Those right royal Christmas parties were night after night of raucous revels. Once the religious significance of Christmas had been duly put paid to, it was time for the big year-end blowout!
First there was the:
BRINGING IN THE YULE LOG AND THE HOLY BOUGH
On Christmas Eve, the large central trunk of a great tree was dragged into the great hall and placed into one of its cavernous fireplaces. Medieval and Tudor fireplaces were often large enough for a man to stand up in, so it was no problem to haul in a good-sized chunk of tree.
Everyone helped with the job by pulling on the ropes, even children, and if he were young and athletic enough, perhaps the king himself might join in the fun. When the log was finally settled in, it burned for the entire twelve days of Christmas.
Many superstitions surrounded the Yule log. It had to be ignited the first time a flame was put to it or bad luck would surely follow; it had to be lit with a stick saved from the fire from the year before or the house would burn down; and unless charcoal from the great fire was kept under the family beds for the following year, the house might be struck by lightning.
Mistletoe, considered sacred by the British Druids, was believed to have many miraculous powers. Among the Romans, it was symbol of peace, and, it was said that when enemies met under it, they discarded their arms and declared a truce. From this comes our custom of kissing under the mistletoe. England was the first country to use it during the Christmas season.
In England there a custom began in the 15th century to create a hoop, woven from ash, willow or hazel, and bedecked with mistletoe. In the middle was placed a small effigy of the Christ Child or the Holy Family, and the whole hung up over the threshold of the house. Such items were called Sacramentals and were blessed by a priest; in the case of the royals, more likely a bishop. Anyone who called at the house during the Christmas season showed that they brought only goodwill with them by a kiss of peace under this Holy Bough.
During Cromwell‘s time, the holy figures were removed for fear of breaking the strict Puritanical rules and facing fines or worse. A bunch of evergreens were hung up in memory of the old Holy Bough. By the time the Victorians began acknowledging old customs again, the custom of the Holy Bough degenerated into a kiss under the mistletoe. The bough became known as first the Holly Bough, then the Kissing Bough.
The word "carol" is derived from the old French word caroller, which means dancing around in a circle. It was derived from the Latin choraula, which in turn was derived from the Greek choraules.
The earliest Christmas music compositions are regarded as chants and hymns. The original carols referred to a circle dance which did not have any singing. As the Catholic Church struggled against pagan customs, the singing of carols was barred from sacred services. However, outside the Church, Nativity carols were written and became popular. Nearly all were simple folk songs created by people from the countryside.
Saint Francis of Assisi is credited with bringing carols into the formal worship of the Church during a Christmas Midnight Mass in a cave in Greccio, in the province of Umbria, Italy, in 1223. It's said that the music sung that night was more akin to what we know as carols than to hymns. Carols enjoyed further development and popularity when they were used in the mystery plays of the Middle Ages.
Wandering minstrels traveled from hamlet to castle, performing carols in the distant past. In later years, villages had their own bands of waits. Waits were originally watchmen who patrolled the streets and byways of the old walled cities keeping guard against fire and singing out the hours of the night. During the holiday season, they would include some carols for the people along the way, although some folks complained that they would rather get a good nights sleep than have somebody singing under their window. Eventually the term was used to describe groups of musicians who sang and played for various civic events during the Christmas season.
When Johann Gutenberg started his printing press rolling in 1454, copies of carols could be distributed freely. The singing of Christmas carols was widely discouraged during the Renaissance as various religious sects struggled for supremacy. Thus, many of the Christmas carols that we know today were composed fairly recently.
Every great hall worth its salt had a minstrels' gallery tucked up in the rafters. This was where the royal musicians (and sometimes exceptional foreign ones) assembled to play the background music at the royal banquets. We tend to think of great halls as enormous settings for court gatherings, but in actuality, even in castles and palaces, rooms were much smaller back then, so a Christmas feast might see more than a hundred nobles crammed into a venue perhaps the size of a modern *great room*. The one at Hampton Court Palace only measures 12' x 30', so one can imagine the degree of crowded bodies jostling for space on benches pulled up to trestle tables. The dais was reserved for the royals, of course, and so up in the gallery the minstrels went.
While some musical instruments have survived in the same form used in medieval or Tudor times, others can only be seen nowadays at Renaissance Faires and some of the names have changed. Trombones used to be known as sackbuts. Cornets were similar to recorders, only larger and thus more difficult. Shawms were another large wind instrument using a reed, looking like the forerunner to a clarinet (only without all those keys). Viols were bigger than a modern violin and perched in the musician's lap to be played. So were smaller stringed instruments like the trapezoidal psaltery and pear-shaped rebec.
There were other string instruments like the harp, lute, citole (guitar), and mandolin; keyboards such as the virginals (forerunner of the harpsichord and spinet); mechanical devices like the hurdy-gurdy; and different sizes of drums, blocks, triangles, tambourines, and cymbals (sometimes small and worn on fingertips) to add percussion.
