Marshfield Mummers

The Marshfield Mummers perform their play on Boxing Day morning in Marshfield, a village between Bath and Chippenham. On Boxing Day 2025 carols with the brass band started in the Market Place at 10.20am, the Mummers greeted the crowd at 11am, and they worked their way up the High Street giving the play several times before the last performance at about 11.45am outside the Catherine Wheel. In 2024 they finished at the Almshouses instead, so the last stop can change. By the Boxing Day custom the next performance falls on Saturday 26 December 2026, but the Mummers had not announced it when we checked, so the date and times are to be confirmed.

What you see

The players are known as the Paper Boys, because their costumes are covered in strips of paper that hide their faces. The play is a short rhymed piece of the old hero-combat kind: a fight, a death and a comic doctor who brings the fallen man back to life, with characters such as Father Christmas, Dr Phoenix, Father Beelzebub and Saucy Jack. Each performance takes a few minutes, so if you miss one in the crush you can walk on and catch the next. There is no charge; the Mummers take a collection and give it to village causes; in 2015 and 2016 these included the church hall, the band, the cricket club, the Brownies and the Scouts.

It is a crowded hour on a narrow street, and families with small children do best near the Market Place before 11am. Dogs that dislike crowds and brass bands are better left at home.

Getting there and parking

Marshfield is just off the A420, about 9 miles from Bath, Bristol and Chippenham. Marshfield has few buses, so most people drive and park considerately on the streets around the village. The Catherine Wheel opens for drinks, mulled wine and mince pies after the play but served no food on Boxing Day 2025, and its 2026 festive menu is not served on Christmas Day or Boxing Day.

Where the play comes from

Mumming plays were once performed at Christmas across the Cotswolds. Marshfield's lapsed in the nineteenth century and was revived in the 1930s; the story goes that the rectory gardener was overheard reciting the words, and one of the revivers had played in it as a boy; accounts differ over who led the revival, and over the year, 1930 or 1932. Recordings of the play were made in 1943 and 1957. The story of the region's plays, from Chipping Campden to Gloucester, is in our article on mummers' plays, and the village itself in the guide to Marshfield.