Mr Happy: with apologies to readers who disapprove of "academic folklorists", if you go to the Roud Index on the EFDSS pages, and enter 209 under Roud Number you'll find 274 entries for what is essentially the same wassail song, with or without apple trees as the case may be. There seem to be no examples from the Northernmost counties (Northumberland and Cumberland), but twenty-odd from Yorkshire - many collected as recently as the 1970s by Ruaridh Greig and Mudcat contributor Steve Gardham - three from Lancashire, and one from Birkenhead in Cheshire.

So there is evidence of a wassailing tradition in the North West, and bearing in mind the geographical bias of the early collectors, it's fair to assume it was more widespread than those handful of examples might suggest.