page_title: Mari Lwyd
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Mari Lwyd / Early development / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Druid Ceremony at the 2013 Los Angeles St. David's Day Festival, with coordinators Lorin Morgan-Richards holding the Mari Lwyd, while Peter Anthony Freeman speaks.
context_page_description: The Mari Lwyd is a wassailing folk custom found in South Wales. The tradition entails the use of an eponymous hobby horse which is made from a horse's skull mounted on a pole and carried by an individual hidden under a sackcloth. It represents a regional variation of a "hooded animal" tradition that appears throughout Great Britain.
  The custom was first recorded in 1800, with subsequent accounts of it being produced into the early twentieth century. According to these, the Mari Lwyd was a tradition performed at Christmas time by groups of men. They would form into teams to accompany the horse on its travels around the local area, and although the makeup of such groups varied, they typically included an individual to carry the horse, a leader, and individuals dressed as stock characters such as Punch and Judy. The team would carry the Mari Lwyd to local houses, where they would request entry through the medium of song. The householders would be expected to deny them entry, again through song, and the two sides would continue their responses to one another in this manner. If the householders eventually relented, then the team would be permitted entry and given food and drink.
context_section_description: 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. According to Jones' idea, the Mari Lwyd itself represented the donkey on which Mary rode during the story.
  Peate was of the opinion that the Mari Lwyd was "no doubt a survival of a pre-Christian tradition" that had once been spread across Britain and other parts of Europe, and which – having survived the Christianisation of Britain – had been renamed Mari Lwyd in reference to the Virgin Mary during the Middle Ages. He expressed the view that the original custom had been "horrific in origin and intention" and that from an early date it had been connected to wassailing. Cawte concurred that it was "reasonable to accept" that the Mari Lwyd head had become attached to an independent wassailing tradition, but said that the connection to the Virgin Mary was unnecessary. 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".
  The folklorist Trefor M. Owen also suggested that the Mari Lwyd was a practice "which probably had a religious (if pre-Christian) origin", adding that by the time it had been recorded, it had become "emptied of its religious content". Also embracing Peate's suggestion of ancient origins, Ellen Ettlinger believed that the Mari Lwyd represented a "death horse", as symbolised by the white cloth worn by its carrier, suggesting that it was originally employed in a pre-Christian ritual to mark the festival of Samhain. The folklorist Christina Hole suggested that this "ancient character" was once "a bringer of fertility". 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.
  The Mari Lwyd was part of a wider "hooded animal" tradition that the folklorist E. C. Cawte identified as existing in different forms in various parts of Britain. 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. A related example is the hoodening custom of East Kent in southeastern England. 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. Hole drew parallels between hoodening and the Christmas Bull tradition recorded in Dorset and Gloucestershire. In south-west England, there are two extant hobby horse traditions—the Padstow 'Obby 'Oss festival and Minehead Hobby Horse—which take place not at Christmas time but on May Day.
  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. In this, the hooded animal traditions may be comparable to England's Morris dance tradition, which became a "nation-wide craze" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before evolving into "a set of sharply delineated regional traditions".
caption: A Mari Lwyd at the 2013 St. David's Day festivities in Los Angeles.
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