Christmas Read online

  Turkeys, when Tusser wrote of them, were a relative novelty, having first been brought to Europe from the New World by the Spanish in the 1520s.* Half a century after Tusser, however, they were commonplace: ‘Capons and Hennes, beside Turkies, Geese and Duckes, beside Beefe and Mutton, must all die for the great feast.’ The next sentence added that ‘plummes and spice, Sugar and Honey, square it among pies and broth’. Tusser had made no mention of another Christmas dish, but even then, plum broth, or plum-pottage or porridge, was well known. Like the shred pies, it was savoury rather than sweet, a beef soup thickened with breadcrumbs and dried fruit. (An eighteenth-century Swiss traveller said very firmly that you had to be English to like it.)

  In 1619 a masque at the Inner Temple featured a ‘plump and lusty’ Plumporridge, who fears that Master Kersmas (Christmas) is fading away. A doctor agrees: ‘I saw him very lusty o’ Twelfth Night’, but while ‘he may linger out till Candlemas … [he will] ne’er recover.’

  No one could have foreseen how grievous the wounds Master Kersmas was to sustain in the coming decades would be, but somehow he would linger on long past Candlemas, biding his time.

  Chapter Three

  Sixteenth-century England had always had a few more religiously minded people, who forcibly expressed their concern about the drinking, gambling and what they saw as mindless pleasure of Christmas, instead of matters of life, death and afterlife. They were, however, a minority. Generally, those who wanted to reform the season were tolerated as eccentrics, their views nobody’s business but their own, even as a number of Christmas practices were banned, or cherished, or banned once more as the throne passed from Protestant to Catholic and back to Protestant under Henry VIII and his successors. Under Mary, mystery plays were forbidden and boy bishops returned to favour; when Elizabeth sat on the throne, street plays gave way to mumming among the working people, while among the aristocracy, courtly masques gained new life.

  Alongside these vacillations, a growing number of ardent Protestants began to condemn the secular holiday for a variety of reasons: that the holiday cycle commemorated saints, contrary to the Reformation’s opposition to the role of saints as intercessors for mankind; that there was no biblical authentication for celebrating the nativity on 25 December; and, the familiar complaint, that the season was too much a period of licence:

  … The youth in every place doe flocke,

  and all appareld fine,

  With Pypars through the streetes they runne,

  and sing at every dore …

  Edward VI addressed the problem of saints’ days by sticking to the letter of the law: the Reformation had condemned the cult of saints, but omitted the apostles and evangelists from its wider ban. Thus the reformed church could still celebrate Christmas Day, St Stephen’s Day, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the Feast of the Circumcision and Epiphany, barely disturbing the traditional twelve days.

  In Scotland, however, in 1561 the newly reformed Kirk declared all of Christmas a nasty popish invention and banned the holidays entirely. By the 1570s and 1580s, court records in the Lowlands (Highland practices were always looser, being further away from the centres of power) included a number of people condemned, or in some cases excommunicated, for marking ‘superstitious days and specially … Yull-day’. Shopkeepers too were sanctioned for closing their shops, and guilds for marking the day. By the turn of the century, carol singing, playing football, ‘guising’ [mumming], making music and dancing were all banned as profane, although the quantity of ordinances against them is a strong indication that they persisted nonetheless.

  In England, meanwhile, life was difficult for the non-conformists – those religious groups that did not adhere to the tenets of the Church of England and who did not acknowledge the holiday. One group travelled from East Anglia in 1607 to the Netherlands in search of freedom to practise their religion. Thirteen years later some set out again, this time on a ship named the Mayflower, heading across the Atlantic.

  Earlier emigrants from the British Isles and France to the colonies in North America had taken the customs of their home countries with them. In the south, particularly in what was to become Virginia, the settlers were mostly adherents of the mainstream Church of England, and they observed Christmas as they had at home. Captain John Smith, of the Virginia Company that settled at Jamestown, spent December of 1608 among the Algonquian, ‘where we were never more merry, nor fed on more plenty of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wilde foule, and good bread, nor never had better fires in England’. Even in a wilderness setting, Christmas continued to be food, warmth and good company.

