Mari Lwyd
[4] An observer of the tradition as it was performed at Llangynwyd during the nineteenth century noted that preparation for the activity was a communal event, with many locals involving themselves in the decorating of the Mari Lwyd.
[9] The Mari Lwyd party consisted of four to seven men, who often had coloured ribbons and rosettes attached to their clothes and sometimes wore a broad sash around the waist.
[16] Once inside, the entertainment continued with the Mari Lwyd running around neighing and snapping its jaws, creating havoc, frightening children (and perhaps even adults) while the Leader pretended to try to restrain it.
[23] This etymological explanation would have parallels with the name of a similar hooded horse tradition found in Ireland and the Isle of Man, which is known in Irish as the Láir Bhán and in Manx as the Laare Vane, in both cases meaning "White Mare".
[22] Another reason to doubt this idea is that there is no known historical link between the Mari Lwyd, which was found in South Wales, and the Morris dance, which was concentrated in the north of the country.
[34] Positing the custom to be "the survival of some ancient popular rite or ceremony", in 1888 David Jones suggested that its origins were Christian, and that it had once been part of the festivities of the Feast of the Ass, a commemoration of the flight into Egypt of Mary and Saint Joseph that was historically marked on 14 January.
[3] Pearce also suggested the possibility that in parts of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire the Mari Lwyd tradition came under the influence of mystery plays, thus explaining why later recorded examples from those counties contained characters known as "the Sergeant" and the "Merryman".
[41] However, after 1970 the folkloric trend for interpreting such hobby horse traditions as pre-Christian survivals had ended, as scholars came to express greater caution about proposing origins for such customs.
[43] Features common to these customs were the use of a hobby horse, the performance at Christmas time, a song or spoken statement requesting payment, and the use of a team who included a man dressed in women's clothing.
[45] In an area along the border between Derbyshire and Yorkshire, the Old Tup tradition featured groups knocking on doors around Christmas carrying a hobby horse that had a goat's head.
[48] Although the origins of these traditions are not known with any certainty, the lack of any late medieval references to such practices may suggest that they emerged from the documented elite fashion for hobby horses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
[50] In mapping the distribution of Mari Lwyd appearances, Cawte noted that it was principally a custom associated with Glamorgan, with two-thirds of instances falling within that county.
[52] Previously, Peate had cautioned that the comparative absence of recorded examples from Mid and North Wales was not proof that the Mari Lwyd custom had never been present in those areas.
Here he provided a clearer discussion than before, making it apparent that teams accompanying a man dressed as a horse or bull toured the local area from Christmas until after Twelfth Day, and that they were given food or money to leave the householders alone.
[59] In 1802, the harpist Edward Jones of Merionethshire published a book in which he lamented the destructive impact that Christian preachers were having on Welsh folk customs, which they were criticising as sinful.
[60] Reflecting such a view, in 1852 the Reverend William Roberts, a Baptist minister at Blaenau Gwent, condemned the Mari Lwyd and other related customs as "a mixture of old Pagan and Popish ceremonies...
He argued that the Mari Lwyd wassailing custom "gave an approved means of entering the houses of neighbours in a culture in which there were few public assemblies – at least in the heart of winter – in which the convivial spirit of the season could be released".
[62] He argued that the changing social conditions altered the ways that people in southern Wales celebrated Christmas, hence contributing to the folk custom's decline.
[20] He highlighted an example from Christmas Eve 1934, in which a Mari Lwyd was observed performing alongside at least twelve singers in a chemist's shop in the Mumbles, Swansea.
[20] Ettlinger subsequently expressed the view that "Dr. Peate deserves the sincerest gratitude of all folk-lore students for having so valiantly penetrated the mysteries surrounding the Mari Lwyd.
[64] In 1967, Lois Blake published a letter in the journal English Dance and Song in which she noted that the Mari Lwyd appeared each Christmas Eve at the Barley Mow Inn at Graig Penllyn, near Cowbridge, where a man named John Williams had kept the custom alive for the past sixty years.
[64] More widely, he believed that the revival of the Mari Lwyd was in large part due to the "forces of local patriotism", noting that a similar situation had resulted in the resurrection of the hoodening tradition in East Kent.
"[73] The Mari Lwyd was utilised by the artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins in a series of drawings from around 2000 that focused on a metamorphosing horse/man as a nightmarish harbinger of his father's death.
[78] According to Evans' description, this Mari Lwyd consisted of a sheet that had been sewn together along two adjacent sides to make a cone, which was then stuffed with hay and decorated with buttons for eyes and harvest gloves for ears, thus resembling an animal's snout.
[80] Cawte also noted the example of other Welsh folk customs featuring the head of a horse, however he opined that these "so not seem to be closely related to the mari lwyd".
[55] A horse's head was prepared in a manner akin to the Mari Lwyd for a spring festival known as the mynwenta or pynwenta, which took place in Pembrokeshire circa 1820.
