Christmas Read online

  The janneyers walked in a stylized ‘jogging, half-dance, half-shake, that is the “mummer’s walk”’ as they went house-to-house, banging on pots or playing instruments. The householders then tried to guess their identities while the janneys attempted to foil recognition. This was followed by food and drink, music and dancing, before the janneyers moved on. Some roughhousing might take place: janneys carried sticks to keep those who would attempt to discover their identities at a distance, while householders might ‘accidentally’ trip the janneys to dislodge their masks.

  Other rituals were recorded in the British Isles in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Wassailing – carrying a wassail cup around a village or town to offer toasts in exchange for money or food and drink – occurred from at least 1461, when a church account in Hertfordshire recorded payments to wassailers. Soon it was traditional for young women to be cup-bearers over the twelve days, calling ‘wassail, wassail’, initially offering a drink in exchange for bread, cheese and mince pies, but from the seventeenth century mostly for cash.

  These were asymmetrical payments, from greater to lesser. The practice of giving upwards, from lesser to greater, also continued. Monarchs, senior churchmen and others in power expected to receive costly items annually as thanks for their patronage, each gift calibrated according to rank and position: Elizabeth I’s archbishops gave her gold worth £40, while lesser peers gave only £20. Lower down the scale, tenants continued to offer fowl or game to their landlords. In a morality play of 1578, a character thanks another ‘heartily’ for his help and promises to ‘remember you every year with a Christmas capon’.

  Hierarchical gifts were designed to emphasize status differences. While Elizabeth’s courtiers never complained of their enforced gifts to her, complaints about the obligations of seasonal vails, or tips, to tradespeople and servants from their social superiors, were endless. The earliest reference is, as we now recognize as a pattern, a prohibition. In 1419, the City of London aldermen banned servants from soliciting Christmas ‘offerings’ from suppliers of food and drink to the Mayor and Sheriff’s offices. Apprentices were said to have kept earthenware boxes, like modern piggy-banks, into which these tips were dropped; at Christmas they were broken open, and the term ‘Christmas box’ was transferred to the money. Soon the phrase had become proverbial: ‘It is not for men to bee like swine, good for nothing till they be dead,’ preached the President of Corpus Christi, Oxford; ‘or like Christmas-boxes, that will afford nothing, till they be broken.’

  Others asked for cash, but not for themselves. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in several rural regions of England, groups of hogglers, or hoggells, or hogners, or hogans, collected money at Christmas. We know almost nothing about them: we don’t know what social group these men – probably men, although the sources are not explicit – came from, or what they did for the money, whether they performed a service, or provided entertainment. Church accounts indicate they made seasonal collections – from whom or how much from each we also don’t know – which were then handed over for parish use.

  Some of that money might have been spent on greenery: by the late Middle Ages in England, almost all surviving church records include entries for the purchase of holly and ivy in the winter. Private houses were also dressed with greenery, as were the streets themselves. In the early seventh century, Pope Gregory the Great had noted that decorating churches and holy places was a custom of the British Isles, although it was not yet seasonal: midsummer decorations were as common as mid-winter ones. One sixteenth-century historian claimed that in previous centuries every parish had a great pole serving as a maypole in the summer, decorated with holly and ivy in the winter, and that in 1444, a storm in London had blown down ‘a standard of tree … nailed full of [holly] and ivy, for disport of Christmas to the people’.

  This was not a Christmas tree as we know it, but it might be considered a precursor. For an association between trees and Christmas was emerging, especially in Germany. By the fifteenth century, the legend of the eighth-century St Boniface had become widespread. It told of an event one winter solstice, when the saint heard that a human sacrifice was planned under an oak tree, sacred to the god Thor. In a mighty rage, Boniface chopped down the tree, replacing it with a small fir, its evergreen branches representing Christ’s eternal truth. (Awed locals were said to be so impressed by this analogy that they converted on the spot.) Another fifteenth-century legend told of a Bishop of Bamberg who witnessed apple trees miraculously blossoming on Christmas Eve. Soon sightings of miraculous Christmas flowerings were well-known.

