Christmas Read online

  One remnant of the topsy-turvy nature of the Kalends re-emerged in the European craze for the Feast of Fools, when minor clergy took over the roles of their seniors between Christmas and New Year. This was no gentle event:

  Priests and clerks … dance in the choir dressed as women, panders [pimps] or minstrels. They sing wanton songs … They play at dice [at the altar]. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church … with indecent gesture and verses scurrilous and unchaste.

  Over time, these lewd games were replaced by a more innocent version of the servant-as-master inversion, this time controlled by the masters. ‘Boy bishops’, choristers who took on the bishops’ role, were elected for the holiday cycle on 6 December, the name day of St Nicholas, patron saint of children, and they officiated especially on 28 December, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The first boy bishop we know of was in St Gallen, in what is today Switzerland, in 911, and that this social upheaval was approved from above is clear: both King Conrad I of Germany and the Bishop of Constance attended services on the day the boy preached, the king attempting to distract him and his child attendants by rolling apples down the aisle. (The boys apparently turned a dignified blind eye to the misbehaviour of their rowdy adult congregants.)

  Boy bishops were especially popular in England, many churches keeping miniature chasubles and staffs and albs for the use of their miniature clergy. Ultimately, Henry VIII took a dislike to the custom and it was banned in England in 1541. Queen Mary restored it, but it failed to outlast her, although schoolboys continued to enjoy St Nicholas’s Day as a holiday. Elsewhere, it survived far longer. Many Swiss districts had a boy bishop as late as the mid-nineteenth century.

  Churches saw more solemn pageantry on Christmas Day, but it was no less theatrical. Charlemagne was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800, and the holiday remained a favoured one for kingly entrances and exits: Edward the Confessor was buried in Westminster Abbey on Epiphany 1066, while the coronation of his successor, William I, took place the following Christmas Day. At Epiphany 1300, Edward I offered the church a gift of gold, frankincense and myrrh, a king marking the day of the three kings, a tradition that continued in England for another six centuries.*

  The holiday impulse in courts across Europe, however, was primarily secular. Courtly feasting in Germany in the eleventh century saw guests singing secular songs (although at one of these feasts they were countered by liturgical chanting from the shocked clergy present). Welsh and Irish courts also held winter feasts from around the same date, and soon it was a time of feasting for all who could afford it. In Germany especially, year-end fairs became regular events, with one in Kempen being established from at least 1461 to supply these lavish entertainments. In England, rulers intermittently attempted to curb the excesses of the period, although with little success. Around 1100, Henry I issued a proclamation declaring the year-end a time of fasting, not feasting. Yet by the reign of King John, courtly Christmas feasts had become mind-bogglingly elaborate. On Christmas Day 1213 the king’s household and guests consumed 27 hogsheads of wine, 400 head of pork, 3,000 fowl, 15,000 herring, 10,000 eels, 100 pounds of almonds, two pounds of spices and 66 pounds of pepper. Two hundred years later, Edward III tried again, passing laws restricting the meals on seven of the holiday’s twelve days to two courses, with a limit of two kinds of meat per course.*

  The recipes that have survived indicate that seasonal excess was not confined to the courts, but was also indulged in by the prosperous. One recipe for a Christmas pie from 1394 includes pheasant, hare, capon, partridge, pigeon and rabbit, livers, hearts and kidneys, and meatballs, all spiced and sauced and cooked with pickled mushrooms before being baked into a pastry case ‘made craftily in the likeness of a bird’s body’, including a ‘great tail’ complete with feathers.†

  This was the more remarkable, because from at least the fifth century, Advent had officially been a church-designated period of penitence and fasting, like Lent, with Christmas Eve a major fast day, on which meat, cheese and eggs were forbidden.* Yet the late fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight indicates that this was often honoured more in the breach. There, the castle guests are served

  a feast of fish,

  some baked in bread, some browned over flames,

  some boiled or steamed, some stewed in spices

  and subtle sauces to tantalize his tongue.

