This Ancient Agricultural Ceremony Is Basically a Massive Piss-Up

It's a strange looking gathering. Kids with shakers and drums run around smashing ice frozen across water troughs. A handful of people wear exotic hats that look like they may have once been real animals. Someone has a trombone. And in the middle of it all is Ian White: black-jacketed, black-skirted, crowned with a wreath of green leaves, and ready to lead us all in a community wassail.

Wassail is a properly ancient English tradition, though you may never have heard of it. The word itself is Anglo-Saxon: wæs hæl means "be healthy" and for centuries, local people have taken a cup of something—preferably alcoholic—and toasted their neighbours and land with good health for the coming year.

Mostly though, wassailing is an excuse to sing, drink, and make merry in January.

"Here's a toast to Dry January!" someone shouts out as we wait to gather, lifting a bottle of cider and taking an exuberant swig, as if to prove their point.

When England was an agricultural society, wassails were common. But a few communities kept the tradition alive through the 20th century and the past few years have seen something of a revival. Stroud in Gloucestershire not only has wassail singers but Morris dancers and "mummers" (actors who perform without using any words, i.e. "keeping mum"), a full-blown procession through the town with mad costumes, celebrations from pub to pub, and a grand finale in the town's Subscription Rooms.

"Traditionally, farm labourers for hire would go from house to house wassailing, like some people do with carol singing," explains Stephen Rowley, one of the organisers of the Stroud Wassail. "They'd take a decorated bowl and wish the local farmers good health and prosperity, singing songs about their particular farm."

For example, you'd pop round to your neighbour and sing to him about his cow, or his wheat, or his apple tree—like they do in this Gloucestershire wassail:

"So, here is to cherry and to his right cheek Pray God send our master a good piece of beef And a good piece of beef that may we all see With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee."

Each place the wassailers visited would give them something to drink and to eat. Then they'd roll along to the next place. In some towns, every house would be asked to add booze to the wassail bowl, making a potent punch for the wassailers to drink. You can imagine why they ended up revelling at the end of the night—and the sore heads that must have followed from mixing drinks.

"We usually stick to a spiced ale or cider," says Rowley. "And we serve it with lambswool—you roast apples till they are soft, fluff them up with sugar like a meringue, and float it on the top of the mulled ale. It's delicious."

Stroud Wassail is one of the biggest in England but our ramshackle group are probably a little more like the farm labourers of old, trying to keep warm in the middle of One Tree Hill Allotments in Honor Oak, South London. Various plot holders have put in requests to have their land wassailed—in particular their fruit trees—and so White, as master of ceremonies, leads the way.

"We scatter salt first to purify the land," he says, pulling out a not very medieval looking plastic bottle of table salt and chucking a handful in the general direction of the tree. "Then we put a piece of toast soaked in cider in the tree for the birds."

The toast is duly jammed onto one of the bare twigs.

"Lastly, we pour some cider on the soil made from last year's crop to ask the tree to give us a good crop again," White concludes.

The tree gets a good glug of grog and then we sing:

"Here stands a good apple tree. Stand fast, root; bear well top. Every twig, apples big, Every bough, apples enou' Hats full, caps full, four and 20 sacks full."

In fact, every song we sing ends with a plea for the tree to fill hats, caps, sacks, bushels, bags, and barns. I guess if you don't ask, you don't get.

We all cry wassail, the children shake their shakers, the trombonist blows his horn, and those of us of legal drinking age take a swig of cider for good measure. Then, we roll onto the next tree and do it all over again.

By the time we get back to the start, the sun is dropping in the sky, a bonfire begins to burn, and people start to hand out tin foil-wrapped jacket potatoes. There's more beer and cider of course, served in clay flagons or more conventional glass bottles shrouded in brown paper bags.

"Some people say it's a pagan ritual to awaken the trees," says Rowley. "But there's no evidence for that."

Rather, it's a tradition that brought people together, reminding them of how interconnected we all are. Farm owners needed labourers and labourers needed farm owners. Both needed the land.

But for all the costumes, singing, parades, dancing, acting, and banging of drums, when you bring it back down to basics, wassailing is just another expression of the longest standing English tradition of all: the piss-up.