  In the north-east, as the Mayflower travellers arrived in what would become Massachusetts, the holiday was to become contested ground. On the settlers’ first Christmas in 1620, a mere six weeks after landing, work was obligatory, not for religious reasons but for survival. The emigrants were still living on board ship, and on the 25th ‘we went on shore, some to fell tymber, some to saw … and some to carry; so no man rested all day’. On that day, they ‘begane to erecte ye first house for commone use’.

  Once shelter was no longer a pressing matter, however, fewer allowances were made. Yet the religious dissidents who had fled England and then the Netherlands in search of freedom of worship numbered just forty-one when they departed the Old World (seventeen men, ten women and fourteen children). They were heavily outnumbered by sixty-one other passengers, some servants of the Pilgrims, but many others simply hoping to find a new life in a new world. They had no interest in religious quarrels.

  Thus, when some residents of the colony excused themselves from work on Christmas Day in that second year, professing ‘it wente against their consciences to work on that day’, it is likely that they were those ‘strangers’ who had also travelled on the Mayflower. Certainly the colony’s governor, William Bradford, had no problem with permitting them to conform to their own practices – at least, until they were seen ‘in the streete at play, openly; some pitching the barr and some at stoole-ball, and such-like sports. So he went to them, and tooke away their implements, and tould them that it was against his conscience that they should play and others worke. If they made the keeping of [Christmas] a mater of devotion, let them kepe their houses, but ther should be no gameing or revelling in the streets.’

  A unified population, all sharing identical beliefs, was never a reality in the colonies. New France covered not only much of what later became Canada, but also a great swathe of territory down to the Gulf of Mexico, and the French settlers maintained their own holiday traditions: on the religious side, midnight Mass; on the secular, good food and drink. In the 1620s and 1630s Samuel de Champlain, Governor of New France, presided over feasts of venison, squirrel and wildfowl, both stewed and in pies, eel and salmon, and sweet dishes baked with maple-sugar, that new-world culinary innovation.

  In the 1630s, a further 20,000 immigrants settled in New England, bringing their own customs. Possibly it was this numerical imbalance that caused the Puritans to tighten their grip: they may have felt that they had not travelled all that way, in such peril, to be surrounded by those whose practices were so at odds with their own. Or it may have been that events in England and Scotland had given them hope that their own views could be made to prevail.

  James VI of Scotland’s love of holiday celebrations had been a problem for the Kirk, ensuring Christmas bans were impossible during his reign. When he gained the throne of England too, in 1603, with its populace more tolerant of the secular holiday, it must have seemed to the Puritans that the battle was lost. In 1617 the king attempted to enforce legally the celebration of the twelve days. Yet this was only ever partially successful; after his death in 1625 the monarchy lost even the appearance of control in Scotland, and in 1638 the General Assembly banned Christmas outright. Gradually, even gestures towards the holiday were liable to punishment.

  Initially, this was in marked contrast to England. Half a decade after the ill-suited Charles I succeeded James, Christmas continued to be
a time of festivity and enjoyment. One ‘lesson’ instructed young men to ‘Be holy in Lent. Be [painstaking] in Harvest. Be merry at Christmas.’ Even churchmen agreed: Christmas was, said the Bishop of Winchester, a ‘season of gathering together, of neighbourly meetings and invitations … of good housekeeping and hospitality’. But once the Civil War began, there was no longer any space for neighbourly gatherings. Now what mattered were the views of reformers, who saw Christmas, unmentioned in the Bible, as a mark of the antichrist. At first their attacks on the day concentrated on its secular elements, and in 1642 Parliament banned seasonal plays. But in 1643, when the Long Parliament joined forces with the Scottish government, all holiday observances, secular and religious, were forbidden. Parliament sat on 25 December, to make sure the people understood that this was a working day like any other, and by 1645 ‘Festival days, vulgarly called Holy days, having no Warrant in the Word of God, are not to be continued.’

