I was pleased to be able to attend the Hartshill / Honeywall part of the newly revived Penkhull Wassail tradition on Saturday evening, in Stoke-on-Trent. It joins the existing Wassail procession tradition at Barlaston in the south of the city. About a mile away from the intercity train station in urban Stoke on Saturday, this was happening…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIdeSNVeM3s?rel=0&w=640&h=480]

The procession tour took about three hours…

Andy White followed the procession and performances thoughout with his camera, and now has two excellent sets of photos (one and two) online at Facebook.

It was later asked on the Facebook event page if this Wassail was similar in nature to a Mummers’ procession. I did a bit of research and found that:

Mumming has a walking performance of a narrative story, presented more like a play. Done similar to Saturday’s Wassail, though, in a tour of the local pub yards around the boundary of a place. But instead of dancing it would have parts of the mummers’ narrative story performed in masks and costumes. In Ireland and England, the earliest examples of mummers were apparently recorded as happening at Christmastime and New Year. Although — as the fabric of tradition decayed — it seems the mummers would also make appearances at other times.

Locally, an interesting New Year’s Day one was recorded at Dore in Derbyshire, where it sounds like it had once been a full Mumming play in procession. An “‘Owd ‘Oss” song and hobby-horse procession was last recorded there on 1st Jan 1971, with a song which has a similar ‘open your door’ theme as the Wassail song we heard on Saturday…

We’ve got a poor old horse,
And he’s standing at your door,
And if you’ll only let him in
He’ll please you all, I’m sure.

“…in 1970, Ruaridh and Malvina Greig discovered it still being performed around Dore on New Year’s Day, at two private houses and at two pubs, the Devonshire Arms and the Hare and Hounds … Young women pretend to be frightened at the way in which the horse opens his wide jaws … The singers, Billy Palmer and Chris Ralphs, and the horse (Reg —) were from Dronfield, and had in the past been part of a much larger group. A full account appears in Lore and Language (1973)…” [Source]

Lore and Language for summer 1973 is online — although with a dismal display-method that only an academic librarian could love, and with broken links to the PDFs. The full reference is: Rory Greig, “We Have a Poor Old Horse”, Lore and Language 2.9 (July 1973), pp.7-10. So go to Page 7 at that Web link to read the article.

So if the Penkhull Wassail were to expand in future years, then having an additional group able to perform / sing the story of a poor old knackered hobby horse might be a suitable addition.

An interesting and well-visualised proposal for a ceramics heritage and preservation centre on the hillside at the back of the Burslem School of Art. I’m told that area is geologically unsound (basicially that whole hillside is slowly slipping downhill), and might not take the weight of new buildings — but it’s great to see some vision for the town…

Can’t afford the 4,000 page The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary? Historical writers can instead use the Historical Thesaurus of English from Glasgow University, which is online for free and has a search facility.

The cassette-tape audio book Charles Tomlinson Reads His Stoke Poems (Keele University, 1985) is now online for free, in .mp3 format. Scroll down to the second collection.

“In old country-houses in England, instead of glass for windows, they used wicker, or fine strips of oak disposed checkerwise. Horn was also used. The windows of princes and great noblemen were of crystal; those of Studley Castle, Holinshed says, of beryl.” (Hawthorne, from the American Notebooks).

A scholarly etymological article from 1895 lists the then-known native names for British folkloric monsters and imps…

Devils, Devilets, Devilings, Dablets, and other Imps, Black Angels, Black Men, Black Bears, Black Bulls, Black Dogs, Bogles and Bogies and Boggards, Bollies and Boodies, Bugs, Bugaboos, and Bugbears, Bullbears, Bull beggars, Barghests and Boghests, Boggleboes and Boboggles, Boocows and Boomen, Churchgrims, Demons, Dobbies, Doolies, Gallybeggars, Galliments, Goblins, Hobs, Hob Goblins, Hob Thursts, Hob Thrushes, Hodge Pokers, Lobs, Padfoots, Pokers, Pookas, Pucks, Puckles, Pugs, Thurses, Urchins, Woodwoses, Banshees, Cluricaunes, Leprechauns, Logherimans, Mermaids, Mermen, Merrows, Kelpies, Necks, Nicks, Nickers, Nixes, Nixies, Niogles, Shagfoals, Shocks, Shucks, the family of Ghosts, Specters, Spooks, Vampires, Fetches, Swarths, Warths, Waiths, the half saved tribes of Elves, Fairies, Fays, Brownies, Buccas, Spriggans, Knockers, Nisses, Piskies, Pixies, Colepixies, Drows, and Trolls with ‘Jack with the Lantern’, ‘Kit with the Candlestick’ and ‘Will with the Wisp’ lighting their darker kinsmen and the Shoopiltie, the Shellycoat, the Ganfir, the Bwbach, and his Welsh brethren in the background; the Deuce, the Devil, the Dickens, Ragamuffin, Ruffin, Humdudgeon, and Tantrabobus and all their company; the neglected family of Scarecrows and Wussets all these came up for an historical and etymological review…

The BFI’s Sight & Sound cinema magazine surveys “The films of old, weird, Britain”…

By “weird” they mean the Lovecraftian type of supernatural and archaic “weird”, not simply “odd”.

The major exhibition British Folk Art has just opened at the Tate in London.

Excellent BBC Radio 4 “Listen Again” broadcast The Bronze Age Man of Jodrell Bank, about author Alan Garner, his Blackden Trust and the Bronze Age landscape around Alderley Edge. It’s actually only about ten miles north of Stoke-on-Trent, although difficult to get to without a car — it takes about 70 minutes on the train and you also have to change at Stockport.

I enjoyed the weird mystery tale by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, set in the Peak District, “The Terror of Blue John Gap” (1910). It was collected in one volume of a 1922 uniform edition of “Tales of…”. Here are three of the more interesting volumes, which you should be able to find free on Project Gutenberg.

The Last of the Legions and Other Tales of Long Ago. Gutenberg.

Tales of Terror & Mystery. Gutenberg.

The Great Keinplatz Experiment and Other Tales of Twilight and the Unseen. Gutenberg.

If you want all six volumes in paper, they’re collected in a mammoth volume titled The Conan Doyle Stories, which is currently available dirt cheap in used print form via Amazon UK.

There is also The Man from Archangel, and Other Tales of Adventure, which at the back collects his nine ‘Tales of medical life’.

Google Search (UK version) has a ‘Saint George and the Dragon’ Google Doodle today…

Excellent new website for the First World War commemorations in Staffordshire in 2014.