Wassailing in Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds

Wassailing comes in two kinds. In orchard wassailing, people gather round the apple trees in midwinter, hang toast in the branches, pour cider on the roots and make a great deal of noise, for a good crop in the year ahead. In house or visiting wassailing, groups went from farm to farm with a decorated bowl, singing and collecting money. The old Gloucestershire tradition was mainly the second kind.

Wassails are usually held at Twelfth Night, on 5 or 6 January, or on Old Twelfth Night, 17 January, and modern events run on into February. Our guides to the Cotswolds in January and in February have the rest of those months.

The Gloucestershire Wassail

The county's name is on one of the best-loved wassail carols. Versions of the "Gloucestershire Wassail" were printed from 1838, and in 1868 William Husk wrote that the carol had been sent to the antiquary John Brand some seventy years before, when wassailers still sang it in Gloucestershire. On 7 April 1909 the folk song collector Cecil Sharp took down a wassail song at Buckland (opens in a new tab), near Broadway, from William Bayliss. Ralph Vaughan Williams later combined verses from Buckland and from Little Sodbury with a tune from Herefordshire, and that is the version printed in the Oxford Book of Carols in 1928.

Of the custom at Buckland itself, nothing is known beyond the song.

Did Gloucestershire wassail its orchards?

Perhaps not. The folklorist Eric Freeman (opens in a new tab) found no sign that orchard wassailing had been a Gloucestershire tradition, though it survived over the border in Herefordshire. The apple-tree wassails held in the county now are revivals; one of the revivers recalled meeting a 90-year-old at a wassail near Taynton who remembered being lifted into an orchard tree in the dark as a small boy.

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Where to wassail now

The Stroud Wassail, a modern town wassail, was held in Stroud's Stratford Park, at the Museum in the Park, on a Saturday in February in 2025 and 2026, with morris sides, singing, music and a beast dance for children dressed as their favourite animal, and it is free; the museum lists the next date on its calendar once it is set. On the Cotswold edge at Bretforton, in the Vale of Evesham, the National Trust's Fleece Inn holds an orchard wassail in January (opens in a new tab), with morris, toast in the big tree, cider on the roots and musket volleys from the Sealed Knot; it drew hundreds of people on 10 January 2026. Folk of Gloucester has held an apple-tree wassail in the city, its third on a Saturday in January 2025. Each sets its date in the new year, so check the organisers' sites from December.