Tudor Christmas

The modern day British Christmas, with its Christmas trees, mincepies, Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, turkey and all the trimmings, Christmas cards and Christmas crackers, has most of its roots in the Victorian era and is light years away from how Christmas was celebrated in Medieval and Tudor times. So how was this important religious festival celebrated in Tudor times?

Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas, was a time of fasting which did not end until Christmas Day. Alison Sim, in “Pleasures and Pastimes in Tudor England”, writes of how Christmas Eve was particularly strict and Tudor people were not allowed to eat eggs, cheese or meat. On Christmas Day, the festive celebrations began early with a mass before dawn and then two further masses later in the day. Church congregations held lighted tapers as the genealogy of Christ was sung and then they went home to enjoy a well-deserved Christmas Day feast.

The Twelve Days of Christmas

The main days for celebration at this time of year were Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and Epiphany (Twelfth Night), although there were further celebrations during the Twelve Days of Christmas for saint’s days. The actual first day of the new year in Tudor times was the 25th March, the Feast of Annunciation, which celebrated the Angel Gabriel telling Mary that she was pregnant with God’s child, but the Tudors also celebrated New Year’s Day on 1st January, which was a throwback to Roman times when January 1st was the start of the calendar year.

During the Twelve Days of Christmas, work for those who worked on the land would stop and spinners would also be banned from spinning. Work would not start again until Plough Monday, the first Monday after Twelfth Night. The Twelve Days of Christmas were a time for communities to come together and celebrate. People would visit their neighbours and friends and enjoy the Christmas “minced pye” which would contain 13 ingredients, to symbolise Jesus and his apostles. The mince pie would be rectangular, or crib shaped, rather than our present day round ones and would be a minced meat pie rather than containing just dried fruit and suet. A cookbook dating back to around 1545 gave the following instructions:-

“To make Pyes – Pyes of mutton or beif must be fyne mynced and ceasoned wyth pepper and salte, and a lyttle saffron to coloure it, suet or marrow a good quantite, a lyttle vyneger, prumes, greate raysins and dates, take thefattest of the broathe of powdred beyfe, and yf you wyll have paest royall, take butter and yolkes of egges and so tempre the flowre to make the paeste”

The mutton in the pie would be to symbolise the shepherds to whom the Angel Gabriel appeared.

Henry VIII was one of the first people to have turkey as part of his Christmas feast, after the bird was introduced into Britain in the 1520s. It soon became a popular meat, but such feasting was only enjoyed by those of high society and not by the masses. The famous Tudor Christmas Pie was a coffin shaped pie crust containing a turkey stuffed with a goose which was stuffed with a chicken which was stuffed with a partridge which was stuffed with a pigeon – phew! If that’s not enough, the pie was often served with hare, game birds and wild fowl. Now you know why Henry became so large!

The Yule Log

This tradition involved a log being brought into the home on Christmas Eve, being decorated with ribbons and then lit and kept burning through the 12 days of Christmas. It is thought that this tradition had its roots in the midwinter rituals of the early Vikings who built huge bonfires for their festival of light. People thought it was lucky to keep some charred remains of the Yule log to light the next year’s Yule log.

The chocolate Yule Logs that we buy at Christmas today are a reminder of this old tradition.

New Year

Alison Sim writes of how the upper classes exchanged gifts on New Year’s Day, a habit that has since died out and which is done on Christmas Day instead. It is not known whether the common people exchanged gifts too, but Tudor poet Thomas Tusser wrote about gift giving, saying:

“At Christmas of Christ many Carols we sing,
and give many gifts in the joy of that King.”

Sim writes of how gift giving was treated very seriously at the Tudor court and that gifts had major political significance. There are still records today which outline the instructions for the reception of gifts at the court of Henry VIII. Sim explains:-

“The King would finish dressing on New Year’s morning, and just as he put his shoes on a fanfare would be sounded and one of the Queen’s servants would come in carrying a gift from her, followed by the servants of other important
courtiers bearing their master’s gifts. The Queen, meanwhile, also received gifts in her own chamber.”

The way that a monarch responded to a person’s gift was very telling of who was in royal favour. In 1532, Henry VIII refused Catherine of Aragon’s gft, while accepting the one from Anne Boleyn, and Elizabeth I famously refused the Duke of Norfolk’s gift of a beautiful jewel in 1571 because he was in the Tower of London for being involved in a revolt against the crown. A monarch was meant to respond to gifts by giving the giver something in return, and it was expected that they would give them something more expensive than the item that had been given to them.

