Wassail: The Medieval Toast That Became a Christmas Drink

A greeting before it was a drink

Wassail started life as a wish for good health. The word comes from a salutation meaning "be healthy" or "be in good health," found in Old Norse as ves heill and in Old English as wes hal. The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that the Old English phrase is not recorded as a drinking toast, and suggests the drinking use was likely introduced by Danes living in England.

The first record of wassail as a toast comes from the mid-12th century. In his History of the Kings of Britain, written around 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth tells how Rowena offered a cup to the British king Vortigern with the words "was hail," and how the proper reply was "drinc hail." Geoffrey set the scene centuries before his own time, so the story itself is legend, but he presents the exchange as a custom still in use in his own day.

The drink and the wassail bowl

Around 1300 the word began to stretch from the toast to the drink being toasted with. An early example appears in the Middle English poem Havelok the Dane. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, wassail came to mean especially the spiced ale drunk at Christmastime, and by about 1600 it could also mean a lively evening of reveling.

The traditional mixture was warm ale or cider with sugar and spices, often with roasted apples floating in it. As the apples burst and broke up, they gave the drink its old nickname, lambswool. The communal wassail bowl, passed from hand to hand, became a symbol of Christmas hospitality, and a carol printed in 1688 mentions "the Wassel Bowl" by name.

What went into a historic wassail bowl

There was never one official recipe. The food historian behind the British Food: A History blog describes wassail as essentially a hot mulled cider or ale, and quotes a later English recipe, collected by the writer Dorothy Hartley in Food in England, that combines a pound of brown sugar with hot beer, grated nutmeg and preserved ginger, adds sherry, stretches the mixture with cold beer, and finishes it with toast and hot roasted apples.

That is a rich, heady brew and very much a drink for grown-ups. It also comes from long after the Middle Ages, so it shows how the old bowl was still being filled in later centuries rather than exactly what was poured in 1420. The modern family version below keeps the spices and roasted apples but swaps the ale for sweet apple cider.

Wassailing from door to door

The best-known form of the custom, wassailing, involved groups visiting homes with the wassail bowl to offer the household their good wishes. Robert Herrick's poem "The Wassail," printed in his Hesperides in 1648, opens with the visitors asking the gates to "give way" so that their entrance will bring a blessing to the household's bin and basket and fill its larders. Verse by verse they go on to wish the family thriving dairies, fruitful plants, laying hens and prosperous plows.

The poem also makes plain that the blessing came with an expectation. Its wassailers complain that they "see none here / That brings us either ale or beer," decide to take their "free feet" elsewhere, and warn that the household will one day regret the good luck it has lost. Hospitality, in other words, was the price of the good wishes.

The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the word "wassailing" in the sense of caroling from house to house at Christmas to 1742.

Wassailing the orchards

In the cider country of southern England, people also wassailed apple trees. On Twelfth Night, or in some places on Old Twelfth Night in mid-January, people gathered in the orchards to bless the apple trees so they would bear a good crop for the next year's cider.

Herrick again provides an early printed witness. Among his Christmas ceremonies in Hesperides (1648) are the lines "Wassail the trees, that they may bear / You many a plum and many a pear: / For more or less fruits they will bring, / As you do give them wassailing."

Some writers trace orchard wassailing to ancient Rome or to pagan fertility rites, including offerings to Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit. That link is a theory, not a documented line of descent, and should be treated as such.

Which came when?

Because the word changed meaning over time, it helps to separate what is attested when.

• Mid-12th century: wassail recorded as a drinking toast, answered with "drinc hail."
• About 1300: wassail used for the drink itself, especially spiced Christmas ale.
• 1648: Herrick's Hesperides describes both house-visiting wassail and wassailing fruit trees.
• 1688: a printed carol mentions "the Wassel Bowl."
• 1742: "wassailing" recorded in the sense of house-to-house caroling.

Wassail in 1420

For the England of 1420 recreated at the Yuletide Medieval Festival, the toast and the spiced drink were both long established, while the door-to-door visits and orchard ceremonies familiar today are documented later. At the festival's St. Nicholas Day Feast, guests can raise a cup of ale, wine or a festive drink for under-21s, and "wassail" remains a fine thing to say as they do.

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