CHRISTMAS A TRADITIONAL PLAY.
Mummers' Plays also known as Mumming plays are seasonal folk plays performed by troupes of amateur actors known as mummers. They are sometimes performed in the street but more usually as house-to-house visits and in public houses.
The earliest evidence of Mummers' plays as they are known is from the mid to late 18th century. Mummers plays were formerly performed throughout most of Britain. There are a few surviving traditional teams, the...
more »CHRISTMAS A TRADITIONAL PLAY.
Mummers' Plays also known as Mumming plays are seasonal folk plays performed by troupes of amateur actors known as mummers. They are sometimes performed in the street but more usually as house-to-house visits and in public houses.
The earliest evidence of Mummers' plays as they are known is from the mid to late 18th century. Mummers plays were formerly performed throughout most of Britain. There are a few surviving traditional teams, the most well known and established are in the villagers of BAMPTON, RIPON and MARSHFIELD.
Mummers can be traced back at least to the Middle Ages. Usually broadly comic performances, the plays are based on underlying themes of duality and resurrection, generally involve a battle between two characters, often representing good and evil. They feature a quack doctor who has a magic potion which is able to resuscitate a slain character. Mumming had its heyday at the end of the nineteenth century and the earliest years of the 20th century. Most traditional mummers groups stopped with the onset of the first world war. To most groups, mumming was a way of raising extra money for Christmas and the play was taken round the big houses. Those involved with mumming groups were often unwilling to admit to it as they did not like to confess to begging. But it seems that it could be quite lucrative, it is said that three nights of mumming often raised as much as a whole month's wages for the agricultural laborers who mostly made up the groups.
Some groups continued after the first world war and even beyond the second, but most did not.
In the second half of the twentieth century many groups were revived, mostly by folk music and dance enthusiasts, and the begging done for some charity rather than for the mummers themselves.
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