  Not everyone agreed. While the regime demanded that shops stay open, some apprentices forced their masters to close: in 1646 in Bury St Edmunds, they took to the streets, and further scuffles and fights broke out the next year too, with a ‘great mutiny’ in Norwich, while in Canterbury a mob demanding holiday church services attacked the mayor’s house. Christmas traditions became symbols of the royalist cause. ‘Christmas was kil’d at Nasbie fight’, claimed one broadside: ‘Charity was slain … Likewise then did die, / Rost beef and shred pie.’* In London in 1647, there was a tense stand-off when now-illicit greenery was defiantly hung on City walls. The Lord Mayor and City Marshal rode out to supervise its removal, but their calls for ladders went unheeded by an angry crowd, who spooked the mayor’s horse, making it bolt – or, as a royalist pamphlet gleefully interpreted the episode, ‘The pulling down of holly and ivy was an act his very horse was ashamed of.’

  Royalists, and the more conservative Church of England worshippers, tried to mark the day, either in secular or religious form, but it was difficult, and sometimes dangerous. In 1652, with churches forced to close, the diarist John Evelyn found, ‘no Sermon anywhere, so observ’d [Christmas Day] at home’. The following year was the same: ‘No churches[, nor] publique Assembly, I was faine to passe the devotions of that blessed day with my family at home.’ 1654 was worse, with penalties levied on anyone who attempted to worship in church. In 1655 all Church of England ministers were barred from both teaching and preaching, and after that, wrote Evelyn, ‘There was no more notice taken of Christmas Day in Churches.’ The following year saw Evelyn attend a service at the Earl of Rutland’s private chapel, held in defiance of parliamentary orders, but as the clergyman ‘was giving us the holy Sacrament, The Chapell was surrounded with Souldiers: all the Communicants and Assembly surpriz’d and kept Prisoner’. Evelyn was held and questioned as to

  why contrarie to an Ordinance made that none should any longer observe the superstitious time of the Nativity (so esteem’d by them), I durst offend and particularly be at Common prayers, which they told me was but the Masse in English [that is, was Catholic in all but name], and particularly pray for Charles stuard, for which we had no Scripture: I told them we did not pray for Ch: Steward, but for all Christian Kings, Princes and Governors: The[y] replied, in so doing we praied for the K[ing] of Spaine too, who was their Enemie, and a Papist, with other frivolous and insnaring questions, with much threatning …

  While Evelyn was attempting to worship, many more were battling governmental regulations over secular customs. Shops now closed on 25 December because the day routinely provoked street disorder. But this had consequences unforeseen by either reformers or royalists as, with shops and churches closed, and private celebrations under a cloud, people went to inns and taverns and drank. The banning of Christmas by religious reformers had ensured that the day became ever more secular.

  Banning Christmas celebrations, however, is not the same as Christmas celebrations being banned. In 1659 the Massachusetts Bay court instituted 5s. fines for anyone caught ‘forbearing of labour, feasting’, or celebrating the day ‘in any other way’, yet court records show that in the twenty-two years the law was in force, not a single person was brought up on charges of enjoying Christmas. Given the region’s many non-Puritans, it is impossible that no one marked the day. Perhaps, instead, celebrating Christmas in Puritan New England should be understood to be like speeding in the twenty-first century. When drivers stick to 23 or 24 mph in a 20 mph zone, a blind eye is turned; if they drive at 40 mph, it is more likely they will be arrested. As long as holiday celebrations were private, participants could expect no repercussions.

