Christmas, we are often told, is rich in traditions invented by the Victorians (or even later), and it was a rather austere affair before Charles Dickens. But while it is true that the Victorians gave us many of our Christmas traditions in their current form, English Christmas traditions before the Victorian era were simply different, not non-existent – and they were every bit as exuberant as what came after, if not more so. One of those long-lost pre-Victorian traditions of Christmas is mumming; something which was as synonymous with Christmas 200 years ago as a fat man in a red suit with a proclivity for housebreaking is today. Mumming was a form of folk drama with its roots in the midwinter custom of guising – the wearing of masks for folk performances during winter festivals – which is found across Europe and may well have very ancient origins indeed, although it is first attested from the 13th century.
However, while the word ‘mumming’ just means masking or concealing one’s identity for a performance, in early modern England it came to refer to a specific type of seasonal folk drama. The first evidence for the shape of this drama emerges in the 18th century, and the poet John Clare described the form the drama took in his home village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire) in 1825:
The [protagonist] of the drama steps in first, and … describes himself to be a no less personage than the King of Egypt. His errand appears to be to demand his lost son, who seems to have married a lady not worthy of the heir of Egypt, or to be confined in prison … And if they refuse his enquiries his champion Prince George is called on; who, after talking a great deal of his wonderful feats in slaying dragons and kicking his enemies as small as flies, begins a dialogue with his majesty. Then the Fool is introduced with his bell, who gives a humorous description of himself and his abilities, when all three join in the dialogue and instantly a quarrel is created between the King and [another performer] … and they draw their swords and fight. The Fool gets between them to part them, and pretending to be wounded falls down as dead; when the other confesses that the wounded Fool is the King’s own son in disguise, whose rage is instantly turned to sorrow. And the Doctor is called in and a large reward is offered him if he can restore him to life; who, after enumerating his vast powers in medical skill and knowledge declares the Fool to be only in a trance. And on the Doctor’s touching him he rises and they all join hands and end the drama with a dance and song.
The four key characters of the King of Egypt, Prince George, the Fool, and the Doctor are found in virtually all versions of the mummers’ play – since, as a folk drama, the mummers’ play was learnt orally and varied in details of plot in every locality (when I made a study of mummers’ plays in the Soke of Peterborough, I found a quite different play was performed in villages just a few miles apart). Even the name given to the performers varied – they were not always the mummers, but sometimes the ‘waits’ or the ‘morris dancers’ (a term then without the specific meaning it has today). One character whose name and identity fluctuated was the Fool, who was sometimes ‘the Devil’ or ‘Beelzebub’ – although he remained a figure of fun, and always carried a bell and had a grotesque appearance and a hunchback. Indeed, John Clare noted that the Devil/Fool was sometimes called ‘Punchinello’, a reminder of the relationship between mumming and Punch and Judy.
Punch and Judy is not a descendant of mumming, but both Punch and Judy and pantomime – which still clings on as a Christmas staple – may well share a common ancestor in the slapstick Italian commedia dell’arte, which reached England in the late 17th century via itinerant performers. While Punch and Judy took commedia dell’arte in the direction of a one-man puppet show (retaining its grotesque stock characters and comedic violence), mumming represented an amateur, garbled folk-performance of half-remembered visits by Italian performers, albeit with a particularly English twist. Mumming’s cousin pantomime, meanwhile, has roots in Victorian theatre and music-hall culture. And while pantomime retains the stereotyped plots and stock characters characteristic of mumming, as well as mummers’ utter disregard for ‘the fourth wall’ and engagement with the audience, the plots of pantomimes quickly diverged from commedia dell’arte.
If today’s Christmas pantomime performances seem chaotic, spare a thought for the people of Regency England at Christmas time, who were subject to the likelihood of an entire pantomime being acted on their doorsteps by inebriated local performers throughout the month of December. Mumming was feral pantomime: spontaneous performance of an orally transmitted script with little regard for dramatic authenticity or convincing acting. Each character introduced him or herself with the words ‘Here comes I …!’, leaving little room for ambiguity. But as with Punch and Judy and pantomime, the familiarity of folk drama is the point. It carried with it the comfort of a seasonal ritual; and again, as with Punch and Judy and pantomime, the ribaldry of audience participation was half the fun. No one watched the mummers with the attentiveness of a theatre critic.
A few modern traditions of spontaneous outdoor performance at Christmas time, such as the dreaded arrival (to some, anyway) of carol singers on people’s doorsteps and scratch choirs singing seasonal numbers at Christmas markets perhaps offer a hint of what it was like to watch a mummers’ play – but they are pallid replacements for a tradition that, ultimately, was unacceptable to the Victorians’ moral reformation. Like seasonal fairs, mumming fell victim to a burgeoning civic culture of respectability in which spontaneous drunken folk-drama became gradually socially unacceptable. But the later Victorians were also fascinated by the folk culture they had killed; in the 1880s and 1890s local newspapers were filled with memories of the mummers at Christmas time, and sometimes an elderly resident could be found who remembered his part in the drama and recounted snatches of traditional dialogue from his youth. These newspaper reports are now invaluable to the researcher, of course.
Mumming is occasionally revived today, and there are thriving groups of mummers in individual towns and villages around the UK. But it would be hard to argue that mumming has recovered its cultural significance, or is likely to do so. The demise of mumming is a reminder that seemingly universally beloved seasonal traditions, synonymous with the season, can quickly fall into obscurity under social or economic pressure (how many people today have heard of the Michaelmas goose, let alone cooked one at the end of September?) And the fate of mumming might lead us to wonder which of today’s familiar Christmas traditions might one day meet with the disapproval of future generations and end up deleted from our collective cultural memory.
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