  Four or five times he called it a feast,

  and the courteous company happily cheered him along:

  ‘On penance plates you dine –

  there’s better board to come.’

  That they are eating fish from ‘penance plates’ makes clear that this is a fast-day meal, but otherwise the notion of fasting is barely observed.

  That feasting overcame all prohibitions is unsurprising. The European agricultural year almost dictated it. After the autumn harvest, grain was stored, fruit and vegetables preserved, followed by what the sixteenth-century poet-farmer Thomas Tusser called ‘slaughter-time’, when ‘the husbandman’s feasting begin[s]’. In the colder parts of Europe, St Martin’s Day was the traditional time for slaughter, and feasting followed hard behind, with St Martin’s geese or swine in Germany, geese in Denmark and Martlemas beef in England. In wine-growing regions, too, St Martin’s Day was when the new wine was ready.

  In England, seasonal drinking was given an archaic air, a sense of tradition to justify it. In the twelfth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain told the tale of the fifth-century leader Vortigern, who was invited to drink with the toast, Lauerd king wacht heil! [more correctly, wæs hæil, or Lord king, your health], to which the response was Drinc heil! The story was almost entirely fabricated, and the parts that weren’t were anachronistic by half a millennium. Nonetheless, this legendary wæs hæil was transformed into ‘wassail’ and became part of the holiday traditions.* In the fourteenth century the rich began to prize special wassail bowls of precious metals, using them for formal toasts; the poor carried humbler bowls from door to door, drinking to their superiors in exchange for food or drink.

  As with the Kalends, by the Middle Ages the holiday period had become a time of gambling and gifts. In many places dicing and cards were limited to the Christmas season; in others gaming was legal year-round, but respectable people indulged only during the holiday. In one area in France, more than two-thirds of court cases concerning gambling occurred between October and February; in Castile, the royal monopoly on gambling was lifted on 25 and 26 December so all could indulge. In England, legislation permitted holiday gambling: by 1461, a law prohibited nobles from playing dice or cards in their own homes except during the twelve days; fifty years later, ‘Artificer or Craftsman … Husbandman, Apprentice, Labourer, Servant at husbandry, Journeyman or Servant of Artificer … or any Serving-man’ were all banned from playing ‘at the Tables, Tennis, Dice, Cards, Bowls, Clash, Coyting, Logating, or any other unlawful Game’, except at Christmas.*

  With the twelve days considered a single holiday, the Kalends New Year’s gifts became a Christmas custom. In Gawain and the Green Knight, the courtiers shout, ‘Noel, Noel,’ then

  ‘New Year’s Gifts!’ the knights cried next

  as they pressed forward to offer their presents.†

  These knights were offering gifts to their lord. Small gifts were sometimes given among friends, but more frequent were gifts designed to reinforce the social hierarchy, always given upwards, from knight to lord, from lord to ruler. In fifteenth-and sixteenth-century England, account books from the households of the great all indicate that gift-giving was routine, although we don’t know how widespread the habit was lower down the social scale. In 1575 the soldier and poet George Gascoigne wrote that tenants traditionally gave their landlords capons at Christmas as part of a series of obligatory, year-round gifts:

  And when the tenants come to pay their quarter’s rent,

  They bring some fowl
at Midsummer, a dish of fish in Lent

  At Christmas a capon, at Michaelmas a goose,

  And somewhat else at New Year’s tide, for fear their lease fly loose.*

  In Gawain, after the gifts were given, the knights and their ladies ‘danced and drank’ for three days. Some great houses hired professional musicians, but more commonly, the entertainments were produced by and for the guests. In the fifteenth century a death in the family reduced one landowner’s household to a most unseasonal quiet, with no ‘disguising, nor harpings, nor luting, nor singing nor none loud disporting, but playing at the tables, and chess and cards’.

  Thus by the close of the Middle Ages, for much of Europe, Christmas was certainly a religious festival, but while the church had included new traditions to mark the day, it never succeeded in overwhelming the secular pastimes, and Christmas was primarily a time of ‘feaste … where kynnesfolke do resorte together, bryngyng or sendynge presents mutually’: food, family and giving.

