged. Part of the luck was connected with the seasonal foods; in the nineteenth century some people liked to keep a piece of the Christmas cake all year, and there is still a widely known saying to the effect that every mince pie you eat ensures a happy month in the following year – though some people add that, for the charm to work properly, each pie must have been baked by a different person. At a season where there is much visiting to and fro, this condition is not too difficult to fulfil for those at home among friends and neighbours, but in the old days it did cause problems for young people working far from home, for instance as servants or apprentices. So, to fulfil the conditions, in large families one used to arrange that twelve different people should each bake a batch of mince pies, and that one pie from each batch would be put in a box and sent to any member of the family who was away from home, to ensure him his twelve happy months.
Christmas was also the season for wassailing, in several of the senses of that rather elastic word. First, there was the wassailing or ‘howling’ of apple trees, the season for which began on Christmas Eve; this has already been described under ‘January’, since the most popular date for it was 5 January (see pp. 99–102). Then, there was a form of ‘wassailing’ which was the direct ancestor of our modern carol-singing, though in earlier days the songs were not necessarily religious nor even particularly seasonal, to judge from a mid-nineteenth-century description:
In Sussex there is a custom, celebrated at Christmas time, called wassailing. By this term is meant the singing of carols and songs by labourers going about from house to house. They are welcome at the fireside of the cottage, and are still admitted at the hall. The customary time for wassailing is from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Night. The men are dependent on oral tradition for their songs. Two of these commonly sung … are entitled ‘The Baillie’s Daughter of Islington’ and ‘The Blind Beggar’s Daughter of Bethnal Green’; others … are ‘A Sweet Country Life’, and ‘The Husbandman and the Serving-Man’. These ballads are not only remarkable as poetry, but are sung to very pretty tunes, probably as old as the ballads.
Another, rather unusual, type of wassailing was described to Miss Candlin a few decades ago by a member of the Women’s Institute at Shipley. She told how, when she was a child, the children would go round the village with gaily decorated baskets or china bowls covered with a cloth; in return for a penny or a cake, they would lift the cloth and let the giver have a peep at their ‘wassail bowl’. Although there was nothing inside the bowl or basket, apart from decorations, this looks like a remnant of a more elaborate custom attested from several other parts of England in the nineteenth century, in which women or children carried round, hidden under a cloth, a lavishly decorated bowl or box with two dolls in it, these representing the Virgin and Child, and showed this to those who made a small donation. Perhaps the dolls were omitted at Shipley as being too Popish. Or, alternatively, the Shipley custom may derive from yet another form of wassailing, in which people took a decorated bowl of ale from house to house, offering a sip in return for a donation – though I find it harder to imagine how a good drinking custom should fall into decay, than how ‘Popish’ dolls might cause offence.
Boxing Day, 26 December, got its name, as is well known, from the old and widespread custom of giving a money tip, known as a Christmas Box, to employees and tradesmen on this day – a custom now often replaced by the more practical habit of giving tips before Christmas rather than after. In Sussex traditions, the day is chiefly noteworthy as the favourite day for performing the Mummers’ Play, though other dates within the Christmas period may also be chosen.
Mummers, in Sussex, are commonly called Tipteers or Tipteerers – a term the meaning of which is unknown. No fewer than forty-five of our towns and villages are known to have had, at one time or another, groups of men who performed the traditional Mummers’ Play, going from house to house or performing outside inns. Many of the texts they have used have been recorded, in whole or in part; one of the more elaborate, from Compton, was printed by Arthur Beckett, and it is from this that my quotations will be taken.
The play, known in many other parts of England too, is in a mixture of doggerel verse and prose; it varies in length, but not in plot, and the speeches assigned to the various characters are also often very much alike in different versions. The subject is a combat between St George and a Turkish Knight whom he kills, and the latter’s restoration to life by the skills of a comic quack Doctor. Subsidiary characters, found in some versions but not in all, include Father Christmas (acting as compère), other boastful champions named Valiant Soldier, Bold Prince, or Noble Captain, and the comic figures of Beezlebub or Little Johnny Jack, one or other of whom takes a collection from the audience. The plot is extremely simple, the tone comic.
