The wran, the wran, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze,
Come, give us a bumper, or give us a cake,
Or give us a copper, for Charity’s sake.
Yarrell records a similar practice in Kerry, where the peasantry on Christmas Day used to hunt the bird with two sticks, “one to beat the bushes the other to fling at the bird.” Bullock also mentions it as prevalent in the Isle of Man, both on Christmas Eve and St. Stephen’s Day, and tells us it was founded on a tradition of a beautiful fairy who lured the male inhabitants to a watery grave in the sea, and who to escape subsequent destruction took the form of a wren, which form she was supposed to be doomed by a spell to reassume each succeeding New Year’s Day, ultimately perishing by human hands.... To my own knowledge this custom of a “wren hunt” existed in Nottinghamshire also within recent times, the bird being hunted along the hedgerows by boys armed with stones, but I do not recollect that anything was done with the bird when killed or maimed....
In connection with this belief [alluded to above] in the kingship over other birds, a Twelfth Day custom of parading a caged wren in Pembrokeshire, with the lines recited, is described in Swainson’s Folklore of British Birds, O’Curry has recorded that the wren, like the raven, was kept domesticated on account of the auguries derived from it, which were employed by the Druids. An Irish proverb asserts that “The fox is the cunningest beast in the world barring the wren.” According to Dalyell the wren is considered an unlucky token in Scotland, but the robin a lucky one.
Explanations of this revolting yet long persistent custom have been many and various. A totemic sort of theory is that the bird “was once regarded as sacred, and the Christmas hunting is the survival of an annual custom of slaying the divine animal, such as is found among primitive peoples. The carrying of its body from door to door is apparently intended to convey to each house a portion of its virtues.” I know of no facts in history to support this theory as applied to the Keltic race. One authority tells us that the “crime” for which the bird must be punished so ferociously is that it has “a drop o’ the de’il’s blood in its veins,” but so has the magpie, which is not persecuted.
Lady Wilde[[60]] assures us that “the wren is mortally hated by the Irish for on one occasion, when the Irish troops were approaching to attack a portion of Thomas Cromwell’s army the wrens came and perched on the Irish drums, and by their tapping and noise aroused the English soldiers, who fell on the Irish troops and killed them all.” For this tragic incident we are given no time or place; and it happens that the same report was made respecting a battle between Irish and Danish invaders some 800 years before Cromwell’s campaigns in the Emerald Isle or anywhere else.
The real clue to the puzzle is contained in the fact that in their barbarous hunt for wrens the men and boys kept yelling words that in Cormac’s Glossary (10th century) are explained as “draoi-en,” Druid-bird. We know that the Druid priests were accustomed to draw auguries from the chirpings of the wren—a divination to which the early Christian missionaries objected strenuously. It is probable that they condemned the little songster as a symbol of heathen rites, and encouraged their converts to kill it at the time of the annual Christian feast as a sign of abnegation of Druidical connections. The stoning of the birds on St. Stephen’s Day might be regarded as a vengeful reminder of the manner of that martyr’s murder by a mob.
One more bird-story is connected with Christianity in general—that alluded to in Hamlet, where Ophelia says: “Well, God ’ield you! They say the owl was a baker’s daughter!” This enigmatical remark probably had reference to the story formerly, and perhaps still, common among the peasantry in the English Midlands, of a baker’s daughter that was transformed into an owl by Jesus as a punishment for reducing to a very small size the large piece of dough which her mother had agreed to bake for him. The dough, however, swelled in the oven to enormous proportions, to the girl’s great astonishment, and she gasped out “Heu, heu, heu!” This owl-like noise suggested her transformation into that bird. The story is told to children as a warning lesson against illiberal treatment of the poor. It is evidently alluded to, also, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play The Nice Valour, where the Passionate Lord says, after speaking of a nest of owls, “Happy is he whose window opens to a brown baker’s chimney! he shall be sure there to hear the bird sometimes after twilight.” In northern Germany they say a baker’s man was the offender; and that he was changed by Jesus into a cuckoo, the white spots in whose wings show where the flour was sprinkled on the man’s dun coat. The Norse people apply the same moral by means of their common woodpecker, whose pattern of dress is indicated in the legend known to Norse children as the Gertrud story, which is prettily related by Miss Walker.[[39]] Brewer’s Handbook notes that a maid-servant of the Virgin Mary, who had purloined one of her mistress’s dresses, was converted into a lapwing and condemned forever to cry “Tyvit, tyvit!” (I stole it). The source of the anecdote is not given, nor the language of the one who interprets it, but it reminds one of Tennyson’s.