Page 56 - All About History - Issue 72-18

Festive fun
ABOVE
Frontspiece to The Vindication
of Christmas, created by
Royalist poet John Taylor in
1652, in reaction to the Puritan
clampdown on Christmas
BELOW
The banning of Christmas is
mistakenly blamed on Oliver
Cromwell
56
of enjoyment and better food, a brief respite and a special
time. There were riots and it couldn’t be extinguished no
matter how much the Puritans tried.
The changes [to Christmas] happen not in the reign of
King Henry VIII but in the reign of King Edward VI and
I’ve outlined them, which is essentially the removal of the
angels and the nativity, all because they didn’t like images
at a time when they were being white-washed and stained
glasses being broken.
In Edward’s reign, people are going to
notice the difference in church but on the
secular side the celebrations continue as “What
normal, with the Lord of Misrule, the feasting
and the carnival atmosphere. Edward liked wasn’t
all that, he liked pageants and carnivals, so
he wouldn’t be interested in attacking the eaten at
secular side of Christmas – but the Puritans
hated that, so they were trying to remove the table
everything. The other thing is that the
Puritans didn’t just want to clamp down was passed
on the drinking and the merrymaking, it to those
was also because they came to associate
Christmas with the Royalist course. If you
think about it, they think that Christmas is a who were
Catholic thing and the Royalists, you know,
being Anglican, they were quite close to waiting at
the Catholic church and worlds away from
Puritanism – so that’s why they did it. the gates”
It is a common misconception that
Cromwell was to blame for banning Christmas.
SC: I get very frustrated with the way people blame Oliver
Cromwell. People have this idea that Cromwell single-
handedly banned Christmas but there were a lot of other
major players in this. It was the elected parliament who
started the initiative against Christmas from 1644, but
Cromwell wasn’t Lord Protector until 1653 – although after
he became Lord Protector, he would conduct business on
Christmas Day and he certainly agreed with the ban.
As you discuss in A Tudor Christmas, the festive
season was a time when grand homes would
open their doors to the poor.
AW: Yes, it was the charity that you would have to dispense
in the name of Christ because you had to be seen to be
practising Christian charity. The court was always giving
alms to beggars and what wasn’t eaten at the table was
passed to those who were literally waiting at the gates.
Great houses did this as well, but they particularly did
it at Christmas and if you turned up, you might even be
invited to eat in the hall - depending on how well you
were dressed, I am sure! It was not just about charity
though because it was a conspicuous display.
SC: We tend to think that the Victorians started that, the
idea of charity, but it had been going on for centuries
before. It was a time to think about people who were less
well off, so it was incumbent on the wealthy to provide
for them, especially in terms of food, feasting and to some
extent, in terms in gifts – although gifts were for New Year
and not for Christmas.
What did you discover about Christmas in the
Tudor period that surprised you?
AW: There were quite a lot of things that surprised me. I
didn’t realise turkey had been discovered and appeared so
early in the period, with the first turkeys sold at Bristol in
1526. They are called turkey from the mistaken belief that
they came from Turkey, when they actually came from the
New World. One thing that really surprised me was that
on Holy Innocents’ Day, commemorating the massacre of
the innocents by King Herod, children were
beaten in their beds in the morning – I’m
sure it must have been symbolic.
However, the rest of the day the children
were allowed a hell of a lot of licence and
they could even play in church. Everyday
life was gruelling, and the twelve days of
Christmas must have been an oasis for them,
particularly as it was the middle of winter.
SC: I knew about the 12 days of Christmas
and I could visualise it at court, but I don’t
think that I fully realised that it was twelve
days for everybody. I think it was in the
9th century when it was said that no free
man could be compelled to work during
those twelve days. I didn’t realise this had
been decreed so early on and I find that so
interesting, at a time when people worked so
hard and life was so tough in comparison to
today, that they were given this holiday.
If you think about it, it wasn’t until
probably in the late 20th century that we started taking off
time between Christmas and New Year, whereas nowadays
a lot of people take leave and we celebrate for a lot longer. It
is only now, in recent times, that we are kind of going back
to the twelve days – where for many centuries, certainly in
the Georgian and Victorian periods, they got that one day,