In the Compton version, the action is introduced first by the Valiant Soldier:
In come I, a roamer, a gallant roamer,
Give me room to rhyme;
I’ve come to show you British sport
Upon this Christmas time.
Stir up your fire and give us a light,
And see we merry actors fight.
There is a second introduction from Father Christmas, in a speech beginning:
In come I, old Father Christmas,
Perhaps welcome, perhaps not;
I hope old Father Christmas
Will never be forgot.
After this, St George and the Turkish Knight both begin boasting of their strength and past exploits, threatening and defying one another, and fight. The Turk is killed at once, but the Doctor assures Father Christmas (who, it appears, is the Turkish Knight’s father) that he knows a way to raise the dead. In rapid nonsense patter, he boasts of his skills, his travels, and his past marvellous cures:
I rose my poor old grandmother after she had been dead one hundred and ninety-nine years. She cut her throat with a ball of rice; I slipped in and sewed it up with a rice chain… I had a man brought to me the other day – indeed, he was not brought to me, he was wheeled to me, in a left-handed wheel-barrow. He couldn’t see anything without opening his eyes, and he couldn’t speak without moving his tongue.
The Doctor then revives the Turkish Knight with a few drops from a bottle of ‘okum, slokum, elegant plaint’ (or, rather more lucidly, in other versions, ‘hocus, pocus, elicampane’). There follows, in the Compton version, a subsidiary fight between the Valiant Soldier and the Turkish Knight (neither gets killed), and the appearance of two clown-like figures, Beezlebub and Little Johnny Jack. The former carries a frying-pan, the latter a sack of dolls whom he calls his ‘wife and family’. They too are braggarts, but their main function is to take up the collection. At Compton this was Beezlebub’s task, as he appealed to the seasonal spirit of good will:
Christmas comes but once a year,
And likes to give you jolly good cheer…
Price, sir! Price, sir! And my old bell shall ring;
Put what you like in my old hat, and then these chaps will sing.
The performance then concluded with a carol.
Descriptions of the Tipteers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show that they did not try to dress up in distinctive costumes suited to their parts, except that Father Christmas always wore a long false beard. On the other hand, they did not hide their identity behind the cascades of dangling ribbons worn by Mummers in some other parts of England. Some groups wore their ordinary working clothes, garnished with bits of coloured cloth cut out in stars o
r crescents or other designs, and had pheasants’ tail-feathers in their hats; others had brightly coloured clothes, further decorated with spangles or knots of ribbon. The general intention was to be as gay as possible, but neither to disguise oneself nor to ‘dress the part’.
Since 1900, there have been several deliberate revivals of the play by groups of folk-dancers and other persons interested in old customs, but not necessarily in the same villages where the original bands of Tipteerers flourished. Notable among these modern groups were the Boxgrove Tipteerers, under the leadership of R.J. Sharp. Their version was a combination of texts from East Preston and Iping, written down in 1911 and 1912 from the memories of two elderly men who had been Mummers in their youth; it was performed at the Albert Hall in 1913 and again in 1937. After the Second World War the play was again revived, in a different version, by the Fittleworth Tipteerers. Performances are now regularly given in many towns and villages on or near Boxing Day, usually by local morris dancers; traditional texts provide the basis, with scope allowed for occasional improvisation and topical references.
The Christmas season, and particularly Boxing Day, used also to be a time for a less agreeable custom – that of hunting the wren. Although at other times this bird was well enough liked for it to be considered most unlucky to disturb its nest, at Christmas in the mid-nineteenth century bands of boys used to go about beating the hedges and hurling ‘libbets’, i.e. short knobbed and weighted sticks, at any wrens which flew out. The origins of this custom (which has many more elaborate parallels in other parts of the British Isles) are mysterious and possibly very ancient; in its later form, however, it was only an outlet for brutal high spirits.