The Tudors in particular amongst the royals were a musical lot. This meant if Henry VIII had composed a new tune (though Greensleeves is often credited as his work, it's never been definitively proven) such as his Green Groweth the Holly, written for the Christmas season, he would naturally want to be a show off and play it for the courtiers on his lute, who would naturally applaud and cheer his efforts. Henry might even select choristers to sing his lyrics, or he might have them printed and passed out to demand everyone sing along. He was like that. Henry was so into music that when he died he left quite the collection of personal instruments, not just several of his favorite lutes, but also Welsh and Irish harps, five sets of bagpipes, and 78 (count 'em) recorders.
Only one of Henry's queens, Anne Boleyn, shared his love of music, and she also enjoyed displaying her prowess on the lute. Both Mary I and Elizabeth I were very proficient with the virginals, though neither wrote music as their father did. Back then pieces weren't specifically written for any particular instrument, so they could be played on any of them.
The minstrels would continue playing as the party went on, as there was certain to be dancing eventually. Henry was a particular show-off in this area as well, having stolen the show as a brash lad of eleven at his late brother Arthur's wedding celebration (in case you haven't kept up with the begats, Henry would later marry Catherine of Aragon, Arthur's widow). English country dances were rather simple in nature, sort of like square dancing, only not so twangy. No one really had partners, as they danced in sets and often threaded around briefly swinging with every dancer of the opposite sex. Henry could supposedly jig like nobody's business, and there was a sprightly, skipping dance called the galliard that was popular at the Tudor court. Most dances involved a bit of swinging, jigging, jumping, leaping (the song wasn't lying about those ten lords), and skipping steps.
The pavane was a slow, stately promenade with one's partner, introduced to the English court by Catherine of Aragon. Pavon, in Spanish, meant peacock, so it was a fitting title for a processional in which everyone preened in their best garments to be seen by everyone else.
Filmé , avec un appareil photo , aux Fêtes Historiques de Vannes le 13 Juillet 2009 , le Ballet Légendaire du Pays d'Iroise dans une Pavane d' Ecosse suivi d'une Gaillarde.....zut alors, say what? Scots version of the pavane & galliard.
By the time Henry was on his fifth wife, things Italian were becoming all the rage and since Catherine Howard loved to dance (sometimes partnered with Henry's ex, Anne of Cleves), the doting king acquired an Italian dance master to instruct the court in these new steps of the Renaissance period. They were so intricate that it became the fashion for dance manuals to be written up by the court's dancing masters, printed, bound, and distributed to the courtiers so that they could learn what would be expected of them when it came time for the dancing after a royal feast!
The volta was an Italian dance that caused a great flurry at the English court, as it involved coupling off and remaining with the same partner throughout. The male had to grasp the female about the waist and lift her into the air at some points! Obviously the courtiers had to literally keep on their toes and remain fit if they wanted to participate in this seductive, flirtatious dance with a young maid in waiting.
The Volta. Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley dance a Volta.
They did not dance like this, amusing as tis :-D
This is the dance scene of A Knight's Tale starring Heath Ledger, Shannyn Sossamon
A masque was an entertainment in which disguised (wearing masks, hence the name) participants offered gifts to their host and then joined together for a ceremonial dance. Henry VIII, especially in the early years of his reign, was a great one for "disguisings", and enthusiastically participated in these productions put together by the Master of the Revels.
A typical masque consisted of a band of costumed and masked persons of the same sex who, accompanied by torchbearers, arrived at a social gathering to dance and converse with the guests. The masque could be simply a procession of such persons introduced by a presenter, or it could be an elaborately staged show in which a brief lyrical drama heralded the appearance of masquers, who, having descended from their pageant to perform figured dances, reveled with the guests until summoned back into their pageant by farewell speeches and song.
The theme of the drama presented during a masque was usually mythological, allegorical, or symbolic. At Christmas time, it was sure to include a Nativity scene, a glittering star of Bethlehem, and other elements associated with the religious aspect of the lengthy season.
Gorgeous costumes, spectacular scenery with elaborate machinery to move it around on the stage, and rich versification were hallmarks of the English masque. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the masque provided a vehicle for compliments paid to the queen at her palace and during her summer tours throughout England. It was both an honor and financially ruinious to have the queen select one's estate as a stop on her progress, for she expected to be wined, dined, and fabulously entertained.
Under the Stuarts the masque reached its zenith when Ben Jonson became court poet. He and the scene designer Inigo Jones produced the first of many excellent masques, which they continued to collaborate on until 1634. Jonson invented the antimasque (also known as the false masque or the antic masque) and produced the first in 1609. It took place before the main masque and concentrated on grotesque elements, providing a direct contrast to the elegance of the masque that followed. In later years the masque developed into opera, and the antimasque became primarily a farce or pantomime. After Jonson's retirement, masques lost their literary value and became mainly vehicles for spectacle and pageantry.