Twelfth Night

As in many Catholic countries today, the most important feast day of the year was Epiphany (6th January) or Twelfth Night, on the eve of Epiphany. Epiphany would be celebrated with a church service and then lots of feasting and entertainment, such as a masque.

Tomb of the Boy Bishop, Salisbury

Boy Bishop

On either the 6th December (the feast of St Nicholas) or the 28th December (Holy Innocents’ Day), Tudor people would often celebrate the Boy Bishop, a tradition which had been going on since the 10th century. This tradition would usually consist of a boy from the choir being chosen to lead the community and do everything apart from leading the mass. Sim writes of how Boy Bishops would lead processions around their communities, collecting money for the church and parish funds, and that the Boy Bishop of St Paul’s Cathedral would lead a procession through the city of London to bless the city.

The tradition of the Boy Bishop went on until 1541, when King Henry VIII banned it, perhaps because he felt that it was mocking Church authorities and himself as head of the Church. Although the tradition made a brief return in Mary I’s Catholic reign, it disappeared again in Elizabeth I’s reign.

The Cathedrals of Hereford and Salisbury actually still continue the tradition of Boy Bishop today.

The Lord of Misrule

The Lord of Misrule was a popular part of Tudor Christmas traditions and involved a commoner playing the “Lord of Misrule” and supervising entertainments, drinking and revelry, and, in general, causing chaos. Sim writes of how the tradition was not solely a Christmas one and how a Lord of Misrule often supervised summer parish festivities, sometimes disrupting church services and causing trouble.

Henry VII loved the tradition and had a Lord of Misrule and an Abbot of Unreason, and it seems that his son, Henry VIII, enjoyed the tradition too because not only did he appoint a Lord of Misrule for his own court, but also for Princess Mary’s household in 1525. During Edward VI’s reign, the Duke of Northumberland is known to have spent a huge amount of money on the tradition and Sim writes of how George Ferrers, Edward’s Lord of Misrule, “had an entire retinue which consisted of everything from an astronomer to a Master of Requests.” Sim gives an example of what the tradition could involve:-

“At the Inner Temple a fox and a cat were let loose in the hall on St Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day) and hunted with a pack of hounds until the two were torn to pieces.”

Although their father and half-brother had been keen on this tradition, Mary I and Elizabeth I were not so keen. Mary did not celebrate it and Elizabeth discouraged it because of her disliking of the public disorder that it caused.

Wassailing

Although many people link the word “wassail” to Victorian times, the word actually comes from Anglo-Saxon and means “your good health” or “be whole”. Wassailing was a popular traditon of the Tudor Christmas season and its focus was the wassail bowl, a wooden bowl containing up to a gallon of hot ale, apples, spices and sugar.

We do not have much information about wassailing in Tudor times but there is one description from the reign of Henry VII which describes a very formal occasion where the steward and treasurer were present, along with their staves of office. The steward would enter the court with the “wassell” and cry out “wassell!” three times and then the people would reply with a song. Although this sounds rather formal, Sim is of the opinion that, in general, wassails were more informal and that it was common for people, even of “high” society, to share a communal wassail bowl of drink. At the bottom of the wassail bowl was a crust of bread which, at the end of the wassail, was presented to the most important person present. Apparently, this is where our present day tradition of “the toast”, at wedding receptions and parties, comes from.

Here is the first stanza of the famous Gloucestershire Wassail which dates back to the Middle ages:-

Wassail, wassail all over the town
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree
With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee

You can see the music and the rest of the wassail at http://sniff.numachi.com/~rickheit/dtrad/pages/tiWASGLOUC;ttWASGLOUC.html

In areas with orchards, people would go out to the orchard and drink to the orchard in the hope of having a good crop of fruit.

Christmas Carols

The word “carol” comes from “caraula”, in Latin. or “carole”, in French, which both mean “a dance with a song”. Carols were an important part of the Tudor Christmas and were a way to tell the Nativity story and to celebrate it. The tradition of singing carols and dancing died out when the Puritans banned such Christmas festivities in the 17th century, but the singing element was revived in the Victorian era.

Plough Monday

Plough Monday was the official end of the Twelve Days of Christmas and was when work on the land began again. Most farmers would take it in turns to use a communal plough which was often kept in the church during the Twelve Days of Christmas. Often, a plough light would be kept burning before the Sacrament or Rood until Plough Monday, when the younger men of the parish would collect the plough, harness themselves to it and drag it around demannding money from people and ploughing up the ground in front of their door if they didn’t give them some money.

