Dr Fiona McCall is a lecturer in early modern history, teaching units on the British Civil Wars, and Crime, Sin and Punishment in early modern Britain, amongst others. Her current research project investigates traditionalist resistance to puritan values in English parish churches during the 1640s and 1650s, and in this blog she discusses how Christmas was banned during this period.
Christmas was officially banned during the late 1640s and 1650s along with the rest of the church calendar. But the interdict was widely ignored. Trawling through various counties’ quarter sessions depositions for the period, I have found frequent references to Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and various saints days, the witnesses (even those testifying against suspected royalists) usually oblivious to the fact that these festivals are no longer supposed to be celebrated. At Bristol the Mayoral court was even postponed from December to January ‘because the feast of Christmas comes betweene’.[1] Some were clearly mindful that Christmas was a sensitive issue: a 1651 Cheshire case refers to the ‘tyme Commonly called Christmas’, while a 1655 Northern Circuit assize deposition refers to the twelfth day after Christmas ‘so commonly Called’ [2] The term ‘Christide’ was frequently preferred instead, but not by everyone: one Devonshire witness timed the events he reported to ‘the Feast of the birth of our Lord god last past’. [3]
Churches were supposed to be closed on Christmas Day and shops open. That was the theory, anyway. At Norwich in 1647, the Mayor of Norwich apparently gave notice that Christmas Day was to be observed, the market kept the day before instead, and even invited the ejected Bishop of Norwich, Joseph Hall, to preach in the Cathedral. [4] The authorities in Canterbury attempted a harder line. On the 22 December 1647, the town crier there proclaimed that a market was to be kept on Christmas day. This ‘occasioned great discontent among the people’ causing them to ‘rise in a rebellious way’, throwing shopkeepers’ ware ‘up and down’ until they shut up shop, and knocking down the mayor when he attempted to quell the ‘tumult’ with a cudgel. [5] ‘That which we so much desired that day was but a Sermon’, protested Canterbury Prebendary Edward Aldey, ‘which any other day of the weeke was tollerable by the orders and practise of the two Houses and all their adherents, but that day (because it was Christ’s birth day). [6] Elsewhere in Kent, parishioners crowded round the puritan minister Richard Culmer’s reading desk in protest at the lack of a Christmas day service, and assaulted him in the churchyard. [7] Gloucestershire minister Mr Tray, unpopular on account of his opposition to the festival, became the target of malicious rumours. Stories were spread that he had sabotaged the Christmas pies of his parishioners, baking in the communal oven, by sending his own unconventional confection to be baked alongside them. Lines of verse were placed under Tray’s cushion in the pulpit:
Parson tray, on Christmas Day
To help on reformation
Instead of the word did bake a t[urd]
And poyson’d his congregation [8]