Halliwell saw a relation between the huntsman of this verse and the bird robin, since the robin was reckoned to disappear at Christmas and not to return till Midsummer. As a matter of fact, the robin leaves the abodes of man and retires into the woodland as soon as the sharp winter frost is over. However this may be, the presence of the wren and of the robin was mutually exclusive, as we shall see in the pieces which deal with the proposed union, the jealousy, and the death of these two birds.
CHAPTER XVI
BIRD SACRIFICE
THE custom of slaying the wren is widespread in France also. But the chants that deal with it dwell, not like ours, on the actual hunt, but on the sacrificial plucking and dividing up of the bird. Moreover, the French chants depend for their consistency not on repetition like ours, but are set in cumulative form. Both in contents and in form they seem to represent the same idea in a later development.
At Entraigues, in Vaucluse, men and boys hunted the wren on Christmas Eve, and when they caught a bird alive they gave it to the priest, who set it free in church. At Mirabeau the hunted bird was blessed by the priest, and the curious detail is preserved that if the first bird was secured by a woman, this gave the sex the right to jeer at and insult the men, and to blacken their faces with mud and soot if they caught them. At Carcassonne, on the first Sunday of December, the young people who dwelt in the street of Saint-Jean went out of the town armed with sticks and stones to engage in the hunt. The first person who struck the bird was hailed king, and carried the bird home in procession. On the last of December he was solemnly introduced to his office as king; on Twelfth Day he attended mass in church, and then, crowned and girt about with a cloak, he visited the various dignitaries of the place, including the bishop and the mayor, in a procession of mock solemnity. This was done as late as 1819.[67] This identification of the bird and the men explains the hiring of a cart or waggon to convey "the bird" in our own custom-rhymes.
The Breton chant on "plucking the wren," Plumer le roitelet begins:—
Nin' ziblus bec al laouenanic
Rac henès a zo bihanic | bis.
(L., I, p. 72.)
"We will pluck the beak of the wren, for he is very small," and continues, "We will pluck the left eye of the wren, for he is very small".