Masque entertainments in England ceased with the beginning of the English Civil Wars, and later revivals never equaled the originals.
BABY, 'TIS COLD OUTSIDE
Cold weather didn't stop the royals from haivng outdoor fun at Christmas time. Since the celebrations went on for twelve days and nights, they had to find more things to fill the hours. In addition to hunting parties, often tournaments would be organized, with the ladies seated on bleachers under a billowing silk pavilion, hot bricks on which to rest their feet and charcoal braziers at the ready to keep them warm as they cheered on the jousting gentlemen.
If it was a white Christmas, sleigh rides were in order, bells jingling on the horses' harnesses as the courtiers and ladies went for rides about the castle grounds. Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII even ventured out on the frozen Thames in their sleigh (it was her last Christmas, alas, because by May she would be Queen Anne Lackhead). Their daughter Elizabeth also experienced the river freezing solid during her reign. She had archery butts set up upon the ice and would not only order her courtiers out to play, but would practice her own skills with the Welsh longbow.
The 1600s had a "mini Ice Age" and the Thames froze several times, encouraging enterprising folk to set up Frost Fairs on the ice. Whole towns would appear on the ice. James II, then the Duke of York, even had a tavern set up bearing his name! Charles II caught cold at the fifth or sixth Frost Fair of his reign and before you knew it, he'd cocked up his toes. He and the ferrymen, who had no work when there was no water, were the only unhappy ones that year.
TWELFTH NIGHT PEA AND BEAN
The twelfth night of the twelve days of Christmas was the official end of the winter holiday season and one of the traditional days for taking down the Christmas decorations. This was also a traditional day for wassailing apple trees (see below).
The ancient Roman tradition of choosing the master of the Saturnalian revels by baking a good luck bean inside a cake was transferred to Twelfth Night. The diner who found the bean in his or her cake becomes king or queen of Twelfth Night.
or King and Queen
Now, now the mirth comes
With the cake full of plums,
Where Bean’s the King of the sport here;
Beside we must know
The Pea also
Must revel, as Queen, in the Court here.
Begin then to choose,
(This night as ye use)
Who shall for the present delight here.
Be a King by the lot
And who shall not
Be Twelfth-day Queen for the night here.
Which known, let us make
Joy-sops with the cake;
And let not a man then be seen here,
Who unurg’d will not drink
To the base from the brink
A health to the King and the Queen here.
Next crown the bowl full
With gentle lambs-wool;
Add sugar, nutmeg and ginger,
With store of ale too;
And thus ye must do
To make the wassail a swinger.
Give then to the King
And Queen wassailing;
And though with ale ye be wet here;
Yet part ye from hence,
As free from offence
As when ye innocent met here.
~poem by Robert Herrick
In England, the Twelfth Night cake is usually a rich, dense fruitcake which contains both a bean and pea. The man who finds the bean is the king, the woman who finds the pea is the queen. But if a woman finds the bean, she can choose the king, while the man who finds the pea can choose the queen. The "royal" pair then direct the rest of the company in merriment.
Just like any modern party, in the castles and palaces of yore the liquor flowed freely and goblets were never empty of punches, wine, ale, beer, mead, even Irish or Scots whisky. The most important drink of the Christmas season was the Wassail Bowl.
Wassail is an old English greeting, meaning "Be in good health!". The king would proclaim, "Wassail!" to which all reply, "Drink hail!" Then the Wassail Bowl would be passed with a kiss to the next person and continued until all drank from it. Likely it would have to be refilled at large court festivals.
Wassail would be associated with caroling, too, in later years. Men would carry a large vessel from house to house. They would sing, get the vessel filled, drink up, and go on to the next house to repeat. It was a sign of good luck to have them visit.
There is also a tradition of blessing the crops, especially the apple trees. People gathered by the trees to celebrate and poured some wassail as a blessing into the roots of the trees.
Old recipes call for cakes, apples, and sugar to be placed in a bowl. Then it was filled with warm ale. The ale was drunk and the rest was eaten when the ale was gone. Mmmm, ale-soaked cakes. Not.
A more modern recipe for a wassail bowl that does not include mushy ale cakes would be:
2 quarts apple cider, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 1/3 cups lemon juice, 6 cinnamon sticks, 12 whole cloves, 12 whole allspice, 1-1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, 2 fifths dry sherry
Combine juices, sugar and spices in pot. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer 20 minutes. Remove spices and add sherry. Heat until just below boiling. Fill a punch bowl with boiling water. Let stand one minute, then empty. Fill punch bowl with spiced wine. Garnish wassail bowl with orange or lemon slices, studded with cloves.
In case you missed it:
And this isn't Xmas-y, but it's historically good fun, so go see and strain your brain before the answers get posted: