Mummers' play
Mummers' plays are traditional English folk plays performed by troupes of amateur actors, traditionally all male, known as mummers or guisers. The term refers especially to a play in which a number of characters are called on stage, two of whom engage in a combat, the loser being revived by a doctor character. This play is sometimes found associated with a sword dance though both also exist in England independently.
Plays may be performed in the street or during visits to houses and pubs. They are generally performed seasonally, often at Christmas, Easter or on Plough Monday, more rarely on Halloween or All Souls' Day, and often with a collection of money. The practice may be compared with other customs such as those of Halloween, Bonfire Night, wassailing, pace egging and first-footing at new year.
The term mumming has been in use since the Middle Ages to refer to informal groups of costumed community members that visited from house to house on various holidays, but there appear not to have been folk plays associated with mumming from that era. The earliest evidence of mummers' plays as they are known today is from the mid- to late 18th century. Mummers' plays also should not be confused with the earlier mystery plays.
Mummers' plays spread from the British Isles to a number of former British colonies. Ireland has its own unique history of mummers' play, and adopted the term for the tradition from the English language.
Etymology
The word mummer is sometimes explained to derive from Middle English mum or Greek mommo, but is more likely to be associated with Early New High German mummer and vermummen, which itself is derived from or came to be associated with mummen and mumschanz,, these latter words originally referring to a game or throw of dice. Ingrid Brainard argues that the English word "mummer" is ultimately derived from the Greek name Momus, a god of mockery and scoff.Overview
Mummers' and guisers' plays were formerly performed throughout much of English-speaking Great Britain and Ireland, spreading to other English-speaking parts of the world including Newfoundland and Saint Kitts and Nevis. There are a few surviving traditional teams of mummers in England and Ireland, but there have been many revivals of mummers' plays, often associated nowadays with morris and sword dance groups.Broadly comic performances, the most common type features a doctor who has a magic potion able to resuscitate the vanquished character. Early scholars of folk drama, influenced by James Frazer's The Golden Bough, tended to view these plays as descendants of pre-Christian fertility ritual, but modern researchers have subjected this interpretation to criticism.
The characters may be introduced in a series of short speeches or they may introduce themselves in the course of the play's action. The principal characters, presented in a wide variety of manners, are a hero, most commonly Saint George, King George, or Prince George, and his chief opponent, and a quack Doctor who comes to restore the dead man to life. Other characters include: Old Father Christmas, who introduces some plays, the Fool, and Beelzebub or Little Devil Doubt.
In Ynysmeudwy near Swansea groups of four boys dressed as Crwmpyn John, Indian Dark, Robin Hood and Doctor Brown took the play from house to house on Bonfire Night and were rewarded with money.
Despite the frequent presence of Saint George, the Dragon rarely appears although it is often mentioned. A dragon seems to have appeared in the Revesby Ploughboys' Play in 1779, along with a "wild worm", but it had no words. In the few instances where the dragon appears and speaks its words can be traced back to a Cornish script published by William Sandys in 1833.
File:Westonmummers.JPG|thumb|left|Weston Mummers perform at the Packhorse Inn, Southstoke on Boxing Day, 2007.
In 1418 a law was passed in London forbidding in the city "mumming, plays, interludes or any other disguisings with any feigned beards, painted visors, deformed or coloured visages in any wise, upon pain of imprisonment".
Mumming was a way of raising money and the play was taken round the big houses. Most Southern English versions end with the entrance of "Little Johnny Jack his wife and family on his back". Johnny, traditionally played by the youngest mummer in the group, first asks for food and then more urgently for money. Johnny Jack's wife and family were either dolls in a model house or sometimes a picture.
Textual evidence
Although there are earlier hints, the earliest complete text of the "Doctor" play appears to be an undated chapbook of Alexander and the King of Egypt, published by John White in Newcastle upon Tyne between 1746 and 1769. The fullest early version of a mummers' play text is probably the 1779 "Morrice Dancers'" play from Revesby, Lincolnshire. The full text is available online. Although performed at Christmas, this text is a forerunner of the East Midlands Plough Monday plays. A text from Islip, Oxfordshire, dates back to 1780.A play text which had, until recently, been attributed to Mylor in Cornwall has now been shown, by genealogical and other research, to have originated in Truro, Cornwall, around 1780. A play from an unknown locality in Cheshire, close to the border with Wales, dates from before 1788.
Chapbook versions of The Christmas Rhime or The Mummer's Own Book were published in Belfast, c.1803-1818. A mummers' play from Ballybrennan, County Wexford, Ireland, dating from around 1817–18, was published in 1863. It is from the 19th century that the bulk of recorded texts derive.
