The robin is always remembered at Christmas in the rural villages and farms of northern Europe, for it is not migratory. In South Germany the custom is to put grain on a roof for the redbreasts, who come trustfully about houses at that season, and find welcome shelter in barns and straw-stacks: and in Sweden and elsewhere an unthreshed sheaf of wheat is set up on a pole for their winter fare.
It will have been noticed that in the ballads quoted, the wren is associated with the robin in a protective way. A whole book might be written about this least of birds, which, although the least, is called “king” in every European language. We are told that a wren was in the stable at Bethlehem when Christ was born; and an Irish proverb runs: “The robin and the wren are God’s two holy men.” How surprising, then, to read of a custom called Hunting (or in some places Burying) the Wren, which once prevailed in southern France, in Keltic parts of England, in Wales, and also in Ireland, where it persisted until abolished by the British Government about the middle of the 19th century. Accounts of the practices, songs, etc., connected with it may be found in antiquarian histories, for example the following from Miles’s book of Christmas customs:
In the Isle of Man very early on Christmas morning, when the church-bells had rung out midnight, servants went out to hunt the wren. They killed the bird, fastened it to the top of a long pole; and carried it in procession to every house, chanting these words:
We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for Jack of the Can,
We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for everyone.
At each house they sought to collect money. At last, when all had been visited, they laid the wren on a bier, carried it to the church-yard, and buried it with the utmost solemnity, singing Manx dirges.
It is evident that this is a very ancient practice, and embodies in its utterly degenerate state a religious idea or symbolism, the meaning of which has been forgotten. Why, for example, should the feathers of the murdered Manx wrens be preserved, one by one, among the coast families, as a talisman preserving the possessor from shipwreck, unless some religious sanction was involved, and this may be connected with St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who was stoned to death; for this savage custom belonged to St. Stephen’s Day, December 26, as well as to Christmas, or locally in place of Christmas. But why the wren, rather than some other bird? The matter is interesting enough to justify quoting the broad account of the matter furnished by Swann:[[47]]
An old Irish custom on St. Stephen’s Day, and one that has not quite died out, was the “hunting of the wren” by boys. When captured it was tied, alive but maimed, to a pole (or, according to Vallancey—De Reb. Hib., IV, 13—tied by the leg in the center of two hoops placed at right angles with one another) and paraded around the neighborhood, a few doggerel verses being repeated at each house, while a donation was requested, one version being;