  Perhaps these stories were nourished by the popularity of the dramatic genre known in Germany as paradise plays. Christmas Eve was the feast day of Adam and Eve, and paradise plays opened with a scene set in the Garden of Eden, the tree of knowledge represented in midwinter by an evergreen fir with apples tied to its branches. After the plays went out of vogue, paradise trees continued to be erected in public places in German-speaking countries, initially on wooden pyramids, surrounded by ornaments and candles, and then without the pyramids, the ornaments and candles being tied onto the trees instead. As early as 1419, a Freiburg city guild erected a tree decorated with apples, wafers, tinsel and gingerbread.* In Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia), in 1441, what might have been a tree, or might have been a pole decorated with greenery, was erected outside the town hall, as in London three years later.

  By the end of the century, trees or greenery were so common that Strasbourg passed an ordinance banning the seasonal cutting of pine branches; by the 1530s ordinances in Alsace limited each household to one small tree; two decades later Freiburg forbade chopping down trees at Christmas altogether. Even as these prohibitions were enacted to preserve forests, decorated trees were recorded with increasing regularity: in Riga in 1510, a tree was decked with ‘woollen thread, straw and apples’; in 1570, a guild in Bremen erected a tree for their members’ children to gather the apples, nuts and pretzels which adorned its branches.

  These were public, outdoor trees, but by 1531 there was a new fashion, with Strasbourg markets selling trees for people to erect indoors, although these were apparently not yet decorated. The first decorated indoor tree we know of was in 1605, again in Strasbourg. Adorned with paper roses, apples, wafers, gilded sweets and sugar ornaments, it was what, a few years later, would be given a new name – a Weihnachtsbaum, or Christmas tree. These indoor trees were first recorded in the south-west of Germany, again around Strasbourg. It was later said that Martin Luther, inspired to thoughts of the goodness of God by the sight of pine trees, had cut down a tree for his family so they could be similarly inspired. This is unlikely: Luther lived nearly 700 kilometres from Strasbourg, in Wittenberg, a town with no record of indoor Christmas trees until the eighteenth century.

  Yet Christmas greenery was everywhere, and soon listeners were encouraged to ‘Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly’, or at least they were in Wales, where the carol originated in the sixteenth century. The earliest Christmas music, dating from the fourth century, had been written by churchmen, for churchmen, and concerned the theological implications of the nativity. In the twelfth century, a carol was a secular French spring song accompanied by a dance.* In that same century, what might have been the first Christmas carol, ‘Veni Emmanuel’, was probably written. From the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries, Christmas carols began to be written in Latin, followed by macaronic carols, with words in both Latin and the local language, and finally only in the local language. ‘La Marche des rois’, from Provence, may have been, in the thirteenth century, one of the very first carols to omit Latin entirely, along with ‘W żłobie leży’ in Poland (‘The March of the Kings’ and ‘In a Manger’ respectively). In Italy, a Franciscan speciality was carols in which diminutives – bambino, piccolino, Jesulino – underscored the popular, childlike ingredients of the holiday and the song-form.

  These carols all tell of the nativity. In contrast, the earliest English carol we know is contemp
oraneous with these but, unlike its continental counterparts, this Anglo-Norman contribution is a drinking song with only a token nod to seasonality:

  Lords, by Christmas and the host,

  Of this mansion hear my toast –

  Drink it well –

  Each must drain his cup of wine,

  And I the first will toss off mine:

  Thus I advise.

  Here then I bid you all Wassail,

  Cursed by he who will not say,

  Drinkhail!

  Other carols involved holly, ivy or feasting. They were sung at court, in the streets and in private homes. In the sixteenth century, at the Inns of Court on the feast of St Thomas, the benchers processed and sang a carol as part of the entertainment.

  In the middle of the fifteenth century Richard Smart, a Devonshire clergyman, may have written the first carol to greet Christmas not as a religious festival, nor as a season, but as a person:

  Nowell, Nowell, Nowell, Nowell,

  Who ys ther that syngeth so nowell, nowell, nowell?

