“Origin of the Wassail-Bowl,” James Godwin, 1865. Rowena presenting a drinking cup to Vortigern.
11 December 2024
Wassail and wassailing are associated with Yuletide revels and overindulgence, although many people are a bit fuzzy on what the words mean. That’s somewhat understandable as the words have a variety of meanings. Wassail started out as a simple greeting, became a drinking toast, then became the drink and revelry itself, as well as songs associated with drinking, then carols and songs sung by people begging for drinks on Twelfth Night, and finally Christmas carols as we know them today.
The word comes from the Old English wes hal (and ves heill in Old Norse), meaning be in good health, a traditional greeting. For instance, an anonymous homily, HomS 24.1 (Scragg), copied sometime between 1000-1025 C..E., translates Pilate’s greeting to Christ, “Ave, rex Iudeorum” (Hail, King of the Jews) as “Wes hal, þu Iudea cyning.” In Middle English this became wæs hæil.
Neither the Old English nor the Old Norse phrase was especially associated with drinking. The first known association of wassail specifically with drinking appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) 6.12, written c. 1136, in an account of the wedding feast of Rowena and Vortigern. The text is primarily Latin, but the was heil and drinc heil are quoted in Old English. Historians question whether Rowena and Vortigern actually ever existed, but if they did, she would have been speaking an early form of Old English and he an early form of Welsh:
Accedens deinde propius regi, flexis genibus dixit: “Lauerd king, wasseil.”
At ille, uisa facie puellae, ammiratus est tantum eius decorem et incaluit. Denique interrogauit interpretem suum quid dixerat puella et quid ei respondere debebat. Cui interpres dixit: “Vocauit te dominum regem et uocabulo salutationis honorauit. Quod autem respondere debes est ‘drincheil.’”
Respondens deinde Vortegirnus “drincheil,” iussit puellam potare cepitque ciphum de manu ipsius et osculatus est eam et potauit. Ab illo die usque in hodiernum mansit consuetudo illa in Britannia quia in conuiuiis qui potat ad alium dicit “wasseil,” qui uero post illum recipit potum respondet “drincheil.”
(Going up to the king, she curtseyed and said: “Lord king, wasseil.”
At the sight of the girl’s face he was amazed by her beauty and inflamed with desire. He asked his interpreter what the girl had said and what he should reply. He answered: “She called you lord king and honored you with a word of greeting. You should reply ‘drincheil.’”
Then Vortigern, giving the reply “drincheil,” told the girl to drink, took the goblet from her hand with a kiss and drank. From that day forward it has been the custom in Britain that at feasts a drinker says to his neighbor “wasseil” and the one who receives the drink after him replies “drincheil.”)
Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien will recognize a similar scene in The Two Towers, where Eomer greets Theoden with “Westu Théoden hál!” (Health to you, Theoden!) Tolkien invented various languages for the peoples of his fictional Middle-Earth, but when it cam to the Rohirrim, he simply used Old English to represent their speech.
Some decades after Geoffrey wrote his history, Laȝamon’s Brut (written sometime before 1200, with an extant copy—British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix—from c.1275) provides an English-language account of the wedding feast:
Reowen sæt a cneowe; & cleopede to þan kinge.
& þus ærest sæide; in Ænglene londe.
Lauerd king wæs hæil; For þine kime ich æm uæin.
Þe king þis ihærde; & nuste what heo seide.
þe king Vortigerne; fræinede his cnihtes sone.
what weoren þat speche; þe þat maide spilede.
Þa andswarede Keredic; a cniht swiðe sellic.
he wes þe bezste latimer; þat ær com her.
Lust me nu lauerd king; & ich þe wulle cuðen.
whæt seið Rouwenne; fæirest wimmonnen.
Hit beoð tiðende; inne Sæxe-londe.
whær-swa æi duȝeðe gladieð of drenche;
þat freond sæiðe to freonde; mid fæire loten hende.
Leofue freond wæs hail; Þe oðer sæið Drinc hail.
(Rowena knelt and spoke to the king and rising said, in the English tongue, “Lord King, wassail. I am glad you have come.” The king heard this, but did not understand what she said. King Vortigern then asked his knights what were those words that the maid had said. Then Keredic, a very excellent knight, answered; he was the best interpreter of those who had come there, “Listen to me now, my lord king, and I will tell what Rowena, the fairest of women, said. It is a custom in Saxon lands whenever a company is glad of drink, that a friend says to a friend with a pleasant look, ‘Dear friend, wassail.’ The other says, ‘Drink hail.’”)