In 1538, Henry VIII banned the plough light in churches and ten years later Edward VI banned the Plough Monday festivities completely.

Read more: http://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/resources/tudor-life/tudor-christmas/#ixzz19pa0QuDi

Anne Boleyn's Faith

(theanneboleynfiles.com)

In my last article, I looked at Anne’s role in the Reformation and today I continue the theme of religion by looking at Anne Boleyn’s personal faith and the clues and evidence which give us an idea of what she truly believed in her heart.

One of Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours is on display at Hever Castle and it is in that book that we can see not only Anne’s signature but the inscription “le temps viendra“, “the time will come”, under an illumination of the Last Judgement. Eric Ives, in “The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn”, writes of how these words are an abbreviation of the proverb “a day will come that shall pay for all”, a precis of part of “The Ecclesiaste”, an illuminated manuscript produced for Anne, which says “the judgement of God shall be general and universal where as all things shall be discovered and nothing shall abide hidden, whether it be good or evil.” The fact that Anne wrote this inscription in her own Book of Hours shows that these words had real meaning to Anne and it was something that she was pondering deeply.

But before we look at the clues to Anne’s faith, let’s consider the people who had influence on her when she was growing up:-

Thomas Boleyn

Joanna Denny describes Anne Boleyn’s father, Thomas, as a “firm advocate of the New Religion” and writes of how he used his diplomatic missions to import heretical tracts into England. This was a dangerous thing to do as he could easily have been caught and condemned for heresy. Denny also writes of how he translated one of these heretical publications and dedicated it to Anne, an act which suggests that Anne was interested in these works.

In 1513, at around the age of 12, Thomas Boleyn sent Anne Boleyn to the continent to become one of Archduchess Margaret of Austria’s maids of honour. She stayed on the continent for nearly 9 years so it is important that we look at the people she spent time with, the people who may have influenced the teenage Anne and shaped her mind and her faith.

Archduchess Margaret of Austria

The Court of Margaret of Austria

The Habsburg court of Margaret of Austria at Mechelen in Brabant, in the Lowlands, was a sophisticated Renaissance court. Here, Anne Boleyn learned a multitude of skills and vast knowledge: the language of French, the tradition of courtly love, music, dance and culture. Eric Ives writes of how Flanders and its adjacent lands had, for a century, been the cultural heart of Europe, it must have been culture overload for Anne’s young mind! It is likely that Anne’s love of illuminated manuscripts came from her time with Margaret, who had a huge collection.
A Move to France

It is not known exactly when Anne Boleyn left the Lowlands for France. Her father, Thomas Boleyn, wrote to Margaret of Austria in 1514 asking for Anne to be released to go to France as a member of Mary Tudor’s entourage for her marriage to Louis XII of France, but a list in the French archives makes no mention of Anne in this group, only of her sister, Mary. Ives wonders if there was some delay with Thomas Boleyn’s message, or Margaret of Austria delayed sending Anne, and Anne was unable to get back to England in time to escort Mary Tudor from England to France and so met the group in Paris for Mary’s coronation on the 5th November 1514. What we do know is that in 1515 Anne Boleyn joined the household of Queen Claude, daughter of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, and wife of Francis I who became King on the death of Claude’s father.

Queen Claude of France (1499-1524) with her daughters

Queen Claude

Anne Boleyn was a member of Claude’s household for nearly seven years and although some historians like to make out that her time at the French court corrupted Anne they do not take into account the fact that Claude’s court was not as public as her husband’s and was actually sophisticated, cultural and chaste. Claude actually had strict moral codes for her household and Anne would have been expected to follow them and remain chaste and virtuous. It is at Claude’s Renaissance court that Anne would have had her mind further opened, not just to culture but to religion.

Eric Ives writes of how Anne may have met Renaissance giants like Leonardo da Vinci and how she may well have accompanied Claude and Louise of Savoy on their ceremonial journey to welcome Claude’s husband, the King, back from his victory at Marignano. This journey also took them to Lyons where they undertook a pilgrimage to Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, the location of the supposed tomb of Mary Magdalene – did Anne visit this tomb? Perhaps so, but we have no idea what Anne thought of this pilgrimage.