  I am here, syre Crystesmass,

  Wellcome, my lord syre Christemasse

  In the verses that followed, Sir Christmas oversaw eating and drinking and taught listeners the customs of the feast day, giving news of Christ’s birth, but those lines were immediately followed with ‘Buvez bien par toute la compagnie. Make good cheer and be right merry.’ Over time, the Lord of Misrule of the Tudor court came to be known as Captain or Prince or Sir Christmas.

  Sir Christmas was a jolly innovation. Other personifications cast a darker hue. Winter was a time of superstition, of revenants, when the gods, or spirits of the dead, were more easily seen by the living. All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day may have evolved out of days when the dead were worshipped, or propitiated. With the dead came various intercessors, who rewarded or punished or blessed or banished their earthly followers. On St Martin’s Eve, the saint handed out apples and nuts to good Flemish children, while in other places it was a wild man who did so, often the servant or travelling companion of a visiting saint, especially St Nicholas. These men might wear pelts, or animal skins, carry a whip or switch or crop, and be accompanied by some form of horse, or sometimes a goat, with a snapping jaw: Old Hob, Schimmel, Mari Lhoyd, the Klapperbock, Ziege, Habergaiss, Habbersack, hobby, hoden and the Julebukk, or Christmas goat, were a few of their incarnations.

  There was a seemingly endless stream of these seasonal wild men, or elves, or ragged hermits, or devils, or some other form of outsider. Words associated with them were redolent of dirt (schmutz, Aschen) or class (Ru was rough, Knecht a servant). Pelz, a common prefix, meant either fur, that is, animal skin, or came from pelzen, dialect for ‘to beat’. There was Tomte [Elf] Gubbe in Sweden and Père Fouettard, Father Whip, in France; in Germany, Knecht Ruprecht, or Pelz Nichol, Ru Claus or Ru Paul, or Hans Muff or Hans Trapp, or Rumpanz, or Klaubauf (so called from his cry of Klaus auk!, ‘Pick them up’, as he scattered nuts and fruit in front of the household’s children). There were more localized variants: Pelzmärtel or Schmutzbartel from around Lake Constance; Rüpelz or Butzmann in Swabia; in Alsace, Biggesel. There was also Aschenklas, Putenmandl, or Stämpes in the Rhineland and Semper in Bavaria. In Switzerland, there was Schmutzli and Samichlaus, a winter demon who carried switches to beat bad children and a sack to take babies away in. (More on the potently named Samichlaus on p. 105). In Austria, the Krampus was half-goat, half-demon, who ate bad children for his supper.* In the Netherlands, Zwarte Piet, black Peter, accompanied the saint.†

  Whatever he was named, the wild man was ferocious. To draw attention away from these sidekicks to a Catholic saint, the Protestant reformer Martin Luther promoted a gentler idea, the Christkind, or Christ child, who gave fruit and nuts to good children. The treats were a constant in this season of food and drink. For like these legendary gift-bringers, legend – and rose-coloured spectacles – also tell us that Christmas was a time of extravagant hospitality, when the lords of the manor, and more minor gentry, opened up their great halls to strangers as well as friends, family and dependants, in an orgy of indiscriminate welcome and festivity. Writers of the period tell us this in all earnestness – or at least they explain that that was what used to happen, but no longer did. In their own day, they write, the great refused to spend time on their estates, instead frivolling away the holiday in towns and cities, leaving the peasantry without their lords for the holidays. In ‘The Old Cap, or, Time’s Alteration’ a poet lamented the time when

  … Good hospitality

  Was cherished then of many; …

  The holly tree was polled

  At Christmas for each hall;

  There was fire to curb the cold,

  And meat for great and small:

  The neighbours were friendly bidden,

  And all had welcome true;

  The poor from the gates were not chidden

  When this old cap was new …

  The date of this verse is unknown, although it was in circulation by the 1620s. A cookery book of 1660 referred to this supposed golden age as one when the great fed the lesser, ‘before good housekeeping had left England’. But did they? The evidence that survives, for the most part the account books of the very greatest households, indicates otherwise.

