Mari Lwyd
The Mari Lwyd is a wassailing folk custom in South Wales. The tradition entails the use of an eponymous hobby horse which is made from a horse's skull mounted on a pole and carried by an individual hidden under a sheet.
The custom was first recorded in 1800, with subsequent accounts of it being produced into the early twentieth century. According to these, the Mari Lwyd was a tradition performed at Christmas time by groups of men who would accompany the horse on its travels around the local area, and although the makeup of such groups varied, they typically included an individual to carry the horse, a leader, and individuals dressed as stock characters such as Punch and Judy. The men would carry the Mari Lwyd to local houses, where they would request entry through song. The householders would be expected to deny them entry, again through song, and the two sides would continue their responses to one another in this manner. If the householders eventually relented, the team would be permitted entry and given food and drink.
Although the custom was given various names, it was best known as the Mari Lwyd; the etymology of this term remains the subject of academic debate. The folklorist Iorwerth Peate believed that the term meant "Holy Mary" and thus was a reference to Mary, mother of Jesus, while the folklorist E. C. Cawte thought it more likely that the term had originally meant "Grey Mare", referring to the heads' equine appearance. Several earlier folklorists to examine the topic, such as Peate and Ellen Ettlinger, believed that the tradition had once been a pre-Christian religious rite, although scholarly support for this interpretation has declined amid a lack of supporting evidence. The absence of late medieval references to such practices and the geographic dispersal of the various British hooded animal traditions—among them the Hoodening of Kent, the Broad of the Cotswolds, and the Old Ball, Old Tup, and Old Horse of northern England—have led to suggestions that they derive from the regionalised popularisation of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century fashion for hobby horses among the social elite.
Although the tradition declined in the early to mid-twentieth century, partly due to opposition from some local Christian clergy and changing social conditions, it was revived in new forms in the mid-to-latter part of the century. The tradition has also inspired various artistic depictions, appearing, for instance, in the work of the painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins and the poet Vernon Watkins.
Description
The Mari Lwyd itself consists of a horse's skull that is decorated with ribbons and affixed to a pole; to the back of the skull is attached a white sheet, which drapes down to conceal both the pole and the individual carrying this device. On occasion, the horse's head was represented not by a skull but was instead made from wood or even paper. In some instances, the horse's jaw was able to open and close as a result of string or lever attached to it, and there are accounts of pieces of glass being affixed into the eye sockets of some examples, representing eyes. An observer of the tradition as it was performed at Llangynwyd during the nineteenth century noted that preparation for the activity was a communal event, with many locals involving themselves in the decorating of the Mari Lwyd.The Mari Lwyd custom was performed during winter festivities, specifically around the dates of Christmas and New Year. However, the precise date on which the custom was performed varied between villages, and in a number of cases the custom was carried out for several consecutive nights. There is a unique example provided by an account from Gower in which the head was kept buried throughout the year, only being dug up for use during the Christmas season.
The custom used to begin at dusk and often lasted late into the night. The Mari Lwyd party consisted of four to seven men, who often had coloured ribbons and rosettes attached to their clothes and sometimes wore a broad sash around the waist. There was usually a smartly dressed "Leader" who carried a staff, stick, or whip, and sometimes other stock characters, such as the "Merryman" who played music, and Punch and Judy with blackened faces; often brightly dressed, Punch carried a long metal fire iron and Judy had a besom.
The Mari Lwyd party would approach a house and sing a song in which they requested admittance. The inhabitants of the house would then offer excuses for why the team could not enter. The party would sing a second verse, and the debate between the two sides - known as the pwnco - would continue until the house's inhabitants ran out of ideas, at which time they were obliged to allow the party entry and to provide them with ale and food. An account from Nantgarw described such a performance, in which the Punch and Judy characters would cause a noise, with Punch tapping the ground to the rhythm of the music and rapping on the door with a poker, while Judy brushed the ground, house walls, and windows with a broom. The householders had to make Punch promise that he would not touch their fireplace before he entered the building, otherwise it was the local custom that before he left he would rake out the fire with his poker. In the case from Llangynwyd, however, there was no interplay between the householders and troupe, but rather the latter were typically granted entry automatically after singing the first verse of their song.
