- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements and Note
- List of Plates
- List of Maps
- Figure
- 1 The Origins of Christmas
- 2 The Twelve Days
- 3 The Trials of Christmas
- 4 Rites of Celebration and Reassurance
- 5 Rites of Purification and Blessing
- 6 Rites of Hospitality and Charity
- 7 Mummers' Play and Sword Dance
- 8 Hobby-Horse and Horn Dance
- 9 Misrule
- 10 The Reinvention of Christmas
- 11 Speeding the Plough
- 12 Brigid's Night<sup>*</sup>
- 13 Candlemas
- 14 Valentines
- 15 Shrovetide
- 16 Lent
- 17 The Origins of Easter
- 18 Holy Week
- 19 An Egg at Easter
- 20 The Easter Holidays
- 21 England and St George
- 22 Beltane
- 23 The May
- 24 May Games and Whitsun Ales
- 25 Morris and Marian
- 26 Rogationtide and Pentecost
- 27 Royal Oak
- 28 A Merrie May
- 29 Corpus Christi
- 30 The Midsummer Fires
- 31 Sheep, Hay, and Rushes
- 32 First Fruits
- 33 Harvest Home
- 34 Wakes, Revels, and Hoppings
- 35 Samhain
- 36 Saints and Souls
- 37 The Modern Hallowe'en
- 38 Blood Month and Virgin Queen
- 35 Gunpowder Treason
- 40 Conclusions
- Index
Misrule
Misrule
- Chapter:
- (p.95) 9 Misrule
- Source:
- The Stations of the Sun
- Author(s):
Ronald Hutton
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
From one end of nineteenth-century Britain to another there were districts in which young people, and sometimes adults, used fancy dress as a means both to personal enjoyment and to profit. In the Shetland Isles, the ‘skeklers’ or ‘gulicks’ were abroad during the evenings of the Twelve Days; youths dressed in straw costumes with conical hats, handkerchiefs covering their faces. Once admitted to a home, the skeklers would dance and be rewarded with refreshments and a little money. Festival disguise may in places have been an expression of merry-making, but was generally, by the nineteenth century, another part of the considerable number of ritualized means of making money or earning hospitality at midwinter. That this was always so is suggested by the number of payments to ‘mummers’ in early modern household accounts. Into the same pattern fits one of the most curious, and celebrated, of Christmastide ‘ritual reversals’: the hunting, killing, and display of wrens.
Keywords: Britain, Shetland, skeklers, Twelve Days, festival, disguise, merry-making, mummers, Christmastide, wrens
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements and Note
- List of Plates
- List of Maps
- Figure
- 1 The Origins of Christmas
- 2 The Twelve Days
- 3 The Trials of Christmas
- 4 Rites of Celebration and Reassurance
- 5 Rites of Purification and Blessing
- 6 Rites of Hospitality and Charity
- 7 Mummers' Play and Sword Dance
- 8 Hobby-Horse and Horn Dance
- 9 Misrule
- 10 The Reinvention of Christmas
- 11 Speeding the Plough
- 12 Brigid's Night<sup>*</sup>
- 13 Candlemas
- 14 Valentines
- 15 Shrovetide
- 16 Lent
- 17 The Origins of Easter
- 18 Holy Week
- 19 An Egg at Easter
- 20 The Easter Holidays
- 21 England and St George
- 22 Beltane
- 23 The May
- 24 May Games and Whitsun Ales
- 25 Morris and Marian
- 26 Rogationtide and Pentecost
- 27 Royal Oak
- 28 A Merrie May
- 29 Corpus Christi
- 30 The Midsummer Fires
- 31 Sheep, Hay, and Rushes
- 32 First Fruits
- 33 Harvest Home
- 34 Wakes, Revels, and Hoppings
- 35 Samhain
- 36 Saints and Souls
- 37 The Modern Hallowe'en
- 38 Blood Month and Virgin Queen
- 35 Gunpowder Treason
- 40 Conclusions
- Index