  Chapter Two

  The focal point of medieval Christmas for the majority was not the birth of Christ, but eating and drinking and entertainment. For the rulers, however, the festivities offered opportunities beyond mere pleasure. By the sixteenth century James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, understood feast days to be tools of good governance, ‘for delighting the people with publicke spectacles and for merriment’ and, in so doing, displaying the might of rulers, entertaining their allies and impressing their foes with their wealth, all of which translated to power.

  The music of earlier courts had rarely been seasonal. In the later fifteenth century, Edward IV’s household included a ‘wayte’, a band of musicians who performed between Michaelmas and Lent. Several city corporations and guilds also employed waits to play at civic ceremonies, although it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that their performances were confined to Christmas. But for the great courts’ festive season, music alone was soon not enough, and to oversee the ‘divers disguising and plays’ that were coming to be expected at the holiday many of the courts of Europe appointed Lords of Misrule, courtiers, or men of social status, who planned the entertainments beginning in October and then acted as masters of ceremonies as they ‘ruled’ through the traditional twelve days and to Candlemas.

  Twelfth Night, the eve of Epiphany, marked the end of the twelve days, and was equal to Christmas Day in importance. Imperceptibly in the British Isles, the title of the Lord of Misrule merged with the Twelfth Night’s Bean King, who had originated in France. Bean cakes, cakes with a dried legume baked into them, had been sold in Paris markets from at least the thirteenth century. The recipient of the slice with the bean was crowned the Rex Fabarum, or King of the Bean, and was toasted by his fellow diners, ‘The King drinks!’ By the early fourteenth century the custom had travelled to England, and the courts of Edward II and Edward III both had crowned Bean Kings. Edward II’s Bean King received a silver-gilt basin and ewer costing nearly £8 for his service. Edward III’s Bean King was a Lord of Misrule too, organizing the king’s entertainment and hiring his musicians ‘in nomine Regis de Faba’, in the name of the Bean King.

  The custom then briefly went out of fashion; pageantry did not. In 1377, more than a hundred wealthy citizens of London, accompanied by forty-eight men in livery, musicians, and men in costumes, ‘with black visors, not amiable’, rode out to salute the son of the Black Prince, presenting him with gifts of gold and jewellery, before being entertained to a banquet. In the fifteenth century, however, Bean Kings and Lords of Misrule reappeared: Henry VII had a Lord of Misrule and an Abbot of Unreason; James IV of Scotland had a musician King of the Bean in the 1490s. By 1509, the year of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the court allocated £450 on fabrics ‘for the disguising’ alone. The following year a portable stage built to resemble a hill surmounted by a gold tree was pushed down the hall towards the king as entertainers danced on it. In 1511 the king and a dozen courtiers performed a masque, combining dancing, music and dialogue, ‘a thing not seen afore in England’.

  Many of the greatest households had their own Lords of Misrule, as did civic corporations, colleges and other quasi-public bodies. Merton College, Oxford appointed a Rex Fabarum every November in the late fifteenth century, said to be ‘according to ancient custom’. In 1545 the statutes of St John’s College, Cambridge included a requirement that each of the Fellows was to take on the role in turn. The Inns of Court, great promoters of the holiday, spent heavily on year-end entertainment, and they regularly appointed a Lord of Misrule from among their benchers, or members.* One year, Gray’s Inn’s choice was commended as ‘a very proper man of personage, and very active in dancing and revelling’ – that is, he was suitable because he was both a gentleman and liked a good party.