Mumming, at any rate in the South of England, had its heyday at the end of the 19th century and the earliest years of the 20th century. Most traditional mummers groups stopped with the onset of the First World War, but not before they had come to the attention of folklorists. In the second half of the 20th century many groups were revived, mostly by folk music and dance enthusiasts. The revived plays are frequently taken around inns and public houses around Christmas time and the begging done for some charity rather than for the mummers themselves.
Local seasonal variants
Although the main season for mumming throughout Britain was around Christmas, some parts of England had plays performed around All Souls' Day or Easter. In north-eastern England the plays are traditionally associated with Sword dances or Rapper dances.In some parts of Britain and Ireland the plays are traditionally performed on or near Plough Monday. These are therefore known as Plough plays and the performers as Plough-jags, Plough-jacks, Plough-bullocks, Plough-stots or Plough witches. The Plough plays of the East Midlands of England feature several different stock characters. Tradition has it that ploughboys would take their plays from house to house and perform in exchange for money or gifts, some teams pulling a plough and threatened to plough up people's front gardens or path if they did not pay up. Examples of the play have been found in Denmark since the late 1940s.
England
Around Sheffield and in nearby parts of northern Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire a dramatised version of the well-known Derby Ram folksong, known as the Derby Tup, has been performed, since at least 1895, by teams of boys. The brief play is usually introduced by two characters, an old man and an old woman. The Tup was usually represented by a boy, bent over forwards, covered with a sack, and carrying a broomstick with a rough, wooden sheep's head attached. The Tup was killed by a Butcher, and sometimes another boy held a basin to catch the "blood". There is a Sheffield version where the Tup is killed and then brought back to life by the Doctor. This is the main play performed by the Northstow Mummers based in Cambridge.An Owd 'Oss play, another dramatised folksong in Yorkshire, was also known from roughly the same area, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, around Christmas. The custom persisted until at least 1970, when it was performed in private houses and pubs in Dore on New Year's Day. A group of men accompanied a hobby horse and sang a version of The Old Horse or Poor Old Horse, which describes a decrepit horse that is close to death.
In Lincolnshire, similar traditions were known as 'plough plays', many of these were collected by the folklorist Ethel Rudkin.
Ireland
All known Irish play scripts are in English though Irish custom and tradition have permeated mumming ceremony with famous characters from Irish history: Colmcille, Brian Boru, Art MacMorrough, Owen Roe O'Neill, Sarsfield and Wolfe Tone. The mummers are similar but distinct from the other traditions such as wrenboys. The main characters are usually the Captain, Beelzebub, Saint Patrick, Prince George, Oliver Cromwell, The Doctor and Miss Funny.The tradition of the mummers' play is still present in areas of Ireland including County Fermanagh, County Tyrone, County Wexford, and the Fingal area of County Dublin. The practice was discouraged by the Catholic Church in the early 20th century, but appears to have continued despite this condemnation. In 1935, the Carne Mummers were arrested for their street performance under the Dance Halls Act. In Fingal, the modern form of mummering was re-established by the Fingal Mummers in the 1980s, and is now documented as part of Ireland's National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. A festival is held each October in Fingal by a local school, Scoil Seamus Ennis, which has hosted mummering troupes from across Ireland and England. The group, The Armagh Rhymers, have been performing mummers' plays and other performances inspired by the traditional form since the 1970s.
Scotland
In 1831, Sir Walter Scott published a rhyme which had been used as a prelude to the Papa Stour Sword Dance, Shetland in around 1788. It features seven characters, Saint George, Saint James, Saint Dennis, Saint David, Saint Patrick, Saint Anthony and Saint Andrew, the Seven Champions of Christendom. All the characters are introduced in turn by the Master, St. George. There is no real interplay between the characters and no combat or cure, so it is more of a "calling-on song" than a play. Some of the characters dance solos as they are introduced, then all dance a longsword dance together, which climaxes with their swords being meshed together to form a "shield". They each dance with the shield upon their head, then it is laid on the floor and they withdraw their swords to finish the dance. St. George makes a short speech to end the performance.In the 1950s, A.L. Taylor collected surviving fragments of seasonal Scottish folk plays he described as "Galoshens" or "Galatians". Later, Emily Lyle recorded the oral history of fourteen people from the lowlands of Scotland recounting their memories of "Galoshin" dramas. Galoshin is the hero in a drama in the tradition of Robin Hood plays. Building on this research, Brian Hayward investigated the geographical distribution of the play in Scotland, and published Galoshins: the Scottish Folk Play, which includes several maps showing the locations where each version was performed. These are or were largely across the Central Belt of Scotland, with a strange and unexplained "outlier" at Ballater in Aberdeenshire. The Meadows Mummers are an all-female troupe who perform at local festivals inspired by both these writers, and by folk play workshops at the Scottish Storytelling Centre. In 2019 they performed at the Scots Music School in Barga, Italy.