If you happened to walk up Donkey Lane on a very cold Saturday afternoon in January 2020, you might have heard a group of people singing and 'making merry' in the Orchard. What was that all about? Well, Greening Chinnor were holding their first Wassail just before Covid and lockdown struck. We couldn't hold one this year, but on Saturday January 29th 2022, we will once again be Wassailing the apple trees.
Advertising for the event described it as "a very old tradition practiced in the apple orchards of southern England during the winter to bless the fruit trees to encourage them to produce a good harvest for the year. The tradition is to make a lot of noise to ward off bad luck and mischievous spirits, so they stay away and don't steal the fruit!"The word Wassail comes from the Old English 'Waes Hael' meaning Be Healthy or Be Whole; and it is a toast of 'Good health' for both the people, their crops and their animals. Because once upon a time it wasn't just apple trees that were Wassailed, other fruit trees, cows and even bees all had their own Wassailing. The ceremony involving cider apple trees seems to have survived longest, so it is counties such as Somerset, Devon and Herefordshire which were most closely associated with Wassailing in the last century and into living memory.
Dating back at least to the Middle Ages, Wassailing is a custom which almost died out but has lately been revived and re-imagined for the 21st century. For example the National Trust has held public events at several of its properties in recent years, and locally the Mid Shires Orchard Group has been holding Wassails in orchards in Buckinghamshire since about 2008. It is now often celebrated in a more family-friendly way during daylight hours. In the Cotswolds the Morris Men take part in dancing round the trees, and here in Chinnor we were lucky enough to have the Village Voices community choir come to sing us Wassail songs as well as the Vicar who blessed the Orchard.
Other aspects of the traditional ceremony included drinking from a communal Wassail bowl, with a sort of punch which could be cider or beer-based, usually warm and spiced and sometimes with added eggs and cream. These Wassails were held at night, with bonfires being lit in the orchards and people carrying flaming torches. Such old customs could vary between different villages, even between different farms, but they all encompassed singing, drinking and praising the trees with encouragement to do even better next year. Each place had its own song too, a form of folk song or carol, and luckily many of them were collected and written down before they were forgotten. The closest to us that I can find is the Adderbury (Oxon) Wassail, collected in 1917. Read more...
