The leaves that hung but never grew

Here we bring new water
From the well so clear,
For to worship God with
This happy New Year.
Sing levez dew, sing levez dew,
The water and the wine;
The seven bright gold wires
And the bugles they do shine.
Sing reign of Fair Maid
With gold upon her toe,—
Open you the West Door,
And let the Old Year go.
Sing reign of Fair Maid,
With gold upon her chin,
Open you the East Door
And let the New Year in.

Traditional

Collected in South Wales and first recorded in 1848

The version above was published in Notes and Queries on 3 January 1852. The correspondent cites an article published in The Athenaeum on 5 February 1848. I haven’t had a chance to look up the Athenaeum article. The correspondent to NQ states that it is ‘a song sung by the children in South Wales on New Year’s morning, when carrying a jug of water newly drawn from the well’.

A slightly different version was collected by the American folklore collector Wirt Sikes in Pembrokeshire and published by him in about 1880. He says: ‘As soon as it is light children of the peasantry hasten to provide a small cup of pure spring-water, just from the well, and go about sprinkling the faces of those they meet, with the aid of a sprig of evergreen. At the same time they sing the following verses’ &c. For Sikes’s version, see here. The only important difference is that the puzzling phrase ‘levez dew’ becomes the equally puzzling ‘levy dew’.

The rhyme was popularised by Walter de la Mare, who included it in his popular anthology Come Hither (1923). He printed Sikes’s text, with a bit of tidying up, but gave no details of provenance. From there it found its way into innumerable poetry anthologies, in one of which I first read it, long ago.

The folklorist Christina Hole has a long entry in her Dictionary of British Folk Customs (1976) under the heading ‘New Year Water’. She states that in many parts of Britain special qualities were attributed to the first water drawn on New Year’s Day from any well, pond or stream. It was supposed to be lucky, and people competed to be first at the well to obtain it. She gives a detailed account of the Welsh custom, and a text of the song that is close to that of Sikes, with very minor variants. She says the custom was in use in South Wales until almost the end of the nineteenth century, and that in addition to sprinkling people’s faces, as described by Sikes, the children (boys, she says) would take the water from house to house. If they were allowed in, they would sprinkle some of the water in every room, meanwhile singing their song. For this they were rewarded with money, often very generously.

Nice. I didn’t know before that the song was about bringing luck for the coming year; or if I did, I had forgotten it. The water-sprinkling implies purification: that is, it brings luck because it purges evil, blight and bane.

The rite seems to have pagan origins (much more clearly than many British folk customs that are commonly described as pagan). At least, it is hard to understand the Fair Maid as anything other than a goddess, reborn into youth and beauty at the turn of the year. The line ‘For to worship God with’ has clearly been introduced to the song to disarm the objections of parsons and puritans to a superstitious and heathen custom.

The puzzling part is stanza two, with its ‘levez/levy dew’, gold wires, bugles &c. It is more or less meaningless, therefore it is corrupt, therefore at some point in the transmission the singers stopped understanding what they were singing and sang something that sounded vaguely like what they had received from earlier generations. I wish I knew what that was.


tags: folklore | custom

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