The last day of December is devoted to ‘seeing the New Year in’, by gathering to drink at home or in a pub, or by dancing in the street – at Chichester, in the days when traffic conditions allowed such things, the dancing was round the beautiful medieval Market Cross. It was also (yet again) a day for wassailing apple trees, for instance at Horsted Keynes. But the most agreeable custom for this night is that of the Wassail Bowl, best described by Miss Candlin:
In Sussex homes, as well as in the inns, the custom of wassailing was kept up until the end of the nineteenth century. Many wassail parties were held on New Year’s Eve, and as the evening began to approach the hour of twelve, a large china bowl filled with hot spiced ale was brought in and placed in the centre of a round table in the middle of the room. On top of the ale floated ‘lambs’ wool’ – the white fluffy inside of roasted apples, which looked like lambs’ wool. Everyone present was given a silver spoon and, forming themselves into a procession, they walked round the table (clockwise), singing and stirring the ale at the same time. When the clock struck twelve, glasses were filled from the bowl, and everyone wished each other ‘good wassail’.
11
Local Humour
Probably most Sussex people, at one time or another, have been teased by outsiders with the reminder that our county is saddled with the nickname ‘Silly Sussex’. Many will have tried to explain it away by pointing out the etymology of the word – ‘silly’ comes from Anglo-Saxon sælig, ‘blessed’ or ‘innocent’, and the name therefore should be taken as a compliment. But this argument rarely convinces the mockers, and ‘Silly Sussex’ it remains, in the worst sense of the word.
But at least the county is no longer notorious for its mud, as was the case in the days of unmetalled lanes, deep in summer dust and winter mud. The latter was so glutinous that in 1751 Dr John Burton, in his Essays of a Traveller, asked himself:
Why is it that the oxen, swine, women, and all animals are so longlegged in Sussex? May it be from the diffculty of pulling the legs out of so much mud, by the strength of the ankle, that the muscles get stretched and the legs lengthened?
To illustrate the incredible horrors of a Sussex lane, the following story was at one time a favourite: There was once a traveller who, to keep as clear of the mud as he could, was wisely picking his way along the top of a high bank that ran alongside a lane. As he went his way, he noticed a rather good hat lying on the muddy surface of the lane itself. It seemed a pity to leave it there, so he cautiously stretched out his walking stick and hooked it towards him – thus revealing, to his amazement, the head of a man who was sunk almost to the eyebrows in the mud. The traveller rushed off to get help, and a party with ropes arrived and rescued the sunken man in the nick of time. The latter thanked them heartily, and then asked whether they could by any chance manage to haul out his horse, for when he was first seen he had been sitting on horseback. ‘Your horse?’ they exclaimed in horror, ‘Why, the poor beast must be dead, under all that mud!’ ‘Oh no, he’s alive right enough,’ answered the other, ‘for I could hear him munching away at something down below. I think we must have been stuck right on top of the big hay-wain which sank along here last week.’
The small tight-knit rural communities of the past formed an excellent environment for one particular form of folklore, the traditional taunts and witticisms directed by people of one village at those of another. This type of humour was once very widespread, and took the form of rhymes, nicknames, proverbial sayings, and stock comments. The majority of them were noted down in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and are presumably much rarer nowadays; needless to say, they are quite unjustified, and probably always were!
The joke sometimes turns on a verbal pun, as in the rhyme about Rudgwick (pronounced ‘Ridgick’), Wisborough Green, Billingshurst and Horsham (formerly pronounced ‘Horsam’), the last-named being the chief victim:
Rudgwick for riches, Green for poors,
Billingshurst for pretty girls, Horsham for whores.
More often the humour is directed against some physical peculiarity of the place in question. Amberley, for instance, is a delightfully pretty village, but it is hemmed in by low-lying meadows of the Arun valley, which until recent times were flooded during much of the winter. Consequently, it was said that Amberley people have webbed feet; that the women among them have yellow bellies from lifting their skirts to warm themselves over smoky fires; and that if you ask an Amberley man where he lives he will answer cheerfully in summer, ‘Amberley, where would you?’, but in winter gloomily, ‘Amberley, God knows!’
