Now! Then! I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and other carols and mummery

25 December 1916: I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and other carols and mummery

Frederic William Moorman. 1916. Yorkshire Dialect Poems (1673-1915) and Traditional Poems. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Get it:

Indices for all ballads etc. mentioned here: Roud 394 @ Vaughan Williams ML & Bodleian / Roud 209 @ Vaughan Williams ML & Bodleian

Excerpt

I wish you a merry Kessenmas an’ a happy New Year,
A pokeful o’ money an’ a cellar-full o’ beer.
A good fat pig an’ a new-cauven coo;
Good maisther an’ misthress, hoo do you do?

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

Year assigned as per Moorman, but someone will probably be able to find an older version. Moorman has versions of other songs which I, perhaps mistakenly, think of as more southerly: his Cleveland Christmas Song, which he has from Florence Cleveland (Tweddell 1875), is a version of God rest you merry gentlemen (“God a-rist you, merry gintlemen”), then there is a version of God bless the master of this house / Here we come a-wassailing. His Come all ye jolly mummers (A mumming we will go) has much in common with the eponymous, marvellous song in an anonymous 1830s/-40s Sheffield mummers’ chapbook (Pearce 1840).

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Original

I wish you a merry Kessenmas an’ a happy New Year,
A pokeful o’ money an’ a cellar-full o’ beer.
A good fat pig an’ a new-cauven coo;
Good maisther an’ misthress, hoo do you do?

41 words.