Texts of the Change Islands mummers’ play have been published both in the popular press and in H. Halpert and G.M. Story, eds, Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1969, 1990. The text has apparently also featured on at least two websites in recent years. All these texts derive from the recollections of the play by Mr. J.J. Peckford who saw the play performed some fifty years previously, and who believes that what he recalls is "pretty near the mark". They are quite full texts, with a cast of eleven characters, and a few details of performance and context.
During my fieldwork on Change Islands and neighbouring Fogo Island in 1964 and 1965 I recorded some reminiscences of the play from oral tradition, including the recollections of three local men who remembered the play from their boyhood days, and also the memories of another man who actually took part. After such a time lapse, details of the text were fragmentary and somewhat confused, but nevertheless seem to confirm the uniqueness of the play when compared with other texts in M.J. Preston's KWIC Concordance of British Folk Play Texts. On the other hand, information on costume, performance, context and significance to the community, as well as on individuals who participated, add substantially to the existing record of the event. In particular, certain details of performance are strikingly similar to those in an early cine film of the Tichborne (Hampshire) play.
Inevitably, the evidence from the oral tradition is in several respects at variance with the published texts. This raises major questions about the provenance of the published record, and the reliability of the oral testimony concerning a moribund tradition. Above all, it again challenges the concept of a given text or tradition having a fixed or definitive form; in fact its retrieval even from the not so distant past requires the presentation, analysis and reconciliation of a complex of diverse and sometimes contradictory evidence.