  Under Edward VI, the royal court’s Lords of Misrule presided over extravaganzas on a scale rarely attempted before, not merely for the entertainment of aristocrats and courtiers, but also, as James VI and I was to later understand, to give people a sense they had a stake in the monarchy. Only seven month’s before Edward’s death in 1553, one Londoner described the Lord of Misrule and his retinue arriving by river at Tower Wharf, where they were received by the City of London’s own Lord of Misrule and his men. The King’s Lord, ‘gorgyusly a[rrayed in] purpelle welvet furyd with armyn, and ys robe braded with spangulls of selver’, was accompanied by trumpeters and drummers, pipers, singers and morris dancers, and followed by mounted men in gold cloaks, with gold chains, each with their own retinues, fools, dancers, singers and pike-men. They marched through the City, ‘trompet blohyng, makyng a proclamasyon’, before the King’s Lord gave the City’s Lord a gold and silver gown, ‘and a[non] after he knelyd downe and he toke a sword and … mad ym knyght, and after thay dran[k to each] hodur’. This was followed by a banquet, then a torchlight procession back to the river, where guns once more saluted the King’s Lord as he took to the water.*

  Christmas pageantry continued in London at the Inns of Court and among the City of London office-holders, who staged elaborate ceremonies. These, however, were not public, but events for members of the bar and their grand guests, or for the guilds and aldermen of the City of London. The Inner Temple held a breakfast on Christmas Day for their benchers, with ‘Strangers of worth’ invited to dinner; on St Stephen’s Day the ‘Constable Marshall’ led a procession of trumpeters, fifers and drummers to kneel before their guest of honour, the Lord Chancellor. Other ceremonies were quasi-performances, as when a ‘Master of the Game’ and a ‘Ranger of the Forest’ hunted down costumed foxes, cats and hounds. These places also staged masques, which had arrived in the British Isles from, most likely, France in the thirteenth century. (The first record was already one of suppression, when ‘momment’ – mummery – was banned in Troyes in 1263.) This courtly entertainment involved men dressed as angels, or devils, or gods and goddesses, or wearing headpieces of different animals, all supported by dazzlingly costumed squires and knights. The expenditure could be extraordinary: in 1633 the Inns of Court spent £20,000 on a masque entitled The Triumph of Peace.*

  For the majority of the population, however, mumming meant something far humbler, although for the earliest days we know little of what it comprised. Instead, much of our information comes from the ordinances that banned it: in the fifteenth century the City of London forbade anyone at Christmas to ‘walk [the streets] by night in any manner mumming plays, interludes, or any other disguisings with any feigned beards, painted visors, deformed or coloured visages in any way’. In 1572 a banned St Thomas’s Day parade in York was led by a personification of Yule and his ‘wife’ (the phrasing suggests that this was probably a man dressed as a woman), as their supporters threw nuts to the spectators. In Lincoln in 1637, a case was heard against a man who, dressed as a clergyman, had ‘married’ the daughter of the town’s swineherd to a Lord of Misrule as his ‘Christmas wife’. (It was impersonating a clergyman that seems to have tipped the scales against the offender.)

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nbsp; We know a little more about mumming traditions in Scandinavia. In some districts people dressed up, mostly as animals, for a mischief night where pranks, or minor acts of destruction, were designed to incite fear or, at least, a pleasurable shiver of fear. These elements, together with some form of ancestor remembrance, make a strong link to our own Halloween, rooted as it is on All Souls’ Eve, when the dead were thought to walk.

  Another clue to early mumming forms may be found further afield, in Newfoundland, in Canada. In 1583 the adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert landed with five ships that had sailed from Plymouth, in the west of England, to claim part of the island for Elizabeth I. Four centuries later, customs that folklorists recognized from the West Country continued to be found there: morris dancing, hobby-horses and mumming. With no Puritan interregnum, as in Britain and New England, it may be that mumming in Newfoundland in 1962 was not too dissimilar to mumming in Bristol in 1487.

  In some areas of Newfoundland, mumming was known as janneying, with big janneys (adults) and little janneys (children) disguising themselves in many layers of clothes or drapery; covering their faces with sacks, or fabric, or masks; and using assumed voices. Cross-dressing was routine, the women dressing as men and men as women, just as that horrified church father had reported in the sixth century. Sometimes hobby-horses, masks with snapping jaws, known locally as horsey-hops, accompanied the janneys.