Levy-Dew

"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.

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:

Here we bring new water from the well so clear,
For to worship God with, this happy New Year.

Chorus (after each verse):
  Sing levy-dew, sing levy-dew, the water and the wine,
  The seven bright gold wires and the bugles that do shine.

Sing reign of Fair Maid, with gold upon her toe;
Open you the West Door and turn the Old Year go.

Sing reign of Fair Maid, with gold upon her chin;
Open you the East Door and let the New Year in.

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.

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 , or purify, the house for the new year.

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.

...
Wikipedia