What is wassailing?

Wassailing is a midwinter custom of drinking health, and it comes in two related forms. One is the house-visiting wassail: going from door to door with a decorated bowl of spiced drink and a song, offering a toast in exchange for food, money or a drink in return - an ancestor of carol-singing. The other, and the one most alive today, is the orchard wassail of the cider counties: a noisy midwinter gathering to bless and wake the apple trees so they will crop well in the year ahead. The word itself is the toast - Old English wæs hæl, "be well". The archive has not yet stood in a frosted orchard on Twelfth Night and documented one; this entry explains the custom until it has.

The two wassails share a root and a word but do different things. The house-visiting wassail is social and reciprocal: wassailers carry a bowl (sometimes an elaborately dressed one) around the houses, sing, and are given hospitality - a custom of the Christmas season that shades into carolling and the luck-visit. The orchard wassail is agricultural and apotropaic: it is performed on the trees themselves, in the cider-making country of the West Country and the Marches, to ensure the harvest.

It is worth separating wassailing from carol-singing and from beating the bounds: all are communal customs tied to the calendar, but wassailing is specifically about health and increase - toasting a household’s or an orchard’s good fortune for the year. The orchard form is the one that has grown in recent decades, revived and adopted by community orchards, cider-makers and pubs.

Wassail is both the toast (from wæs hæl) and the spiced drink - traditionally warmed cider or ale with apples, spices and sometimes egg, served from the wassail bowl. The wassail king and queen lead an orchard wassail; the queen is often lifted to place cider-soaked toast in the branches for the robins, who stand for the good spirits of the tree. Twelfth Night (5 January) and Old Twelfth Night (17 January, by the old calendar) are the usual dates. The lambs-wool is an old name for the hot spiced-ale-and-apple drink.

The company goes out into the orchard after dark in the depth of winter and gathers round a chosen tree, often the oldest or best. There are toasts and a wassail song; cider is poured on the roots; pieces of toast soaked in cider are hung in the branches for the robins. And then comes the noise - shouting, banging of pots and pans, the blowing of horns, and in some places the firing of shotguns up through the bare branches - to wake the tree from its winter sleep and drive off the bad spirits, so that the blossom sets and the apples come. It is half blessing, half racket, and entirely about the next harvest of cider apples.

Real surviving examples anchor it: the orchard wassails at Carhampton in Somerset and at Whimple in Devon are among the long-kept ones, and dozens of community orchards now hold their own each January. The custom sits directly on top of the craft of cider orcharding - it is the orchard’s own midwinter ceremony, performed by the people who depend on the trees.

The archive has documented the cider tradition in its essay The Cider Orchardist, but it has not yet documented a wassail itself - the night, the noise, the toast in the branches. It is a strong candidate for the archive’s winter calendar, both for its own sake and because it ties the documentary record of cider orcharding to the custom that the orchard community performs. When that visit happens, this page will carry it.

Of all the customs in this glossary, the orchard wassail is one of the few that is clearly growing rather than shrinking. Community orchards, cider-makers and pubs have taken it up enthusiastically over the last few decades, and a midwinter wassail is now a fixture across the cider counties and beyond. That revival is not quite the same as unbroken survival - many modern wassails are recent revivals or new foundations rather than continuous traditions - but it is a genuine and living custom, and one tied to the wider revival of traditional orchards and real cider. The house-visiting wassail, by contrast, has mostly faded into carol-singing.

Anyone can usually join a community wassail in January. The archive’s account of why such customs matter is The People Who Carry England.

What does the word wassail mean?
Wassail comes from the Old English "wæs hæl", meaning "be well" or "be in good health" - a toast. It gives its name both to the spiced drink shared at the custom and to the custom itself.

When does wassailing happen?
In midwinter, around the Twelve Days of Christmas. Orchard wassails are most often held on Twelfth Night (5 January) or Old Twelfth Night (17 January), the latter following the old pre-1752 calendar still kept at some orchards.

What happens at an orchard wassail?
The company gathers in the orchard, toasts the chosen tree, pours cider on its roots and hangs cider-soaked toast in its branches for the robins, and makes a great deal of noise - shouting, banging pans, sometimes firing shotguns - to wake the tree and drive off harm, so the coming harvest will be good.