Why Irish mumming endures The troupes united communities

And if he is welcomed in? Then you get a good look at him in the lamplight. This is the Captain or Jester. In England they might call him Marshall or Tom Fool or Arthur Abland or Father Christmas or even Mother Christmas, depending where you are and when you are. But we are in Ulster, and so we’ll call him the Captain. He comes right into the kitchen with his head veiled by a cone of straw. This is the crucial time. He must take control of his audience and do it quick, before the strange and true can wither into the ridiculous. “Room room brave gallant boys, come give us room to Rhime…”

Now it starts in earnest. In comes the troupe. There could be five of them, there could be 15. It varies from place to place. The Captain introduces some boastful wag. In Ireland, this is usually Prince George. After going on about his triumphs for a while, he is challenged by a third man. This could be Saint Patrick in West Tyrone, or a Turkish Champion in Belfast. They draw swords and lay about one another until the loser lies bleeding. The outcome is cut to local taste. Prince George might triumph in Belfast, but get pancaked in West Tyrone.

The cry goes up for a doctor. One appears, outfitted in a broad hat and a black coat, the very image of a medical man. “I can cure the plague within, the plague without, the palsy and the gout…” Yes, there’s a cure to be had, but it will come dear. Money changes hands. Ten pounds, a wonderful sum. The doctor gets to work and up springs the fallen man, restored to brawn and vigour.

The drama enters its third and final act. The doctor’s insistence on a fee is an ominous portent. Out comes Beelzebub to pass among the audience and press them for a few coins: “All silver and no brass.” The money won’t be much, and will go towards a mummers’ ball in the New Year, or perhaps to  charity. Still, it is awkward to ask. There is a subtle genius to the appearance of the Devil. The rest of the company need not risk embarrassment by asking for money. Who better than the King of Hell to send out begging? Don’t the people already hate him? And wouldn’t they expect such vulgarity from one of his ilk? “Money I want and money I crave, if you don’t give me money I’ll sweep ‘ee all to the grave.”

So might run an evening with the mummers. We know so little about the history of those nights. Christmas mumming probably came over from Britain, though there is much debate about when. We know that some form of the tradition had reached Ireland by the late-17th century — a mummers’ play was seen in Cork City in 1685 — and that it took a particular hold in County Wexford, County Dublin and the North. Mummers joined a broader culture of costumed visitors in Ireland, like strawboys at weddings and wren boys at New Year.

Even the word “mummer” is a mystery. Origins have been suggested in Middle English, German, Latin and Pontic Greek. Did it mean to “perform silently” or “to mask” or something else entirely? Scholars have been merrily disagreeing for years.

The plays are all different too. In the early 1900s, the Oxford don R.J.E. Tiddy collected 32 examples from England, and one from Belfast, later published in his posthumous book The Mummers’ Play. While all follow a core structure — a fight, a miraculous cure, a request for money — the names and numbers of characters vary widely, as do their lines. These plays were printed on the mind and read with the tongue. They changed from village to village and generation to generation. Tiddy caught a few before two world wars and the television turned them into antiquarian curiosities. “I got a Mummer’s Play absolutely at first shot,” he wrote in 1915. “I overtook a dear old shepherd-like man just as I was walking into the village, and after one minute on the weather found he used to act in one, and remembered it.”

It is strange to read Tiddy’s book. The plays look wrong on the page. They were never meant to be transcribed. Loose and mercurial in life, they cramp in print. No doubt they were written down by some performers at one time or another, but only in the way we might write “milk, mince, apples” before we visit the shops. An aid to memory, nothing more. Not a text to keep on a shelf. However much the plays changed over time and place, after all, rhymed lines and closely fitted narratives were there to help the mummers. Each drama, rarely exceeding three or four printed pages, has a vivid pull that encourages recollection.

Tiddy died on the Western Front in 1916. But he had done much to preserve fragments of an English tradition that extended back, in fits and starts, to the Middle Ages. Scholars working in Ireland have had a slightly easier time of it. In 1972, the American anthropologist Henry Glassie spoke to people who had seen the plays or acted in them. He walked about a patch of County Fermanagh and listened to stories, about the welcomes and the rebuffs, about the ribboned costumes and the hard journeys between houses in the black countryside: “You’d be coming up that lane and you’d go up to your knees. It really was mud up to your waist. And you’d have to travel on.”

Glassie must have felt he’d gathered these recollections in the nick of time. When he published his book on mummers, in 1975, the tradition’s future looked bleak, especially in the North. The Troubles had put an end to carefree jaunts about the country after dark. But this was not the only factor. “It must be due to the standard of livin’ raisin’ in Ireland, and they haven’t been out,” said Peter Flanagan, once a mummer himself. Another of Glassie’s interviewees, Hugh Nolan, agreed. He blamed the car. It allowed young men to take jobs in town and spend their evenings gadding about. For good or ill, it let them escape the local and all it meant.

While Glassie was travelling around Fermanagh with his tape recorder, in 1972, Seamus Heaney wrote a poem called “The Last Mummer”. A spectral mummer arrives at a house to find the occupants insensible: “The luminous screen in the corner / has them charmed in a ring / so he stands a long time behind them.” Not only has Heaney’s mummer lost his audience; he is alone. The boisterous company of masked rhymers has been reduced to a solitary ghost, doomed to tramp between houses that are curtained against him, made inhospitable by their cosiness. Heaney was not the only Northern poet to feel the loss. John Montague and John Hewitt both wrote their own elegies for a tradition that must have seemed on the brink of extinction.

But the “ould custom” proved resilient. In 1998, an anthropologist encountered a lively mumming scene in West Tyrone. Ray Cashman even joined them as Beelzebub, on the condition that he swap his Texan twang for a local one. His vivid account offers a glimpse into the practicalities of mumming: drumming up a company; the delicate process of assigning parts; the sheer exhaustion of delivering up to twenty performances night after night. Cashman found that the troupe tended to perform in pubs rather than private homes, but other aspects of the tradition had stuck, including the willingness to perform for whoever was to hand.

Historically, mumming was never the preserve of either Ulster community. There were Protestant troupes and Catholic troupes and mixed troupes. They would visit anyone who would have them. The performance, with its choreographed procession of events from knock to donation, allowed for the suspension of any usual tension. Glassie found that Protestants in his largely Catholic region of study took as keen an interest in mumming as anyone else. He interviewed one Ellen Cutler, who emphasised how much she had looked forward to seeing the mummers each year. Cashman met “a wealthy Protestant farmer” and former agent for the Duke of Abercorn who praised them as the best company he’d ever seen.

Are there mummers still about today? In a sense. The Belfast Wren Boys continue to promote the tradition of indigenous mumming, while the Armagh Rhymers have folded mumming into other Irish traditions of music and storytelling. Mumming endures, if not necessarily as it once was. Like the words of the plays themselves, the tradition adapts to the kitchen. But the core remains unchanged. As the year sputters out, the doctor delivers his cure, and kindles new life in the dark and cold. The Christmas nights may be quieter than before, but they aren’t silent yet.