The Play's the Thing

or, Mummers the word...

Sorry that our blog has been AWOL since early November. As many of you know, I’m writing a book, historical fiction set during the era of Richard the Lionheart. During November, I was doing NANOWRIMO, National Novel Writing Month. The good news is I wrote close to 150 pages, and have reached the last chapter of the first draft. The bad news is I have a lot of editing to do, and I wasn’t able to blog. I hope to get back at it as soon as the holiday frenzy is over. In the meantime, a quick holiday post. A medieval one…

Have you by chance seen the video above? It went viral on TikTok, then Instagram. It is the Windborne singers, out of good old Somerville, MA, singing a Corsican version of the Stabat Mater. The Stabat Mater is a traditional song about the pain of Mary, mother of Christ, during his crucifixion. They surreptitiously snuck into the refectory at Mont St-Michel. It will make the hair on your neck stand up. So beautiful. I had a chance to see them in concert last night, singing a wide variety of medieval, renaissance, and modern songs with a midwinter, holiday bent. Some Occitan carols about a confused devil (Richard spoke Occitan, the language of southern France at the time). Also Lithuanian, Corsican, and others. Good fun. You can watch a livestream of them singing many of these ($20) here:

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/windborne/1020077

Before one of the songs, they spoke about the mummers tradition at Christmas. I knew the word, but not really much about it. Mummering is a tradition of going from house to house in costume, singing, and often demanding tribute in the form of coin, for the performance. The tradition goes back over a thousand years in England¹, and moved from England to Ireland², Newfoundland, and Colonial America³. It was often associated with the harvest, and also with Christmas. In its oldest version, it is often associated with, strangely enough, the legend of Saint George (we discussed the legend of Saint George in the below post).

Characters often dress up as specific characters, such as Saint George, Father Christmas, or the King of Egypt. While the characters vary, an article on the Mummer’s play from Nature Magazine in 1897⁴ says, ‘the play’s the thing.’

It is remarkable that all the actors in the different parts of the country from North England to Cornwall, how- ever widely they differ in their dialogue and in the names of their characters, differ very little, if at all, in their action. The chief features of this action are found to be (1) the drawing of a circle with a broom for the place in which the play is to be performed; (2) the fight, in which the swords are very carefully locked together round the neck; (3) the death and revivification of the champions; (4) the costume of the characters, partly made of paper to imitate armour, as some writers have thought, but leaves of trees, as I think I shall be able to prove, and partly in imitation of animal characters.

Scenes from a Mummer's play

Mummering is often tightly linked to Wassail and Wassailing, and the Windborne Singers sang a wonderful old version of Here We Come A-Wassailing with a melody and harmony quite unlike the version you have come to know. Good fun. Mummering is a cousin to Wassailing, wandering around singing carols with Wassail (mulled cider, ale or wine, together with spices), minus the costumes.

Another medieval holiday tradition is the Feast of Fools. I’ve just learned that there is a production going in Boston, where we happen to be at the moment. I hope we can make it! According to the Globe:

The Feast of Fools arose in medieval Europe as a Christmastide ritual in which a mock bishop or pope was elected and low and high officials changed places. The inspiration came perhaps from the birth of the Christ child in a humble stable and the idea that the meek will inherit the earth. The Feast of Fools is alluded to in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” where Sir Toby Belch serves as the Lord of Misrule, and in Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” with Quasimodo getting elected the Pope of Fools. It’s a natural theme for a “Midwinter Revels,” and this year’s sumptuous “Medieval Celebration of the Solstice” gives us three fools for the price of one.

A scene from Midwinter Revels: The Feast of Fools

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Now, Richard had Christmas in a few places interesting places around the time of the Crusade:

1189 - In France, on his way to the holy land.
1190 - Christmas in Sicily, at his makeshift fort/castle Mategriffon. His chronicler Ambroise said King Philip was his guest, and those in attendance marveled at the gold and silver plate, and quality of the food and drink.
1191 - Christmas, near Ramla in modern day Israel. According to Gillingham’s biography: The weather was appalling: heavy rain and violent hailstorms; mud everywhere. Their food was soggy and rotten, their clothes wet through, and their arms and armour rusty.⁵
1192 - Captured by Leopold near Vienna, he is in captivity.

I wonder if he saw a mummers’ play at any of those?

1. http://projectbritain.com/Xmas/mummers.htm

2. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/these-masked-singers-carry-on-an-irish-christmas-tradition

3. https://washingtonpapers.org/mummers-santa-christmas-america/

4. https://www.nature.com/articles/057175a0

5. Gillingham, John. Richard I (The English Monarchs Series) (p. 189). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.