Page 55 - All About History - Issue 72-18

Alison Weir and Siobhan Clarke discuss their

new book A Tudor Christmas, and how the

festive season has changed throughout the centuries

What inspired you to team up and write A AW: Well,itwasmyidea toseeifwecouldbaseitonthe
Tudor Christmas? 12 days and see if that worked. We thought that it did and
AW: We thought of doing a project together and we had then it was a question of chapter titles, which is when I
already done various different events. It started back in uncovered Ben Jonson’s masque [Christmas, his Masque]
1998, when I wrote a little piece for a charitable book that that had all these names of Christmas and we thought
Waterstones published at Christmas called Little Book of could we adapt these? So that’s where the chapter titles
Light, which was about Christmas at the court of King came from but the only problem is that we had twelve days
HenryVIII.It served asthebasisforaChristmastalk Igave andonlytennames, sowehadtolookinthemasquefora
at the Little Banqueting House at Hampton couple of other titles!
Court for Historic Royal Palaces one year.
Siobhan, meanwhile, had developed a talk It was interesting to read in your
on royal Christmases and we decided to “There was book that at Christmas social class
take out the Tudor bits and amalgamate my was not so strict?
talk to do A Tudor Christmas and we very this great AW: Our idea of class demarcation derives
much enjoyed doing it. more from the Victorians where it was very,
inversion very stringent but go back to the Tudor
SC: I had been doing a lecture on periodandyouwillfindthatHenryVIIIwas ABOVE
Alison Weir wrote the book
royalChristmasesformanyyearsandwe where playing dice with his Master of the Cellar! with her frequent collaborator
were asked to do a joint lecture for an event At Christmas there was this inversion where Siobhan Clarke
some years ago. Alison covered the early part even the even the king, though his word remained
uptotheStuartsandthenIdiditfromthe law,hadtoobeytheLordofMisrule–who
Stuartsuptothepresentday.Wediditafew king had was a fun character but a probable nightmare,
times, it was very popular, and then Alison depending on who was chosen!
actually had the idea that it would make a to obey the
good book.Wejustfocusedin ontheTudors When the Puritans banned
and researched a bit more on the Reformation Lord of Christmas, people rioted and really
and how that impacted on Christmas because, fought for their festive traditions
Icouldn’tfindmuchonthatandnotmuch Misrule” didn’t they?
hadbeenwrittenaboutit–wethoughtitwas SC: Yes, absolutely and the Puritans actually
a really interesting aspect that needed to be said that it was one of the things that the
covered.So Ifocusedon thatinparticular,aswellasthe poor people actually fight for, because these holy days
PuritanimpactonChristmasinthe17thcentury. werealso days ofrestandtheyweremuchcherished.In BELOW
Holy Innocents’ Day
the book, we have explained the idea of having this break commemorates the massacre of
How did you do research for the book? in mid-winter, when life was tough, and it was twelve days the innocents
AW: We already had some research of course but then we
expanded it, looking at source material right down to Henry
VIII’s accounts and just looking generally at all the books
we could find on Christmas, amalgamating information and
looking at original sources. We wrote our own individual
parts, put them together and worked on it as a whole,
adding in to each other’s research.
There was a whole chapter on Henry VIII and his wives
at Christmas, but it was decided that it was a bit too
specialist, because the book doesn’t just look at how royalty
spent Christmas, but how ordinary people did too.

SC: I had a lot already because I had done the lecture, so
was just basically looking in every history book that I could
find to see what other people had said and written about
it. I was looking at trying to find primary sources and
asking other historians for tips, especially people who had
specialised in the religious aspects of the Tudor period.

Why did you choose to arrange the book around
the twelve days of Christmas?

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