It was after dark, between Christmas and the new year, when Isaac Mercer and his brothers-in-law turned up the main road in the Newfoundland town of Bay Roberts in 1860.
Mercer, a quiet newlywed fisherman, saw them coming toward Wilcox Lane: Six men dressed in sealskin masks and brandishing sticks. They were mummers or janneys, people disguised in outlandish getups to go house visiting over the holidays – or in some cases to cause mischief and mayhem.
A tussle ensued. Someone grabbed Mercer’s hatchet and struck him on the head with its blunt end. “I am killed,” he said to his brother-in-law, lying injured on the road. He died in bed the next morning, and days later, his wife of barely three weeks told a justice of the peace, “He said the janneys killed him.”
Mercer’s death on Dec. 28, 1860, prompted an outright ban against mummering that lasted for the next 100 years. But the old-world tradition, brought to the island by Irish and English settlers, endures today in many of the small towns and hamlets that notch coastal Newfoundland.
People still open their doors to neighbours dressed as indistinguishable strangers, donning lampshades and curtains, pillows stuffed down their backsides, and giant bras over their coats, trying to guess their identities over drinks and a song. The fun and foolish tradition unique to Newfoundland is feted annually in the capital city of St. John’s over two weeks with a mummers parade, workshop and a talk about the tradition’s dark past.
In the decades leading up to the Mercer killing, mummers had been accused of assaults using hatchets, sticks, ropes, whips, clubs dipped in blubber, and in one case a hobby horse. But the Mercer case became a “big political football,” said Joy Fraser, a professor of folklore at Memorial University, who presented on the customs and controversy of mummering at the 15th annual Mummers Festival earlier this month.
“The conservative newspapers presented it like an ambush that was premeditated, whereas the more liberal newspapers said it was an accidental result of Christmas mummering and there wasn’t any deadly intent,” Prof. Fraser said during an interview.
The case, which was never prosecuted owing to a lack of evidence, prompted anti-mummering rhetoric in conservative newspapers describing mummers as diabolical villains whose conduct needed to be restricted. It worked.
In 1862, mummering was made illegal. The fine was 20 shillings or imprisonment for up to seven days.
But the mummers kept mummering. Some people in small communities never stopped carousing house to house in disguise wearing lace curtains and underwear over their clothes. In St. John’s, where police patrolled the streets, there were rumpuses where people tried to prevent mummers from being arrested. Others tried to break a mummer out of jail.
In the 1950s, attitudes started to change and people felt nostalgia for the old-time mummering tradition, Prof. Fraser said. But it was only after the academic book on mummering in Newfoundland was published in 1969 that people realized the uniqueness of the custom, and this is generally considered to be when the practice began to emerge as a symbol of cultural identity, she added.
The law was finally repealed in 1990. But with the moratorium on cod fishing, many young people left the province and mummering had started to die out, said Lynn McShane, executive director of the Mummers Festival, established by Memorial University and the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Ms. McShane grew up in the fishing town of Renews where Christmastime mummering was popular. She describes it as a localized version of the worldwide tradition of injecting light and levity during the darkest time of the year. In outport Newfoundland, she said, in the small communities where people relied on fishing to survive, dressing up in outlandish disguises pulled from your grandmother’s closet and going Christmastime visiting was a way for people to make their own fun ahead of a long dark winter, oftentimes without money or enough food.
“We don’t face that harsh conditions today, but the world still faces an awful lot of stressful elements,” said Ms. McShane, who was one of about 1,000 who paraded through the streets of St. John’s on a recent wet December afternoon in her mummers rig. “We definitely see this festival as a way to bring a lot of light and joy to peoples’ lives.
“We’re all about the fun and the foolishness.”