  For example, in 1507 the Duke of Buckingham entertained 182 at dinner on Christmas Day, with another 176 at supper; at Epiphany, there were 319 at dinner, 279 at supper. But unlike later imaginings that suggest that at Christmas anyone could simply appear and sit down in any great dining hall, when Buckingham’s guest list is examined, his liberality is shown to be have a strong underlying political purpose. At Epiphany, most of his guests were local gentry or political supporters, together with their own followers and supporters; others were under his patronage, or they in some way owed fealty to him through political or familial affiliation. Of all those hundreds of people at his table that Christmas season, just three had no obvious obligation towards him.

  Lower down the social scale, and absent the duke’s political aims, comparable invitations of utility rather than of charitable hospitality can be found in gentry families. The majority of guests were the social equals of their hosts, whether friends or acquaintances, as well as those connected through ties of blood and marriage. When those of lower status were present, they were almost without exception tenants, or people who supplied goods and services over a long period. In this way, the gentry were systematically brought into contact with their dependants over the season, the meals building reciprocal bonds of loyalty. Even so, the lord and his immediate family usually ate apart, in a separate room, or at a different, higher table. Thus to interpret these large guest-lists as an indicator of a golden age of social levelling is to misunderstand what was a utilitarian review of those who would, in more recent days, be called employees. In modern terms, this was a CEO dancing with a warehouseman at an office party, not inviting him to her own family’s Christmas dinner.

  Senior clergy followed the same pattern, if on a smaller scale. In the early seventeenth century the Archbishop of York hosted a series of holiday dinners: for his tenants, then for gentry from the towns in his diocese, and after that for lesser ecclesiastical post-holders. Minor clergy followed suit, entertaining their parish clerks, the choir or bell-ringers, or other employees. Hungry strangers might, at most, hope for a loaf of bread at the kitchen door, as on any other day of the year.

  The holiday menu was developing gradually. For the rich, there were already dishes that were considered specifically Christmassy. In 1573, the poet-farmer Thomas Tusser itemized:

  Good bread & good drinke …

  brawne pudding & souse & good mustarde withal.

  Biefe, mutton, & porke, shred pyes of the best,

  pig, veale, goose & capon, & Turkey wel drest:

  Chese, apples & nuttes …

  As now, meat was the centrepiece of the holidays. Brawn had headed the list for centuries. Originally wild boar, later the term described a j
oint of pork, rolled, baked and soused either by being boiled in a vinegar broth or served with the animal’s pickled feet or ears. Still later, a pig’s head was boiled in a vinegar broth, the meat shredded and pressed into a mould, like pâté, and served with mustard. Possibly because it was no longer animal-shaped, there was some confusion in the Anglo-Norman period, and brawn was categorized as a fish dish, suitable for fast days, while still remaining a great celebratory dish – Henry V’s coronation feast in 1413 featured brawn and mustard.

  More flamboyantly ceremonial was a whole boar’s head, which had been part of the Christmas feasts of the great from at least the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century the Lord Mayor of London ordered the Butchers’ Guild to supply a boar’s head annually for the City Christmas feast. The famous Oxford ‘Boar’s Head Carol’ was probably written in the fifteenth century, and by the sixteenth the boar’s head and Christmas feasting were synonymous. Many later descriptions of it being served sound remarkably similar, as though one source were copying another: at some unstated but misty time in the past, a scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford was attacked by a wild boar as he was walking in the woods, saving himself by thrusting his copy of Aristotle into its mouth, and remaining cool-headed enough to shout ‘Græcum est!’* He then retrieved his precious book by cutting off the animal’s head, before having it served up to his fellow students. This implausible story was repeated routinely and regularly for centuries, with more or fewer embellishments as suited the teller.

  The shred pies Tusser mentioned were, by the sixteenth century, usually called mince pies. They were made of various types of minced, or shredded, meat, whether beef, mutton or veal, until the eighteenth century; then, as sugar became cheaper and more readily available, the pies became sweet rather than savoury. They always, however, contained dried fruit, including currants, raisins, dates and prunes, and possibly some fresh fruit such as apples and pears, and candied orange or lemon peel and spices.