Beginners’ Guide to English Folk Drama
Introduction by Steve Roud
From about the middle of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War, there were groups of people who, at the right time of year, would go round the neighbourhood performing their traditional ‘Mumming Play’. This was not an isolated, unusual custom, as we know that at least 1500 places in Britain and Ireland had some sort of Mummers.
The plays were found mostly in rural areas, all over England, (except, oddly enough, the eastern counties of Norfolk and Suffolk), and in most of lowland Scotland, and some parts of Wales and Ireland, plus a few in places settled by British migrants, such as America, Canada, and the West Indies.
The Mummers were not 'travelling players' or 'acting troupes', they never extended their repertoire or tried something new. They were ordinary men from the area who performed their local play over and over again at different places during the season, and it was the same each year.
But being handed on from person to person, and down the generations, change is inevitable, and each mumming play is slightly different from all the others, and there is therefore never a correct version. And also because the custom was in the hands of local people and was rarely written down or properly documented, the information we have about it is patchy and there is a great deal we do not know. This especially applies to the origin and early history of the custom.
Another aspect of this informal transmission is that mumming plays are 'regional', which means that although there are major similarities across the whole country there are also elements which are characteristic of certain areas. An expert can often look at a text or even a list of characters and work out which part of the country it came from.
Folklorists have identified three basic types of play – the Hero/Combat or St George play (by far the most common), the Plough or Wooing Play (confined to the East Midlands area of England), and the Sword Dance Play (found in Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland).
By the middle of the twentieth century, the custom in its traditional form, had almost died out completely. A handful of local teams were still active in the 1930s, but very few survived the Second World War. What happened in the 1970s, however, was a widespread re-discovery of the custom, as part of what is termed the Folk Revival. Many new teams were formed, some of which are still going, and other groups who were looking for something simple, local, folkie and dramatic latched onto the play as worth performing.
