Observations on popular antiquities chiefly illustrating the origin of our vulgar customs, ceremonies, and superstitions / by John Brand.

  • John Brand
Date:
1900
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Observations on popular antiquities chiefly illustrating the origin of our vulgar customs, ceremonies, and superstitions / by John Brand. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/858 (page 17)
    ©ijsjr&ations an J^optilar Antiquities JVEW YEAR'S EVE. There was an ancient custom, which is yet retained in many places, on New Year’s Eve ; young women went about with a Wassail Bowl of spiced ale,* singing some sort of verses from door to door. Wassail is derived from the Anglo-Saxon Aasp psel, be in health.'^ It were unnecessary to add that they accepted little presents on the occasion from the houses at which they stopped to pay this annual congratulation. Selden, in his Table-Talk (article Pope), gives a good description of it : “ The Pope, in sending relics to Princes, does as wenches do to ' their Wassels at New Year’s tide—they present you with a cup, and ; you must drink of a slabby stuff; but the meaning is. You must give i them money, ten times more than it is worth.” And in his Notes on r ^ i * “ The Wassel Bowl,” says Warton in his edition of Milton’s Poems, “is Shakespeare’s Gossips’ Bowl in the Mid.summer Night’s Dream. The com- ‘ position was ale, nutmeg, sugar, toast, and roasted crabs or apples. It was also called Lambs' Wool.” So it is referred to in Polwhele’s Old English Gentleman— i “A massy bowl, to deck the jovial day, I Flash’d from its ample round a sunlike ray. Full many a century it shone forth to grace ; The festive spirits of th’ Andartoii race, As, to the sons of sacred union dear. It welcomed with Lambe tVool the rising year.” I It appears from Thomas de la Moore (Vita Edw. II.) and old Havillan (in Architren. lib. 2), that Was-haile and Drinc-heil were the usual ancient ■ phrases of quaffing among the English, and synonymous with the “Come, -here’s to you,” and “I’ll pledge you,” of the present day. , Verstegan, in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, gives this etymology *. -of Wassail: “As was is our verb of the preter-imperfect tense, or preter- f perfect tense, signifying have been, so wa;, being the same verb in the imperative i imood, and now pronunced Wax, is as much as to say grow, or become; and Waesheal by corruption of pronunciation afterwards came to be Wassail.” Wassel, however, is sometimes used for general riot, intemperance, or 11 festivity. Ben Jonson personifies it thus : “ Enter Wassel like a neat sempster and songster, her page bearing a brown bowl, drest with ribbands and rosemary, I ’before her.” A Wassel candle was a large candle lighted up at a feast. :i A