Christmas in Mellstock/Huntingdon Hall, Worcester

THERE was once a time – perhaps now only just out of living memory – when a country Christmas was not just a period of merriment but also a brief interlude when the twin forces of myth and magic stalked a sleeping winter landscape.

There can be very few people still living today able to recall a pre-First World War festive season. The four years of carnage that sounded the death knell of English rural life would also bring about the process of Americanisation and rampant consumerism that continues unabated up to the present.

We must therefore rejoice in the fact that the Mellstock Band – four fine musicians steeped in West Country traditions – maintains traditions that were once at the core of the seasonal cycle, rituals conforming to the rhythms of the changing year in an English countryside yet to be urbanised and torn apart by motorways.

The band’s instruments of choice are the clarinet, English concertina, fiddle and the gloriously ebullient serpent, an almost menacingly black entity that growls rather than hisses out the bass figures.

Taking their cue from the writings of novelist Thomas Hardy and his friend the dialect poet William Barnes, the audience is transported back to the Wessex so beloved by both these men.

We soon find ourselves in the humble homes of poor farm labourers, their cottages transformed from refuges in a world of ceaseless toil into places of happiness and good cheer.

For an all-too-brief period, drudgery is pushed aside as age-old stories are told around the fireside and smoke-stained rafters are once again raised by the sound of scratchy fiddles playing inherited melodies.

Much of the Mellstock repertoire comes from the Hardy family collection – tunes such as The Waterloo Dance, The Devil Among the Tailors and the more widely known Sir Roger de Coverley, that frenzied gallop of a dance tune so beloved of the modern ceilidh practitioner.

Nevertheless, crime and punishment were never far away from the cottage door of the 19th century rural poor and so The Treadmill Song tells us what happens when a fight between rival cider-fuelled village lads gets out of hand.

As an exile from Shakespeare’s county, my heart was warmed by a hearty rendition of Warwickshire’s Wassail Song, a festive frolic that came hot on the heels of The Mummers’ Play which featured the usual suspects of St George and the Turkish Knight locked in mortal combat. No prizes for guessing who wins.

I also particularly liked the tale of fiddler William Dewey, who fools an angry bull into believing it’s Christmas Eve and so, with the beast kneeling in prayer as all the other animals must do at midnight on that day, our canny tunesmith makes good his escape.

One of the most interesting aspects of these delightful stories is the growing realisation that pagan themes are never far away, whether in song, folk tale or everyday custom.

The holly and ivy personify the Green Man, the Nature spirit who many of us deliberately or unwittingly still celebrate today, while mistletoe continues to symbolise the eternal regeneration that must, of course, always start with a kiss.

This was a wonderful concert in which The Mellstock Band reminded us all that there were once Christmases which weren’t dominated by gaudy lights, endless excess and limitless acquisition. Perhaps some day there will be again.

John Phillpott