Renée, Duchess of Ferrara, as a girl

Renée of France

Renée of France was Queen Claude’s younger sister and we know from the way that she spoke affectionately of Anne Boleyn to Nicholas Throckmorton in the 1560s that she had great respect for Anne. She knew Anne through her sister Claude but also because Anne was her companion for a while. The interesting thing about Renée is that during her time in Ferrara (she was married to the Duke of Ferrara) she was arrested as a heretic. She was in regular correspondence with Protestants abroad and had also been known to have taken the Eucharist in a Protestant manner. The introduction of a special court of Inquisition at Ferrara led to many Protestants being executed but Renée escaped from any serious punishment when she recanted and received the Eucharist at mass.

The death of Renée’s husband allowed her to return to France in late 1559 and following the death of her great nephew, Francis II, she established Protestant worship at her estate at Morntargis and supported Protestants in the area by turning her castle into a refuge.
Marguerite d’Angoulême

Marguerite of Angoulême was Queen Consort of Navarre and sister-in-law to Claude of France, being the sister of Francis I. She was a famous Renaissance figure and is known for her patronage of the arts, her strong religious views and her religious poem “Le Miroir l’âme pécheresse” (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul), the same poem which Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, translated as a gift for her stepmother, Catherine Parr. This poem is a mystical poem which combines evangelical protestant ideas with Marguerite’s idea of her relationship with God as a familial one, God as her brother, father or lover.

Marguerite d'Angoulême (Margaret of Navarre)

It is not known exactly what Anne’s relationship with Marguerite was. Marguerite was said to be close to Claude and Renée, who Anne served, and some even believe that Anne served Marguerite herself. What is clear is that Anne knew Marguerite intimately enough to write in 1535 “that her greatest wish, next to having a son, was to see you again” (quoted in Ives P33) and Ives also writes that in 1534 Anne had written to Marguerite about the 1532 meeting between Henry and Francis I, saying that although there had been “everything proceeding between both kings to the queen’s grace’s singular comfort, there was no one thing which her grace so much desired…as the want of the said queen of Navarre’s company, with whom to have conference, for the more causes than were meet to be expressed, her grace is most desirous.” This sounds like more than polite flattery, it sounds like Anne really missed Marguerite’s company. Anne also wrote to Marguerite in 1534 confiding that she was pregnant and so wanted to postpone a meeting between Henry and Francis until around April 1535.

Could Marguerite have influenced Anne’s faith? Possibly. What is clear is that Anne Boleyn spent her formative years, the years where we question what we believe in, surrounded by what Ives terms as “aristocratic women seeking spiritual fulfilment” and that must have had some effect on her, her outlook and her faith.
Anne Boleyn’s Personal Faith

So, here we have a woman who lived for many years in Renaissance Europe with women searching for spiritual fulfilment and who then moved back to England where, some would suggest, that she was the catalyst of the English Reformation, but what was her personal faith?
Le Temps Viendra

As I said earlier, Anne inscribed the phrase “le temps viendra“, “the time will come”,in her personal Book of Hours, along with an astrolabe and her signature. The phrase “the time will come” suggests that Anne is looking to the future and perhaps to a future of reformation and new ideas. The astrolabe, or armillary sphere, was a popular Renaissance symbol and can be seen in Renaissance paintings, such as Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”, and was used to symbolise time, wisdom, cultural excellence and knowledge. It is hard to understand what exactly Anne Boleyn meant by this inscription but it suggests that she was passionate about new ideas and knowledge, particularly in religion, seeing as she wrote it in her Book of Hours.

Although G W Bernard sees Anne’s faith as more political than personal and Ives writes:-

“Self-interest and ambition – which Anne had in plenty – each pointed to reform as the cause that would serve her best”

Ives also points out that “Anne’s evident interest in French reform cannot be dismissed as a posture taken up for the occasion.”

It seems that Anne’s passion for reform was real, not just a convenient, political move.
George Boleyn

We also have to consider another influence on Anne, that of her brother, George Boleyn, a man who was a zealous reformist and who “spoke the language of Zion” (Ives p278) at his execution on the 17th May 1536. Like his father, George used his diplomatic missions to France, as ambassador, to smuggle back to England reformist literature and he shared this literature with one of his best friends, his sister Anne.

How do we know this?

Because of the collection of French evangelical books which were found amongst George and Anne’s belongings when their possessions were seized after their executions and also because George presented Anne with manuscripts he’d transcribed from the works by Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples (“Les Epistres et Evangiles” and “L’Ecclesiaste”), dedicating them to her and signing them her “moost lovyng and frynddely brother”. If Anne had not been interested in such works then George would not have spent time working on these manuscripts and translating the commentary which was full of Lutheran ideology, such as having a living faith in Christ, rather than relying on ritual, and the idea of justification by faith alone.

