Mummers’ the word, says Barry Leighton

The door is dramatically flung open and in lurches this odd looking cove bellowing that he’s Father Christmas. But he doesn’t look like any Santa I’ve ever seen – at least, not the jolly, red-coated character with the flowing white beard and fur-trimmed hat that Coca Cola kindly dreamt-up in the 1930s.

No, this feller’s draped in a crumpled white night-shirt, sports a scruffy top hat, has an unseemly hump on his back and carries a stick which he occasionally leans upon, just for effect, before loudly addressing perplexed punters, shouting something about beef and beer.

The next minute he’s inviting his mate in – King George, if you please. Doesn’t look very regal, though, not in this raggedy, tattered old coat. But he wears a fancy gold crown and heroically brandishes a sword and a shield.

In two shakes of a lamb’s tale, as they say, an almighty barney is underway. Yer man is exchanging hefty blows with another arrival, a foreign, fearsome looking fellow flailing a cutlass, as if sallying from the pages of a Robert E Howard Conan The Barbarian book.

After much thrusting, yelling and energetic hoo-ha, the newcomer – who goes by the name of Turkey Snipe – is stabbed by the king, and writhes around a bit before gasping his last breath.

And then it really gets weird… “We like an element of surprise – it’s part of the fun,” says Bob Berry, of The Potterne Mummers, one of a just a few of these traditionally inspired troubadours active in Wiltshire during the lead-up to Christmas.

“The landlord, obviously, knows that we are coming but for a lot of people, sitting in a pub enjoying a drink, they have no idea what’s going on. They are completely bemused.”

You can only wonder what these innocent imbibers are thinking as they are confronted with a rough and ready band of inexplicably dressed individuals who act out, for the next 15 minutes or so, what Bob describes as a “completely bizarre play”.

The 300 or so mumming performances executed today are loosely based on The Mystery Plays, a medieval, religious-heavy pageant championing Christendom over paganism. Today’s mummery certainly contains more than a smidgeon of mystery as the plot is virtually unfathomable, particularly if you happen to be in a crowded, noisy bar with a bellyful of ale.

“All the mummers’ plays are different from each other but it’s all basically the same plot,” says Bob. “There’s references to religious and the Turkish and the English fighting each other. Some of it’s quite scary. Best not to delve too deeply – just enjoy it as an old tradition.”

Documentation insists that this fine archaic custom, with its reassuring undertones of violence and religion, harks back more than 600 years when Richard II was entertained at Christmas.

They were originally mime or dumb shows – the word mummers, from the Middle English word mum, meant silent. Dialogue was added later.

This pre-panto, festive entertainment existed for centuries before truly coming into its own in rural parts during the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Attired in a rag-bag of inexpensively assembled duds, impoverished agricultural workers staged their own adaptations in the houses of local farmers and gentry in exchange for food, drink and some pennies.

Mike Marsham, of the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre says: “The plays – normally each village would have its own version – were kept alive by ordinary people who had an interest in being able to supplement their wages once a year.”

Many a mummer’s group perished along with our brave boys in The Great War but the tradition could still be found in remote corners of Wiltshire in the 1930s, such as Alton Barnes near Pewsey and Shrewton on Salisbury Plain, before it gradually faded away.

The age-old presentation, complete with ragamuffin DIY costumes, was briefly revived in Wiltshire at Potterne near Devizes in 1953 by local schoolmaster Bernard Baker.

However, in 1972 mummery again re-emerged in Potterne – this time with legs – at the prompting of villager Mick Hiscock who, 43 years later, continues to appear in the role of one of its seven characters, Old Almanak.

A mummer since 1988 Bob, 61, who plays The Quack, says: “Word for word, the performance is exactly the same every year.”

Some mummer groups indulge in a spot of modern panto, with risqué, Brian Rix-like innuendo, but not the Potterne lads – or The Potterne Christmas Boys, as they are also known. It is strictly trad, dad, as far as they’re concerned.

This Christmas they have 26 gigs lined up within a 15-mile radius of Devizes, during which they will raise a heap of cash for some deserving cause.

However, had some joyless buffoons responsible for our licensing laws gotten their way mummery could well have become another vanished tradition.

Between 2006/09 the Potterne Boys were at the forefront of a national campaign to overturn proposals to charge pubs a veritable pile just to allow mummers into licensed premises for quarter of an hour once-a-year. Common sense prevailed, for once.

“It would have pretty much killed it for us,” reflects Bob. With its shabby costumes, incomprehensible plot and admirable ethos of keeping alive an ancient tradition, it is reassuring to report that mummery mayhem happily continues In Wiltshire each Christmas. To quote the immortal words of Slade: Mummer, mummer, mummer, we’re all crazy now.

•  HAVING a drink in The Wheatsheaf one Christmas our happy gathering in the front bar was unexpectedly accosted by some blokes in frayed garments and provocative headwear brandishing instruments and singing in rough tones. 
  This town doesn’t have an official Mummers group but some fellows from the Swindon Folksingers Club occasionally embark on a world tour of Old Town during the season-to-be-merry.
  They whack out a few traditionally rustic, mummeresque ditties, as I recall, before pressing on to the next boozer. 
  According to the mummer’s bible, Master Mummers, there are only four active bands of mummer’s boy in Wiltshire (Bradford-on-Avon, Lacock, Salisbury and Potterne.) Purton is also listed but don’t appear to have done the business for years. 
•  MUMMERY was rife in Swindon and surrounding communities during the pre-railway days of the early 19th Century, according to the town’s first historian, Adver founder William Morris.
  Writing in 1885, Morris recalled that mumming groups were “most notable” 40 or 50 years earlier during the wintry months up until Christmas Eve. 
  “These mummers used to go about from house to house, and more particularly to the public houses, performing a rude kind of play founded on the legend of St George and the Dragon.”
  Comprising six or eight men they wore “various kinds of disguises” and collected money for a common fund which they’d split on Christmas Eve.
  “Sometimes the company would aspire to nothing more than a recitation set down for each character,” he remembered.
  But occasionally groups of ten to 12 included a fiddler, a comic singer and a dancer whose performance was of a “more elaborate character.”
  The words of their plays, Morris continued, were “partly traditional and partly local” and had been “handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.”
  The plot involved fighting knights in a “deadly conflict of sword,” after which slain combatants would be “restored to animation” thanks to a “magic pill,” followed with a grand finale of  “singing, dancing and what other forms of rejoicing the company was capable of.”
  As his father was the only bookseller in Swindon, Morris “well recollect that every year, just before winter set in, there would be no end of applications for ‘Mummers’ books’. 
  “But these we could never supply, for the simple reason that they were not in existence.
  “There was therefore no help for it but for those who would play the mummer’s part to get some old mummer to repeat the words of the several parts over and over again until the learner had got them by heart.”