A 'Lost' Christmas Custom of the North:

"They haven't gone guising here for a long time," said the old folk of Cambo in 1922.

"There was no 'guisering' at Christmas 1903," wrote Hastings Neville in Ford in his notes of that year.

'Guising' (apparently derived from 'disguising', referring to the costumes and masks worn) was the local version of the Mummers Plays that exist elsewhere.

In both Ford, in the far north of the county, and Cambo, 40 miles to the south, we have records of the old custom, which happened in the days leading up to Christmas. Both apparently involved the key character of a doctor, but in Ford, Revd Neville has preserved the entirety of the script, including 'King George', a young hero, Goliath, and a battle, and finishing with the rhyme:

"Your bottles are full of whisky,
Your barrels are full of beer,
I wish you a Merry Christmas
And a Happy New Year."

Neville puts the dying of the custom down to the reduction of young people in the villages in an age of increased mechanisation and rural depopulation. But when I was growing up in Northumberland in the 1990s, 'guising' was what we called Trick or Treating at Halloween! Maybe it hasn't so much died as shifted.

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"My father and grandfather had this shop before me, and before them it was kept by a warlock, and people daursn't owe him anything!

"There was a woman lived where our kitchen is now, and she kept a cow, and when she churned she used to lock the door for fear the warlock cast an evil eye on the milk and turned it sour. His shop was upstairs, that's his window that's walled up.

"No, he never did anybody any harm. He lived to be a very old man."

- Mr George Handyside of Cambo, Northumberland, collected by Rosalie E. Bosanquet of the Cambo Women's Institute, in 1922. Included in 'In the Troublesome Times' (ed. R.E.B., published 1929), for entry into the competition for the best book compiled by a Women's Institute on old customs, beliefs, stories, and ancient monuments.

According to Mr Handyside, the warlock was still alive in 1814.

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