Once inside, the entertainment continued with the Mari Lwyd running around neighing and snapping its jaws, creating havoc, frightening children while the Leader pretended to try to restrain it. The Merryman played music and entertained the householders. The folklorist Iorwerth Peate believed that in recorded examples from Glamorgan it was apparent that the Mari Lwyd custom had become "indistinguishable" from the practice of wassailing, although added that there were still some examples of wassailing that did not involve the Mari Lwyd. He added that links between Mari Lwyd and wassailing were also apparent from recorded examples in other part of Wales, thus opining that Mari Lwyd represented a variant of the wider wassailing custom that was found throughout Britain.
Early development
Etymology
Although the custom was given various names, most recorded sources term this particular custom Mari Lwyd. Marie Trevelyan states that the name Marw Lwyd had been used in many parts of Wales since the seventeenth century. She derived this name as "Grey Death", arguing that it was a symbol of "the dying or dead year".However, this etymology is heavy contested, Jones considered this to be a translation of "Blessed Mary", and thus a reference to the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, a key religious figure in the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, and others. Although translating it slightly differently, as "Holy Mary", Peate endorsed this viewpoint. Although some of his acquaintances later suggested that the use of Mari for Mary was unknown in Wales prior to the Protestant Reformation, he countered these criticisms with the observation that the term Mari was being used in reference to the Virgin in the mid-14th century Black Book of Carmarthen, thus attesting to its early usage in Welsh. He nevertheless accepted that during the medieval period the term might have been restricted largely to poets, given that there is no evidence of its usage among the common dialect in this period.
Given that llwyd is the usual word for "grey" in the Welsh language and that Welsh speakers would have been exposed to the English word "mare", an alternative suggestion considered by Peate was that the term Mari Lwyd had originally meant "Grey Mare". This etymological explanation would have parallels with the name of a similar hooded horse tradition found in Ireland and the Isle of Man, which is known in Irish as the Láir Bhán and in Manx as the Laare Vane, in both cases meaning "White Mare". Initially believing that "there is much to be said for this suggestion", Peate later embraced it fully. Cawte similarly believed that "Grey Mare" was the most likely original meaning of the term, noting that the Mari Lwyd appeared to represent a horse and that similar hobby horse customs in neighbouring England, such as the hoodening tradition of East Kent, also made reference to horses with their name. Peate suggested that even if the term Mari Lwyd had originally referred to a "Grey Mare", it could still have come to be associated with Mary in popular folk culture following the Reformation, thus explaining why Mary is referred to in the lyrics of some surviving Welsh wassailing songs.
A further suggestion is that Mari Lwyd derives from the English term Merry Lude, referring to a merry game. Peate opposed this idea, arguing that if the latter was converted into Welsh then the result would be merri-liwt or merri-liwd. Peate also dismissed the idea that had been suggested to him that the term Mari in this context had derived from Morris, a reference to Morris dance. Another reason to doubt this idea is that there is no known historical link between the Mari Lwyd, which was found in South Wales, and the Morris dance, which was concentrated in the north of the country.
In other recorded instances, the Mari Lwyd custom is given different names, with it being recorded as y Wasail "The Wassail" in parts of Carmarthenshire. In the first half of the 19th century it was recorded in Pembrokeshire under the name of y March "The Horse" and y Gynfas-farch "The Canvas Horse". One account from West Glamorgan has the head termed the aderyn bee y llwyd, meaning the "Grey Magpie", although this may be due to an error on the part of the recorder, who could have confused the horse's head for the aderyn pica llwyd, an artificial bird in a tree that was carried by wassailers in the same area.
Note that in modern Welsh, the Mari Lwyd is referred to with definite article y, which subsequently causes a soft mutation of m to f, rendering the form y Fari Lwyd.