A later manuscript that contains the poem, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C.xiii, copied c. 1300, reads wassayl rather than wæs hæil. The Old English singular imperative form for the verb to be is wes, but in Middle English the inflection changed, and the imperative became identical to the infinitive be—as it is in modern English. Thus the shift from wes hæil to wassayl or wassail; as wes lost its meaning as an independent element in the phrase, the two words were combined into one.
Around this time, wassail began to be used for the drink itself. The poem Havelok the Dane, written c. 1300, has:
Wyn and ale deden he fete,
And made[n] hem [ful] glade and bliþe, .
Wesseyl ledden he fele siþe.
(Wine and ale did he celebrate, and made him very glad and blithe, wassail [did] he partake many times.)
And the noun was verbed as well. To wassail was to toast, and by extension to drink and carouse. Also from Havelok:
Hwan he haueden þe kiwing deled,
And fele siþes haueden wosseyled,
And with gode drinkes seten longe.
(When he had finished the feast and had wassailed many times and sat long with good drinks.)
Around the turn of the seventeenth century wassail came to be used for general drinking and revelry, especially drinking on Twelfth Night or Epiphany. Shakespeare records the following exchange that criticizes such carousing in Hamlet 1.4:
Ham[let]. The king doth wake to night, and takes his rowse,
Keepes wassell and the swaggering vp-spring reeles:
And as he draines his drafts of Rennish downe,
The kettle drumme, and trumpet, thus bray out
The triumph of his Pledge.
Hora[tio]: Is it a custome?
Ham. I marry ist,
But to my minde, though I am natiue heere
And to the manner borne, it is a custome
More honoured in the breach, then the obseruance.
This heavy headed reuealle east and west
Makes vs tradust, and taxed of other nations,
They clip vs drunkards, and with Swinish phrase
Soyle our addition, and indeede it takes
From our atchieuements, though perform’d at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
Around this time wassail also came to mean a song sung, especially while drinking or in return for receiving drink, hence carolers going house to house, singing wassails and receiving drinks in return. Fletcher and Beaumont use this sense ironically in their 1607 play The Woman Hater:
Haue you done your wassayl, tis a handsome drowsie dittie Ile assure yee, now I had as leeue here a Catte cry, when her taile is cut off, as heere these lamentations, these lowsie loue-layes, these bewaylements.
But within a few decades wassail, and particularly the wassail bowl, or drinking vessel, was being associated with door-to-door Christmas caroling, as evidenced by this carol published in 1688:
Sweet Master of this Habitation,
with my Mistriss, be so kind,
As to grant an Invitation,
if we may this favour find:
To be no invited in,
Then in mirth we will begin
Many of sweet and pleasant Song,
Which doth to this time belong,
Let e'ry Loyal honest Soul,
Contribute to the Wassel Bowl.
In parts of southern England wassailing is drinking to the health of orchards and fruit trees on Twelfth Night. Robert Herrick’s 1648 Hesperides makes note of the practice:
Wassaile the Trees, that they may beare
You many a Plum, and many a Peare:
For more or lesse fruits they will bring,
As you doe give them Wassailing.
Sources:
Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. The Woman Hater. London: R. R. for John Hodges, 1607, 3.1, sig. E1v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).
“A Carrol for Twelfth-Day.” In A Cabinet of Choice Jewels: or, The Christians Joy and Gladness. Set Forth in Sundry Pleasant New Christmas Carrols. London: J. M. for J. Deacon, 1688, sig. B1v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Michael D. Reeve, ed. Neil Wright, trans. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2007, Book 6, 128–29. JSTOR.
Herrick, Robert. Hesperides. London: John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 1648, sig. X4r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Laȝamon. Brut. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, eds. Early English Text Society. London: Oxford University Press, 1963, lines 7140–53, 370. British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
———. Brut. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, eds. Early English Text Society. London: Oxford University Press, 1963, lines 6690–703, 371. British Library, MS Cotton Otho C.xiii. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. wassail, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. wassail, n., wassail, v.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke (Second Quarto). London: I. R. for N. L., 1604, sig. D1r. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Skeat, Walter, W., ed. The Lay of Havelok the Dane. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1868, 38, lines 1244–46, and 47, lines 1736–38. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Two Towers. New York: Ballantine, 1965, 155.
Image credit: James Godwin, 1865. Illustrated London News, 23 December 1865, 624. Public domain image.