Upper plumage reddish brown with transverse dusky bars; quills barred alternately with black and reddish brown; tail dusky, barred with black; over the eyes a narrow light streak; under parts light reddish brown; the sides and thighs marked with dark streaks. Length three inches and three-quarters; breadth six inches and a half. Eggs white with a few yellowish red spots towards the larger end, sometimes without spots.
Throughout the whole of England the Wren is invested with a sanctity peculiar to itself and the Redbreast. In the west of England I was familiar, as a child, with the doggerel rhymes: England I was familiar, as a child, with the doggerel rhymes:
Whoso kills a Robin or a Wran
Shall never prosper boy nor man.
Malisons, malisons, mair than ten,
Who harries the queen of heaven's Wren.
In the Isle of Man a legend exists that there 'once on a time' lived a wicked enchantress who practised her spells on the warriors of Mona, and thereby stripped the country of its chivalry. A doughty knight at length came to the rescue, and was on the point of surprising her and putting her to death, when she suddenly transformed herself into a Wren and flew through his fingers. Every year, on Christmas Day, she is compelled to reappear in the island under the form of a Wren, with the sentence hanging over her, that she is to perish by human hands. On that day, consequently, every year, a grand onslaught is made by troops of idle boys and men on every Wren which can be discovered. Such as are killed are suspended from a bough of holly and carried about in triumph on the following day (St. Stephen's Day), the bearers singing a rude song descriptive of the previous day's hunt. The song is preserved in Quiggin's Guide to the Isle of Man, as it was sung in 1853; and, strange to say, it agrees almost word for word with a song which was current twenty years ago, and is so perhaps now, among the rustic population of Devonshire, though the actual hunt has in the latter case fallen into disuse.
In several parts of Ireland, especially the south, there still exists a legend to the effect that a party of Irish soldiers were on the point of surprising their enemies (either Danes or Royalists, for the story varies) who lay fatigued and asleep, when a Wren perched on the drum and awoke the sentinels. An unhappy legend for the poor bird. For some weeks previous to Christmas, peasants assemble to revenge the treachery of the offender in the persons of his descendants. Every Wren that is seen is hunted to death, and the bodies are carefully saved till St. Stephen's Day, when they are suspended from a decorated holly-bough and carried from house to house by the captors, accompanied by a song of which, in Connemara, this is the burden:
The Wran, the Wran, the king of all birds,