In connection with this belief [alluded to above] in the kingship over other birds, a Twelfth Day custom of parading a caged wren in Pembrokeshire, with the lines recited, is described in Swainson’s _Folklore of British Birds_, O’Curry has recorded that the wren, like the raven, was kept domesticated on account of the auguries derived from it, which were employed by the Druids. An Irish proverb asserts that “The fox is the cunningest beast in the world barring the wren.” According to Dalyell the wren is considered an unlucky token in Scotland, but the robin a lucky one.
Explanations of this revolting yet long persistent custom have been many and various. A totemic sort of theory is that the bird “was once regarded as sacred, and the Christmas hunting is the survival of an annual custom of slaying the divine animal, such as is found among primitive peoples. The carrying of its body from door to door is apparently intended to convey to each house a portion of its virtues.” I know of no facts in history to support this theory as applied to the Keltic race. One authority tells us that the “crime” for which the bird must be punished so ferociously is that it has “a drop o’ the de’il’s blood in its veins,” but so has the magpie, which is not persecuted.
Lady Wilde[60] assures us that “the wren is mortally hated by the Irish for on one occasion, when the Irish troops were approaching to attack a portion of Thomas Cromwell’s army the wrens came and perched on the Irish drums, and by their tapping and noise aroused the English soldiers, who fell on the Irish troops and killed them all.” For this tragic incident we are given no time or place; and it happens that the same report was made respecting a battle between Irish and Danish invaders some 800 years before Cromwell’s campaigns in the Emerald Isle or anywhere else.
The real clue to the puzzle is contained in the fact that in their barbarous hunt for wrens the men and boys kept yelling words that in Cormac’s _Glossary_ (10th century) are explained as “draoi-en,” Druid-bird. We know that the Druid priests were accustomed to draw auguries from the chirpings of the wren—a divination to which the early Christian missionaries objected strenuously. It is probable that they condemned the little songster as a symbol of heathen rites, and encouraged their converts to kill it at the time of the annual Christian feast as a sign of abnegation of Druidical connections. The stoning of the birds on St. Stephen’s Day might be regarded as a vengeful reminder of the manner of that martyr’s murder by a mob.