An age-old Christmas tradition, featuring brightly-coloured knights fighting to the death, was re-enacted on the streets around the island during the weekend.

A team of mummers performed the Whiteboys play, a slightly nonsensical and peculiar traditional play which dates from pre-Victorian times.

Wearing white cloth robes adorned with coloured ribbons, the actors performed the play in Port Erin, Port St Mary, Castletown, Colby, Douglas and finally Peel.

Juan Christian set the scene and with calls of ’clear the way’ and ’give us room’, the actors, featuring Juan Bridson, Peter Hayhurst, Andrew Laidlaw and Phil Gawne as the doctor, cavorted and performed in the streets, before singing a traditional Manx carval and dancing the well-known Whiteboys sword dance.

Once a crowd had gathered and the play introduced, the English knight St George took up a quarrel with St Denis, from France, who he would then slay in deadly combat.

The Irish knight St Patrick would enter and pick up the fight, killing St George.

With the dead lying in the street, a kindly doctor, carrying, according to the old script, ’a little bottle in my pocket, of rixum-raxum, prixum-praxum, with cock-o-lory’, would bring the knights back to life, where they would swear friendship, and drink, sing and dance together.

The Whiteboys play was once a common site around the start of the Christmas period around the island and, running in common with the groups of dancers who would perform the ’Hunt the Wren’ custom after Christmas Day, would encourage people to watch the play and the ask for money, food or a drop of jough or spirits afterwards.

Although the practice, like so many long-lost local customs, largely died out around the 1930s, the play was kept alive, both by cultural enthusiasts in the 1960s and 70s, and at Arbory School, where Phil Gawne remembers performing it as a child.

’I first did a version of it at Arbory primary school, a long time ago,’ said Phil.

’It was nice to perform this today at Colby, in the methodist chapel, where there were a whole load of people who recognised the play.

’The tradition goes back a couple of hundred years when, of course, no one had televisions or radios, or things like that.

It was seen as great fun and a way of going out, having a bit of a laugh and entertaining people.

’I don’t really think there is much meaning to it, to be honest, and the play itself doesn’t really mean an awful lot,’ he added.

’If there is a moral to the story, it is that you can argue, fall out and fight with your neighbours, but then, somehow you can all recover, get up again and go for a pint afterwards.

’It sounds like a pretty good Christmas message to me.’

The plays raised £350 for the Mooinjey Veggey charity.

There will be another Whiteboys play held this Saturday, December 21, in Castletown, from 11am, followed by Peel, Ramsey Courthouse at 3pm and Regent Street, Douglas from 5pm.