Page:Devon and Cornwall Queries Vol 9 1917.djvu/290

 228 Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries. 193. The Silverton Mummers. — I shall be glad to hear of any recent traces of mumming in Devon. Mrs. Ewing, in the volume entitled The Peace Egg (S.P.C.K., no date), published a Mumming Play. She states (page 54), " The following Christmas Mumming Play is compiled from five versions — ' The Peace Egg,' ' The Wassail Cup,' ' Alexander the Great,' ' A Mock Play,' and ' The Silverton Mummers' Play, Devon,' which has been lent to me in manuscript." The version recorded below I took down (in 1900) from the lips of an old man, aged about 70, by name Denner, who was then an inmate in the Tiverton Union Workhouse. Strange to say, at the same time two other members of the troupe were inmates, one named Hopkins and another whose name I cannot recall. I shall never forget the real histrionic power, and even fury, that this third old man put into his part as he tried to instruct the boys whom I had brought into the workhouse, to play this ageless play to the last of the genuine mummers. Denner was cast for Dame Dolly. It is striking that mumming was not meant for boys but was a matter for men. The Silverton men played regularly in Exeter. The only hint of costume is that Father Christmas was dressed in an old long coat tied round with a hay band. In lieu of Room, a Dorset version has Rumour full of tongues, reminiscent of the Prologue in Shakespeare's Henry V. The succession of strata in the epic is to me truly historic and therefore pathetic. We are now too self- conscious to put in Haig and Jellicoe as some unknown hands put in Wolfe, Wellington and Nelson. I believe that Mr. Barker, Rector of Silverton, belonged, as did some of Mrs. Ewing's family, to the Nelson Circle. It is possible that we owe to him the powerful touch recorded by Mrs. Ewing but not by my old friends : — Doctor : •' Britons ! our Nelson is dead ! " A voice replies from without : " But he is not with the dead but in the arms of the living God." Such a shudder went through our land when the news of the drowning of Kitchener came. The latest additions are easily the most corrupt, but " I tells them as they was told to me," and I have refrained from emendations, however tempting. If Silverton had been England in 1915, no Compulsory Service Act would have