From George O Howell (ed.), The Kentish Note Book Vol. 2, 1894, pp298-300.
Reprinted from Gravesend and Dartford Reporter, 29th March 1890.
Contributed by “RAMBLER”.
The Gravesend Reporter, October 19th 1889, contained the following passage, submitted by J. Treverton:
I take the following from the Gentleman’s Magazine, (1799):
“Being on a visit to a little obscure village in Kent, I found an odd sort of sport going forward. The girls from eighteen to five or six years old were assembled in a crowd, and burned an uncouth effigy, which they called an holly boy, and which, it seems, they had stolen from the boys, and in another part of the village the boys were assembling together, and burning what they called an ivy girl which they had stolen from the girls. All this ceremony was accompanied with loud huzzas, noise, and acclamation.”
Is there any trace of this, or a similar custom, in Kent at the present day?
A reply came from “RAMBLER” on 29th March 1890:
I am unable to discover whether the curious ceremony of burning “holly boys” and “ivy girls,” quoted by Mr. Treverton, from The Gentleman’s Magazine, is still performed in any of our county, but the holly and the ivy have from very ancient times been traditionally opposed to each other—the holly being deemed an emblem of Christianity, and the ivy a symbol of the world. The old Christmas carols frequently allude to these differences, always, however, placing the victory on the side of the holly, i.e., the victory of the Church over the world. During Christmas week I purchased, from a street singer, at Northfleet, a few sheets of Carols, one of which contained some verses setting forth this traditional superiority of the holly over the ivy. As the carol in question is a very quaint one, I give a complete copy below.
Following the words of the carol, he added
The same idea is embodied in the following verses from another carol—
Now of all the trees by the King’s highway,
Which do you love the best?
O the one that is green upon Christmas day,
The bush with the bleeding breast,
Now, the Holly, with her drops of blood for me,
For that is our dear St. Mary’s tree.Hone, too, in his Every Day Book, quotes “A Song on the Holly and the Ivy,” from a M.S. in the British Museum, in which the “Holly and his Merry Men” are declared to have the mastery over the “Ivy and her Maidens.” No doubt other instances are known to your readers.
The words on this Northfleet ballad sheet are very much as found in other printed sources – for instance in the 1847 Staffordshire chapbook A Good Christmas Box – and as collected from early twentieth singers by Cecil Sharp and others.