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"Levy-Dew", also known as "A New Year Carol" and "Residue", is a British folk song of Welsh origin traditionally sung in New Year celebrations. It is associated with a New Year's Day custom involving sprinkling people with water newly drawn from a well. The song was set to music by Benjamin Britten in 1934.
Contents
Lyrics
As with any traditional folk song, there are a number of variations. One standard form appeared in Walter de la Mare's Tom Tiddler's Ground (1931), an anthology of verse for children. His version goes:
Benjamin Britten set the De la Mare version of the song to music as "A New Year Carol" in 1934. The text of the song is attested as early as 1849, in form substantially identical to De la Mare's text.
Traditions
The song is associated with Pembrokeshire. There, the song figured in a custom in which, on New Year's Day, children collect fresh water from a well, and go around with a sprig from an evergreen tree, which they use to sprinkle the faces of passers-by with the water while singing the carol and begging for gifts of food or money. Elsewhere in Wales, the custom is called dwr newy, "new water", and the water was also used to lustrate rooms and doors of houses.
This ceremony has a parallel in the Scottish Hogmanay tradition of saining; here water drawn from a "dead and living ford", a ford crossed by both the living and the dead, is sprinkled through the house, and then juniper branches are burnt for the smoke indoors. The purpose of the rite is to sain, or purify, the house for the new year.
Interpretations
According to Trefor Owen, the song preserves "an early well-cult made acceptable to medieval Christianity by its association with the Virgin and perpetuated both by the desire to wish one's neighbor well at the beginning of a new year and by the small monetary payment involved." Similar speculations from the nineteenth century have sought to link the mysterious maidens of the song with the goddess Aurora, bearing the gold of the rising and setting sun on her head and feet.
The meaning of the words 'levy-dew' in the original lyrics of the song is not certainly known. One line of speculation holds that the words represent the Welsh phrase llef y Dduw, "a cry to God". Others connect it to Middle English levedy, '"lady", or to the French phrase levez à Dieu, "raise to God", which may in turn refer to the elevation of the Host in Christian liturgy. Waterson–Carthy performed the song on their 2006 recording Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man. The chorus in this recording begins 'Residue, sing Residue'; Martin Carthy's liner notes credit the 'Residue' variant to Bert Hodgeson, and observe that "None of us can figure out the possible significance of the 'Residue sing Residue' chorus and neither could Bert – or whoever it was – but that was, he said, what was sung to him." The Waterson-Carthy performance leaves out the stanza related to the water ritual, and adds two original verses in which the new year is welcomed through the south gate and the old year shooed from the north gate.