In Channel 4’s 2004 Alternative Christmas Message, the Simpsons enjoy a hot ‘cup of traditional British wassail’ until the second the camera cuts. Immediately they spit it out, with Homer requesting a specifically cold beer instead. Orchard-visiting wassails have been organised all over the Cambridgeshire area this January. Attended by a diverse cross-section of the community, wassailing brings local communities together on a wintry day.

“Orchard-visiting wassails have been organised all over the Cambridgeshire area this January”

But what is wassailing, and what is wassail? A borrowing from the Old Norse ves heill (‘be fortunate’) and dating back to the medieval period, there are two kinds of wassailing. The first - the kind Herrick refers to - is the orchard-visiting wassail. Here, celebrants gather at an orchard to chant, sing songs, and make noise (e.g. by hitting pans) in order to scare away evil spirits and ensure a good harvest later in the year. Hot mulled cider is poured into the roots of the trees, and cider-soaked toast is placed in the branches. The second kind is the door-to-door house-visiting wassail of Twelfth Night, where gifts are exchanged for song and a drink from a wassail bowl. This wassail has mostly ceded its territory now to carol singing. From around 1300, wassail also meant, as in The Simpsons, the drink of hot mulled cider, ale, or spiced wine itself. The Fitzwilliam Museum contains a late seventeenth-century wassail cup and cover decorated with an acorn finial, and a late Victorian Welsh wassail bowl with the inscription ‘Cymru dros byth’ (‘Wales forever’).

And the traditions of wassail live on. Inspired by their music lessons at Stanway Comprehensive School in Essex, Britpop band Blur brought out their own version of the traditional carol ‘The Gloucestershire Wassail’ in 1992:

Wassail, wassail all over the town

Our toast, it is white and our ale, it is brown

Our bowl, it is made of the white maple tree

With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee

Wassailing carols and songs have also been recorded and performed by Cambridge-based musicians over the years, from John Rutter and the choir and orchestra of Clare College’s ‘Traditional: Wassail Song’ on the 1979 album Carols of Cambridge, to the ‘Wassail Carol’, one of the carols sung at King’s College Chapel’s annual Christmas Eve Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. On 12th January, the Cambridge Georgian choirs Chela and Buska’s Georgian Christmas wassail took place at St Clement’s Church on Bridge Street.

“activities like this promote wellbeing and a connection to the land through all the seasons”

In Cambridgeshire, orchard-visiting wassails have been flourishing. On 5th January, Scouts Lead Volunteer Greg Harewood ran a wassail in Fulbourn for the first time, as he believed it was a “tradition worth reviving” and “something for our young people and families.” It was set at the local pub, The Six Bells, rather than the traditional orchard to encourage community involvement and for reasons of accessibility. The event, attended by almost sixty people, received overwhelmingly positive feedback: everyone “had a much better time than they expected, and wished we’d done [even] more singing.” The festivities included a Saint George and the Dragon-themed mummers’ play written, directed, and choreographed by the Scout Players. On 10th January, Darwin Nurseries and Farm Shop on Newmarket Road, who work with adults with disabilities, also hosted a wassail in their fifty-tree orchard. Team Manager Sandie Cain shared that “activities like this promote wellbeing and a connection to the land through all the seasons”.

Two wassails took place on the 12th: one at K1 Cohousing, Marmalade Lane, and the other at Trumpington Orchard, where a wassail has taken place every year since 2008. It is led by the ‘Lord of Misrule,’ a local folk musician dressed in rags and tatters and the toast hung in the trees is a homemade sourdough. Dr Joanna Crosby is one of the project’s founding members, whose PhD included a chapter on wassailing and who has developed a game called ‘The Pomological Apple Picker’ for the Apple Histories blog. She said of the annual wassail that “some of our regulars like to dress as green men and women, but one year we had someone dressed as a penguin.” She hopes the event “inspires others to become active orchard volunteers in the coming year,” remarking that “that’s the best way to ensure a good harvest of “hats full, caps full, bushel bushel sacks full” of apples, in the words of an old wassail poem.”

Later in the month, on the 19th, Willingham Action Group crowned their wassail King and Queen and recited a poem in the Willingham Community Orchard. Social Media and Advertising Lead, Prakash D Nayee, elaborated that the cider used in their wassail ceremony “is often made from apples from the orchard or from trees in the participants’ own gardens”, and believes the Cambridge village “has had the wassail ever since the orchard was planted”. On the 25th, Blue Barrel Cider held their annual wassail at Oakington’s Arcadia Orchard, north of Cambridge; co-founder Emma Jordan commented that those who took part were grateful for the fact that wassailing “gets people outside in nature at a time of year when the days are dark and sometimes bleak”. Crowds disperse with empty glasses and full hearts.