Hunting the wren at Middleton

An old woman of Middleton in County Cork remembered that on St Stephen’s Day the young men of the neighbourhood, in holiday clothes trimmed with coloured ribbons, paraded the town carrying a furze bush with a wren secured in it. Outside the gentry’s houses one of them recited a rhyme asking a treat for the little king of all birds, and the gates were opened and the party feasted. The local explanation was that a wren had once tapped on a drum and woken a sleeping party of soldiers just before their enemies fell on them. The wren’s title as king of the birds came from the tale that it rode up on the eagle’s back and flew higher than him. Wren boys still go out on St Stephen’s Day in many parts of Ireland.