Anne and George were bound by more than blood, they were also bound by their shared faith and ideology.
A True Faith

Anne Boleyn may have been ambitious but, as Ives says, “why should we not allow her genuine religious experience?”, why do we have to explain away her faith by blaming her actions on politics?

Yes, she had a lively court and a sexual magnetism; yes, she enjoyed luxuries and the good life, but does that mean that her faith was not true? No. Eric Ives writes:-

“It is, indeed, hard to deny Anne a personal faith. Apart from the Bible in which, significantly, we know she had an interest in Paul’s epistles, the works she read and collected are certainly redolent of a Christianity of commitment and not of routine observance.”

In the words of George Boleyn’s translation of Lefevre’s “Ecclesiaste”:-

“There is nothing better than by true faith to take Jesuchrist of our side for pledge, mediator, advocate and intercessor. For who that believeth in him and doth come with him to this judgment, shall not be confused” (quoted in Ives p280)

and, as Ives points out:-

“If this was Anne Boleyn’s experience of faith, then she was evangelical by conviction and not just policy.”

But what about her actions in the Tower, the way that she made an oath on the bread and wine and spent her last night praying before it?

This does not mean that Anne was a conservative Catholic deep down, nor does the sermon in which her almoner, John Skip, defended the value of the ceremonies and rituals of the church. The fact that Anne did not completely reject established religion and the rituals associated with it, does not mean that Anne’s reformist faith was not a true faith. As Ives explains, the writings that Anne read were not necessarily challenging the belief in the bodily presence of Christ in the consecrated host, they were challenging “the late medieval focus on the miraculous mechanism of the mass rather than its significance” and Skip’s famous sermon defending church rituals was not defending their sacred power but defending them as aids to memory:-

“holy water…to put us in remembrance that our sins be washed away by the sprinkling and shedding of Christ’s blood; holy bread [to remind us] that all we that have professed Christ’s faith be one body mystical and ought to be one in mind in spirit in Christ our head…”

In my last post, I also mentioned how G W Bernard uses Anne’s refusal of Tristram Revell’s translation of “Farrago Rerum Theologicarum” as evidence of her conservative ideology but Ives argues that:-

“Her attitude would be characteristic of all shades of English evangelical reform for at least a decade more: real spiritual experience, yes; the priority of faith, yes; access to the Bible, yes; reform of abuses and superstition, yes; but heretical views on the miracle of the altar, no.”

Anne was reformist but did not go as far as some on the continent, but she was not a closet conservative.
The Ambassadors – A Clue to Anne’s Lutheran Leanings?

In his biography of Anne Boleyn, “The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn”, Eric Ives ponders if Anne Boleyn actually commissioned Hans Holbein’s famous painting “The Ambassadors”. Anne was a patron of Holbein and had already commissioned “Mount Parnassus” and the fact that “The Ambassadors” must have been painted during the weeks when Anne was preparing for her coronation, combined with the fact that the “shepherd’s” or pillar dial in the painting shows the date of the 11th April, the exact date when the royal court was informed that Anne was queen, does imply that Anne commissioned this work too.

The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein

Like many of Holbein’s works, this painting of ambassadors Jean de Dinteville (a secular landowner) and Georges de Selve (a bishop) is rich in symbolism. As well as objects symbolising the seven liberal arts that were popular at the time – grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy – the painting also includes religious symbols, here are a few of them:-

* The lute with the broken string – a symbol of discord
* A case of flutes with one instrument missing – more discord
* A pair of dividers and an arithmetic book open at a page on division – more discord and division.
* A hymnal open to show the “Veni Creator Spiritus” (“Come Creator Spirit”) and the Ten Commandments – Ives points out that although these were “basic anthems of the Latin Church, Holbein shows them in a vernacular Lutheran version.
* Crucifix and set square – According to Ives, these symbols, along with the Lutheran vernacular and texts, “together express the conviction of evangelicals that the way to unity in the Church was a response to Christ by the Holy Spirit, leading to a life of everyday obedience to the commandments.

If Anne was indeed involved in commissioning this painting, it shows her interest in Lutheran ideology and her recognition of the religious divisions that were around her and which lay in the future.
Conclusion

It is impossible for us to know what was in Anne’s heart, but I think the evidence points towards her having a true faith rather than her using religion for political motives. The Catholic Church at the time was full of corruption, such as the sale of indulgences, and what is unclear is whether Anne was seeking to get rid of this corruption, while remaining in the Catholic Church, or whether her views were even more radical.