CAMBRIDGE CHRISTMAS OF YORE — THE CAMBRIDGE CRITIQUE

Christmas Cambridge lasted far longer than the twelve days of the song. It was a long , merry and very well provisioned time of the year. Even today in Catholic countries, Christmas lasts until Candlemas on 2nd February - and so it was here. They really got going with the feast - and ready for the fast soon on the Church horizon, of Lent.

Archaeologist, writer and local historian Alison Taylor herself celebrates Christmas for as long as she can today, but makes it clear ‘Christmas was a long and well observed feast for hundreds of years. It took Oliver Cromwell to clamp down on the merriment, which he did in typical iron- fisted style. Puritans banned the Feast and it was illegal NOT to work on Christmas Day. Even going to Church that day was banned.”

It got worse

‘Christmas Day became workday, and anyone found at Church on Christmas Day would be fined or even imprisoned. In Presbyterian Scotland Christmas was crushed and even the day itself only became a holiday in 1882.

Two learned historians Alison Weir and Siobhan Clarke and their book ‘A Tudor Christmas’ have scotched the theory that Christmas is a modern dream: Christmas is old, very old indeed. Almost all of our traditions stem from our deep past , when Britain was a wooded agrarian society with close connections to nature and the change of the seasons, the Winter Solstice the centre of Pagan rites , Viking customs and even Roman Saturnalia appear in the season today .

King Alfred the Great made Christmas official in the ninth century. He commanded there should be a holiday on Christmas day and twelve days after that. No one was expected to work or could be made to in that time – up until 6th , the Epiphany when the three kings or wise men arrived ( it was calculated it would have taken them 12 days to get from ‘the East’) ‘ having seen the star ‘ at the birth of Jesus on 25th December. Epiphany was the climax of the feast and Twelfth Night the riotous all night rollicking run up to it the night before. King Henry V111 and his Queen Jane went to Mass on Twelfth Night and at 11 p.m. sat down to a great feast that lasted the entire night- breaking up at dawn

Medieval merriment went on for over six wee

No need to dream of a white Christmas it was a reality. -Winter, in the two hundred years beginning with Tudor times was very harsh – all of Britain endured a mini-ice age and rivers, including the Thames froze solid enough for fairs and festivals. For that epic feast in 1519, Henry and Jane spurred their horses across the Thames to reach the lighted loveliness of a lavishly decorated Greenwich Palace. By the way turkeys were a thing back then. The first six of them arrived in Bristol from the New World in 1526 and sold for 2d each.

Christmas itself got longer and stronger. It was already quite a stretch. It began it on Martinmas, the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, on 11th November, with forty days pre-Xmas preparation

On Christmas Eve, folk brought greenery into the house, holly ivy and the ancient Druid misteltoe, a custom recorded by the Roman historian Pliny as a plant sacred to the Druids. Under a branch enemies of all kinds kissed and made up, harvested by white clad priests with a golden sickle The idea of the house full of greenery itself is thousands of years old, ( bay branches and trees were a protection against spirits) and possibly the Yule log is the oldest. Our ancestors dragged it in from the forest -Yule logs fell gradually out of favour as fireplaces got smaller and rooms more intimate. A grand Yule log needs a communal dining hall.Some immense Yule logs would burn all winter long in the vast grates of large houses.

Our helpful historians tell us Christmas was magical for all. Wealthy people ordered in French wine in vast quantities and further down the social scale, liked the imported Flemish beers – no change there then from today?

“Above everything else it was a religious festival. It began with the eve of Christmas Day when the church bells rang out to invite the people to Midnight Mass. They found the sanctuary lit up with tapers and the altar with many candles. . Voices sang ‘Adeste Fideles’ and Christmas came in with its mystery and wonder’. Followed by feasting and ‘merriment.’ After the Reformation during the persecution of the old religion, Adeste Fideles ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ was the code for London Catholics to gather in their covert church in Soho for the Midnight Mass.

Intriguingly, Father Christmas was an important figure down the centuries. That he was an invention designed to sell Coca Cola is very misleading – the shrink wrapped pint sized elfin Santa was an American take on the often gigantic original. The Saxons welcomed King Winter around their hearth and the Norse Vikings celebrated the god Woden - he rode down to the earth on his eight legged horse,( and doubtless a sleigh) left presents and in turn was always given offerings of bread and beer after everyone had disappeared to bed. The Christian saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra in the 6th century heard of of local girls whose family had been bankrupted and were about to be sold into prostitution As he passed by their house he saw stockings hung on the line to dry and popped money into each one. Honour and poverty solved in one secret gesture. Not really a story for the children but near the kindly Father Christmas of today - it certainly isn’t an imp with designs on your Coca Cola intake.

In the popular Mystery plays put on at Christmas, there was a character called Father Christmas. So many of these were destroyed at the time of the Reformation. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night saw it all coming when he mocked the Puritan Malvolio whose lugubrious kill joy presence comes to grief by the end of the revels. Ben Jonson’s Christmas his Masque also featured a Puritan who spends the play trying to close down all the songs, plays and feasting. Along with so much of Christmas its exuberance ,reverence and roistering the reformers hated. In the bitter end Christmas and all its fun and frolics was banned by law by Parliament Even though Christmas was re-instated in England by the returning Monarch Charles II, it never recovered its fun irreverent spirit. The Victorians straightened out carols like the ancient Good King Wenceslas but the epic scale of festivity for all was hard to revive.

So whatever comes or goes from government edict, let’s make the very most of Christmas just as our ancestors did.

A Tudor Christmas by Alison Weir and Siobhan Clarke.

With learned commentary from Alison Taylor