Medieval "mumming" meant costumed, masked visitors and, by the 1420s, scripted court entertainments such as John Lydgate's for the young Henry VI. The familiar folk Mummers' play, with St. George, a Turkish Knight and a quack Doctor, is a much later tradition first recorded in the second half of the 18th century.
One word, two traditions
Ask about mummers at Christmas and you may get two different answers. One is a medieval court and town custom: people in masks and costumes arriving at a great house, often with music and torches, to entertain and be entertained. The other is the rustic folk play in which St. George fights a foe, someone falls, and a comic Doctor brings him back to life. They share a name and a love of disguise, but they belong to different centuries, and it helps to keep them apart.
Medieval mumming: masked riders at Kennington
One of the best-documented early mummings took place in 1377, on the Monday night before Candlemas. A London chronicle preserved in the British Library describes 130 men, disguised and well mounted, riding out from Newgate through Cheapside with trumpets, shawms and many lighted wax torches, to go mumming to the young prince who would soon be Richard II.
The procession was carefully staged. Forty-eight rode as esquires and forty-eight as knights, their faces covered with well-made vizards, or masks. Behind them came one dressed as an emperor, then a pope, then twenty-four cardinals, and finally eight or ten in black masks, like devils, playing foreign legates. They crossed London Bridge to Kennington, where the prince lived with his mother. This was mumming at its root: a disguised company arriving as visitors, not actors reciting a script.
Lydgate's mummings for a boy king
By the next century, court mummings could carry words. John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk of Bury St. Edmunds and a leading poet of the Lancastrian court, wrote a group of mummings and disguisings, mostly in the late 1420s and early 1430s. Henry VI had been born in 1421 and was still a child, and several of these pieces were made for his household and that of his mother, Queen Catherine of Valois, who was the patron of the Disguising at Hertford, the Mumming at Eltham and the Mumming at Windsor.
The Hertford piece is a comic debate. Husbands and wives air their quarrels, and the king rules that the wives keep their liberty for a year while the men prove they deserve the upper hand. The Eltham mumming features Fortune and the virtues. Lydgate also wrote mummings for London's guilds, including the Mercers and the Goldsmiths, so the form was not purely royal.
These were dumb shows with verse. Costumed figures performed the action while Lydgate's lines explained it. The texts survive largely because the scribe John Shirley copied them, adding headnotes about the occasions, though his aim was to make books for readers, so many details of the live shows were lost. Scholars note that disguisings tend to be longer and written in pentameter couplets, while mummings use the rhyme royal stanza.
The folk Mummers' play: St. George, the Turkish Knight and the Doctor
The play most people now picture is something else. From about the middle of the 18th century until the First World War, local groups went around their neighborhoods at the right season each year to perform a short traditional play in verse, at houses and pubs. The English Folk Dance and Song Society counts at least 1,500 places in Britain and Ireland with some kind of mummers.
The commonest type is the hero-combat play. A hero, usually St. George or King George, fights an opponent who in southern England is often the Turkish Knight; one falls, and a quack Doctor revives him. A version from Cuddesdon in Oxfordshire, recorded in 1914, has King George boast of fighting the fiery dragon and winning the King of Egypt's daughter before the Turkey Knight steps in to challenge him. Cast lists from places like Romsey in Hampshire add Father Christmas to the company. Two other types, the plough or wooing plays of the East Midlands and the sword-dance plays of Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland, show how local the tradition was.
Many surviving texts were written down in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The earliest concrete evidence for the plays dates only from the second half of the 18th century, and researchers who have searched hard for older references have not found them. The folk-drama scholar Peter Millington suggests the plays probably took shape in the early 18th century, or possibly the late 17th.
Not an ancient pagan rite
Earlier generations of writers described mummers' plays as survivals of pre-Christian fertility rituals. Folklorists now reject that idea: a claim of ancient origin needs evidence of a continuous history, and for these plays the record begins in the 1700s. The same caution applies to linking the folk plays directly to medieval court mummings. Both involve disguise at Christmas, but no documented line of descent joins Lydgate's dumb shows to the village St. George.
- Medieval mumming, 1300s to 1400s: masked, costumed visits and court disguisings, recorded in chronicles and Lydgate's verses
- Folk Mummers' play, mid-1700s to early 1900s and revived today: short spoken plays with combat, a death and a cure by the Doctor
Questions
Are mummers' plays medieval?
Not as far as the evidence shows. Mumming as masked visiting and court disguising is medieval, but the folk plays featuring St. George and the Doctor are first recorded in the second half of the 18th century.
What did John Lydgate write for Henry VI's court?
A group of mummings and disguisings, mostly from the late 1420s and early 1430s, including the Disguising at Hertford, the Mumming at Eltham and the Mumming at Windsor, all associated with Queen Catherine of Valois. They paired costumed dumb shows with spoken verse.
Who is the Turkish Knight in a mummers' play?
He is St. George's usual opponent in many southern English versions of the hero-combat play. In other regions the challenger goes by different names.
Do mummers' plays come from pagan rituals?
That theory was once popular but is now rejected by folklorists, because there is no evidence of the plays before the 1700s and no continuous history linking them to pre-Christian rites.
Sources
- Florilegium Urbanum: Mummery (London, 1377), ORB: Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies
- Review of John Lydgate, Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Claire Sponsler (Christine Rose), The Medieval Review, Indiana University
- Review of John Lydgate, Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Claire Sponsler (Alex Mueller), The Medieval Review, Indiana University
- English Folk Drama: Finding Out More, English Folk Dance and Song Society
- Review of Room, Room, Ladies and Gentlemen (Peter Millington), Traditional Drama Research Group (folkplay.info)
- Mapping the Uncharted Territory of Folk Drama (Peter Millington, 2009), White Rose Research Online, University of Sheffield
