We have just been entertained by the children of our local school, Monkton Park Community Primary School, with Christmas carols and songs for History Centre staff and users. They ended with We Wish You a Merry Christmas and we would like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Peaceful New Year. That set me thinking about earlier Christmas times in our county.

            
Adverts in Wiltshire Newpapers, 1909

For glimpses of Christmases past in Wiltshire you need to look in the writings of Francis Kilvert, Alfred Williams and A.G. Street. In Kilvert you will find the entertainments and activities of the clergy and minor gentry – dancing and games, late night parties, skating, and seasonal decorations in the church. Williams presents us with a view of the farm labourer’s Christmas while Street provides a mixture of famers’ and farm workers’ celebrations. To find out more please 'read more'...

In earlier times male villagers performed mummers’ plays at the farm houses and big houses – we have the words and characters of the Limpley Stoke play transcribed by Felicity Gilmour. Other Wiltshire mummers’ can be found in the Folk Arts section of our Wiltshire Community History web site at www.wiltshire.gov.uk/community/folk_play_search.php .

There are a few traditional carols local to Wiltshire; two are from Britford. The Britford First Carol has been transcribed by Chris Wildridge.

Carols came from the folk tradition, not from the church, and it was only about 200 years ago that they became ‘respectable’.

In rural Wiltshire Christmas Festivities began on Christmas Eve, as they still should! This was the time for mumming and wassailing. The latter originated in a fertility ceremony for crops and animals; in earlier times a bull or ox was led round by the wassailers to farmhouses where they sang and toasted the ox and prosperity to the farmer. Their wassail bowl was then filled with spiced ale or punch for them to drink. This tradition lasted longest at Cricklade where information was obtained from ‘Wassail’ Harvey, the last survivor of the Cricklade Wassailers, by Alfred Williams in 1916.

Food and drink loomed large at this time of year and it might have been one of the few occasions when some families tasted ‘butcher’s meat’. In the houses of the gentry before the Civil War John Aubrey mentions that the first dish brought to table at Christmas time was a Boar’s Head with a lemon in its mouth. John Britton wrote about Thomas Ernle, Rector of Everley, who on 25^th December 1667 remonstrated against an ancient “heathenish custom”. He and his predecessors were obliged to entertain the “ruder sort of people with bread, cheese and ale, after Evening Prayer on Christmas Day”. In 1755 the Rector A. Lemoine was still complaining of the same custom. These Christmas Ales go back to medieval times.

One of the most famous dialect poems of Wiltshire is Edward Slow’s Tha Girt Big Figgetty Pooden;  A couple of verses will give you a taste for it;

            Ah, wen I wur a girt hard bwoy,

            We appetite nar mossel coy,

Tha baste thing out to gie I joy,

Wur a girt big figgetty pooden.

. . . . . . .

A used ta come in steamin hot,

Nearly as big’s a waishen pot,

Wie vigs an currands zich a lot,

In thick ar Crismus pooden.

You will find all 31 verses in Figgetty Pooden: the dialect verse of Edward Slow, by John Chandler (1982). John has also compiled A Wiltshire Christmas (1991) in which you will find the boy bishop tradition at Salisbury Cathedral, the Sarum Missal of special Christmas masses, and many stories, poems and plays of Christmas in Wiltshire.

If you have enjoyed this article, the following entries may also be of interest:

A Christmas Custom

Snow, Glorious Snow!?