I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.”
Money or food (bread, butter, eggs, etc.) were given them, upon which they feasted in the evening.[947] In Essex a similar custom used to be observed at Christmas, and the verses sung by the boys were almost identical with those sung in Ireland.[948] In Pembrokeshire a wren, called the King, used to be carried about on Twelfth Day in a box with glass windows surmounted by a wheel, from which hung various coloured ribbons. The men and boys who carried it from house to house sang songs, in one of which they wished joy, health, love, and peace to the inmates of the house.[949]
Hunting the Wren in France.
In the first half of the nineteenth century similar customs were still observed in various parts of the south of France. Thus at Carcassone, every year on the first Sunday of December the young people of the street Saint Jean used to go out of the town armed with sticks, with which they beat the bushes, looking for wrens. The first to strike down one of these birds was proclaimed King. Then they returned to the town in procession, headed by the King, who carried the [pg 321] wren on a pole. On the evening of the last day of the year the King and all who had hunted the wren marched through the streets of the town to the light of torches, with drums beating and fifes playing in front of them. At the door of every house they stopped, and one of them wrote with chalk on the door vive le roi! with the number of the year which was about to begin. On the morning of Twelfth Day the King again marched in procession with great pomp, wearing a crown and a blue mantle and carrying a sceptre. In front of him was borne the wren fastened to the top of a pole, which was adorned with a verdant wreath of olive, of oak, and sometimes of mistletoe grown on an oak. After hearing high mass in the parish church of St. Vincent, surrounded by his officers and guards, the King visited the bishop, the mayor, the magistrates, and the chief inhabitants, collecting money to defray the expenses of the royal banquet which took place in the evening and wound up with a dance.[950] At Entraigues men and boys used to hunt the wren on Christmas Eve. When they caught one alive they presented it to the priest, who, after the midnight mass, set the bird free in the church. At Mirabeau the priest blessed the bird. If the men failed to catch a wren and the women succeeded in doing so, the women had the right to mock and insult the men, and to blacken their faces with mud and soot, when they caught them.[951] At La Ciotat, near Marseilles, a large body of men armed with swords and pistols used to hunt the wren every year about the end of December. When a wren was caught it was hung on the middle of a pole, which two men carried, as if it were a heavy burden. Thus they paraded round the town; the bird was weighed in a great pair of scales; and then the company sat down to table and made merry.[952]
Religious processions with sacred animals. Ceremony of beating a man clad in a cow's skin in the Highlands of Scotland.
The parallelism between this custom of “hunting the [pg 322] wren” and some of those which we have considered, especially the Gilyak procession with the bear, and the Indian one with the snake, seems too close to allow us to doubt that they all belong to the same circle of ideas. The worshipful animal is killed with special solemnity once a year; and before or immediately after death he is promenaded from door to door, that each of his worshippers may receive a portion of the divine virtues that are supposed to emanate from the dead or dying god. Religious processions of this sort must have had a great place in the ritual of European peoples in prehistoric times, if we may judge from the numerous traces of them which have survived in folk-custom. A well-preserved specimen is the following, which lasted in the Highlands of Scotland and in St. Kilda down at least to the latter half of the eighteenth century. It was described to Dr. Samuel Johnson in the island of Coll.[953] Another description of it runs as follows: “On the evening before New Year's Day it is usual for the cowherd and the young people to meet together, and one of them is covered with a cow's hide. The rest of the company are provided with [pg 323] staves, to the end of which bits of raw hide are tied. The person covered with the hide runs thrice round the dwelling-house, deiseil—i.e. according to the course of the sun; the rest pursue, beating the hide with their staves, and crying [here follows the Gaelic], ‘Let us raise the noise louder and louder; let us beat the hide.’ They then come to the door of each dwelling-house, and one of them repeats some verses composed for the purpose. When admission is granted, one of them pronounces within the threshold the beannachadthurlair, or verses by which he pretends to draw down a blessing upon the whole family [here follows the Gaelic], ‘May God bless the house and all that belongs to it, cattle, stones, and timber! In plenty of meat, of bed and body-clothes, and health of men, may it ever abound!’ Then each burns in the fire a little of the bit of hide which is tied to the end of the staff. It is applied to the nose of every person and domestic animal that belongs to the house. This, they imagine, will tend much to secure them from diseases and other misfortunes during the ensuing year. The whole of the ceremony is called colluinn, from the great noise which the hide makes. It is the principal remnant of superstition among the inhabitants of St. Kilda.”[954]
Another description of the Highland custom.
A more recent writer has described the old Highland custom as follows. Towards evening on the last day of the year, or Hogmanay, as the day is called in Scotland, “men began to gather and boys ran about shouting and laughing, playing shinty, and rolling ‘pigs of snow’ (mucan sneachda), i.e. large snowballs. The hide of the mart or winter cow (seiche a mhairt gheamhraidh) was wrapped round the head of one of the men, and he made off, followed by the rest, belabouring the hide, which made a noise like a drum, with switches. The disorderly procession went three times deiseal, according to the course of the sun (i.e. keeping the house on the right hand) round each house in the village, striking the walls and shouting on coming to a door:
‘The calluinn of the yellow bag of hide,
Strike the skin (upon the wall)