Amberley, God knows,
All among the rooks and crows,
Where the good potatoes grows.
Such jeers were sometimes used as battle-cries by rival gangs of village boys. One nineteenth-century observer happened upon two gangs, one from Arundel and one from the tiny hamlet of Offham a mile or so to the north, who were throwing stones at one another and chanting insults:
Ar’ndel mullet, stinking fish!
You eats it off a dirty dish!
and:
Offham dingers, church-bell ringers,
Only ’taters for your Sunday dinners!
Another writer noted that people from Littlehampton taunted those from Arundel with the same allusion to their local fish (praised, incidentally, by Izaac Walton), ‘Arundel mullet!’ The latter retorted, with reference to the ague-breeding marshes of the Arun mouth, near which Littlehampton lies, ‘Hampton shivers!’
Other physical peculiarities commemorated in stock jokes are the isolation of Thakeham, ‘the last place God made’; the former quietness of the cathedral town Chichester, ‘where one half of the people are asleep, and the other half goes about on tiptoe for fear of waking ’em’; and possibly the hill-top site of Rotherfield, where women are said to be so tall that they have an extra pair of ribs.
Other places have inexplicably acquired a reputation for moral faults, such as pilfering and miserliness:
The people of Fletching
Live by snapping and ketching.
Lewes men would skin a rat
For to get its hide and fat.
There is a whole group of rhymes satirically alluding to village churches. Thus it is said of East Grinstead:
Large parish, poor people;
Lar
ge new church, no steeple.
Of Berwick, allegedly in reference to an actual event in 1811:
The parson was poor and so were the people,
So they sold the bells to repair the steeple.
Of Petworth, with reference to the old lead spire taken down in 1800, which used to lean askew:
Proud Petworth, poor people;
High church, crooked steeple.
Most scathing of all, of the free chapel at Playden, named after Sauket Street:
Sauket church, crooked steeple;
Drunken parson, wicked people.
Sometimes the butt of humour is not a town or village, but a particular group of people. Fishermen, for instance, are commonly accused of laziness because of the long hours they spend in enforced idleness, waiting for a good wind or tide. Hence it is said that Brighton fishermen have corns on their chests from leaning on the railings of the cliffs, and Hastings ones patches on their trousers from sitting down all day. It is also an insult to call the latter ‘Chop-Backs’, for this alludes to a bloody fight in 1768 between a gang of pirates based on Hastings and the crew of a Dutch ship, in which they savagely killed the Dutch captain by chopping his spine through with an axe. More obscure is the nickname ‘pork-bolters’ or ‘pork-boilers’ scornfully applied to Worthing fishermen, but it is perhaps connected with the fact that many seamen had a strong superstitious horror of pigs. Those of Eastbourne were also accused of an unsavoury diet, being taunted with the name ‘willock-eaters’ – the willock being the guillemot, whose flesh is most unpalatable.
The point of these sayings is indeed often conveyed by devious and mysterious hints. Thus, the comment on a braying donkey, ‘Well, he’s not from Rottingdean’, constitutes a hit at that village’s former reputation for smuggling – the idea being that Rottingdean donkeys were kept at work all night carrying contraband, so that they were far too tired in the daytime to bray. Equally oblique are the two possible Sussex rebukes to thoughtless people who leave doors open, namely ‘Do you come from Yapton?’ and ‘Do you come from Seaford?’ The latter is said to be an allusion to the extreme windiness of the bleak coast around Seaford, while the former has several traditional explanations, all derogatory – that the villagers of Yapton were so keen to avoid paying window tax that they bricked up all their windows and had to leave their doors open to get any light; or that they don’t understand doors anyway, because they were all born in boats; or, that they leave doors open to help smugglers pass through; or, that it all goes back to one farmer whose calf got its head stuck between the bars of a gate – to free it, he cut its head off, and was so upset at finding he had killed it that from then on he kept all his gates and doors open. A more romantic version is that Yapton is haunted by the ghost of a smuggler’s dog seeking its dead master; doors must be left open for it.
Folklore of Sussex Page 18