  Whatever the case, the ban could not long survive the political revolution that was the death of Cromwell and the end of parliamentary rule back in England. There, following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, all parliamentary legislation passed after 1637 was formally revoked. North of the border, however, the Scottish Kirk continued to frown on the holiday that was being relegitimated in the south, and in 1690 it reinstated its ban.*

  In the Massachusetts Bay colony, the ruling caste was no more open to the holiday. It took a foot-dragging two decades for it to comply with London’s order to lift the ban, only doing so finally in 1681. In England, even many who had professed Puritan ideals from conviction, rather than expediency, now simply took pleasure in the season. One nonconformist vicar, who had been an ardent Commonwealthman, could stand in for many on Christmas Day 1667 as he ‘feasted. [his] Tenants and all [his] children with joy’.

  * * *

  Most of his countrymen felt the same, returning to the old ways, eating, dancing, drinking, playing cards and games, singing and telling stories. Some, however, especially those who had supported the monarchy, began to develop an interest in what they identified as special Christmas observances, things that people did at that time of year and no other, the power of ritual making a political as well as religious point.

  The poet Robert Herrick was a vicar in Devonshire for just over fifteen years, and many of his poems referred to the customs of the people. Historians and folklorists have since mined them for information on the holiday, for his are often the first surviving references we have to a number of traditions. It is important therefore to look not merely at what Herrick wrote, but why he wrote it.

  Herrick’s childhood home was Calvinist, but moderate, and his London merchant family celebrated Christmas in ‘good will in feasting’, enjoying ‘musike’, eating Christmas ‘porredge and pyes’. By the 1640s Herrick had become an outspoken monarchist, publishing poems in praise of the doomed Charles I. His major collection of poetry, Hesperides, begins with a verse setting out his aim to hymn the customs of the rural people, and also of ‘The Court of Mab, and of the Fairie-King’ – that is of both the real and the imaginary worlds. In extolling the country-people’s wakes, morris dancing, Whitsun ale, harvest and shearing feasts, wassailing, mumming and Twelfth Night kings and queens, he was also making a political point: his list of subjects was virtually identical to those praised by James I, emphasizing what would vanish if the royalists were to lose the Civil War.

  Sometimes separating fact from imagination in Herrick’s work is relatively straightforward. In ‘The Wassaile’, Herrick’s wassailers ask for beer in exchange for blessings. The estate they call at is not a wealthy, thriving manor house, but a ghost of itself, a vision of disrepair brought about by newfangled ideas. Yet the practice of wassailing was recorded enough elsewhere that we can compare and contrast his poems with other sources.

  There were two types of wassailing. In one, working people went house to house, toasting the residents in exchange for money, or beer, or food. In the second, agricultural workers toasted their orchards, to promote good harvests in the following year:

  Wassaile the Trees, that they may beare

  You many a Plum, and many a Peare:

  For more or lesse fruits they will bring,

  As you doe give them Wassailing.

  Herrick’s account of wassailing of trees correspo
nds with another, from Sussex in the 1660s or 1670s, in which boys ‘howl’ (possibly a corruption of Yule) the orchards. The antiquary John Aubrey, in a near-contemporaneous study, recorded the same practice in Yorkshire.

  Herrick also described the lighting the ‘Christmas Log’ from a saved piece of the previous year’s log, for luck. This is the first surviving mention, although burning a large log at Christmas had been customary in parts of Germany for some centuries, and may have been the origin of the English tradition. Again, other sources vouch for the practice elsewhere in the country: in 1648, John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet’ (he was a waterman on the Thames), lamented the custom’s decline in the capital; twenty years later, Aubrey found it flourishing in Yorkshire.

  Herrick is also the first source to associate mistletoe with the holiday, in his ‘Ceremonie upon Candlemas Eve’, the day Christmas greenery was removed: ‘Down with the Rosemary, and so / Down with the Baies, & mistletoe’. Once more Taylor echoed Herrick’s account, and the herbalist William Coles mentioned it soon afterwards. What we don’t know was whether Christmas mistletoe was a seventeenth-century novelty, or if earlier references to it just failed to survive, or had never been written down. Nor can we say where it was in use. Taylor wrote almost entirely about London, where Herrick had also spent much of his life. Herrick was in Devonshire when he wrote of the custom, but that does not mean that that was where he saw it.