Mind your language
YES, thank you, I had a very pleasant Christmas. Veronica was staying with a family in France and my husband spent a lot of time restoring an antique case of surgical instruments, as if he were preparing to re-enact Holy Inno- cents Day.
I meanwhile repaired a small hole of ignorance about the word wassail. I had assumed it was what they used to call Wardour Street language (after the ancient furniture once sold there; now it is drugs). Such a suspicion was sup- ported by passages like this in Lord Lytton's The Last of the Barons: 'Fair mistress Sybill, your dainty lips will not, I trow, refuse me the waisall.' Prithee a posset, forsooth, and all that jazz.
But, while looking up something else in the big Oxford English Dictionary, I found that it had gone to town on the word. According to Sir James Murray and his gang, there was a similar term of greeting before the Conquest, but not specifically directed to use as a drinking toast. This development the OED attributes to the Danish-speaking inhabitants of England (numerous because of the Viking invasions).
The next lot of invaders, the Nor- mans, regarded the exclamations of wassail and drinkhail as characteristical- ly English. The was signifies 'be', and the hail 'in health'. Accounts of drink- ing with the exclamations wassail and drinkhail exist from the 12th century. Quite soon the drinking terms became attached to the drink itself. Shake- speare uses it in that way in Macbeth: `His two Chamberlains will I with Wine and Wassel so convince that Memorie . . . shall be a Fume.'
And when Twelfth Night with its cake and Bean King was all the rage, the wassail — the sending round of a bowl of spiced wine — formed part of it. Even the trees of the orchard would be toasted to bring good luck for the coming year. As late as 1878 there is mention of a `worsle' or wassail of the cider-apple trees.
On another matter, they had extracts on the wireless the other week from a book about Gideon Mantell, the 19th- century geologist. Throughout, his sur- name was pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. Yet in a letter to him quoted in the readings a joke was made about a `Mantell-piece', a typical Victorian pun. But could such a play on words be attempted unless Mantell was stressed on the first syllable, like Pur- cell or Marvell? Does anyone have a certain answer to this doubt? In the meantime, wassail to one and all.
Dot Wordsworth
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