“FAREWELL, Advent, Christmas is come! Farewell from us both all and some!” proclaims this whimsical English 15th-century carol about Advent, a season of austerity roughly analogous to Lent.
A joyous season Christmastide certainly was, and history provides a vivid portrait of the fervour and revelry, as well as the hearty blend of rite and folk custom, with which Christmas has been celebrated in our cathedrals.
The Old English poem Menologium pronounces clearly how the celebratory Christmas period was closely attuned to the cycle of the seasons: “Christ was born, glory of kings, at midwinter”, the winter solstice, eight days before the Roman New Year. This was the apogee of the medieval English calendar and for centuries afterwards, brightening the darkest and coldest days through its light.
While the modern commercial festive period endures as a seemingly incessant
festival from mid-November until early January, this is far from a recent phenom-enon: echoing the 40 days of Lent, Christmastide lasted 40 days following Christ’s birth.
Advent Sunday, the fourth before Christmas, welcomed a period of preparation and penance. In fact, it began on 11 November with the feast of St Martin of Tours, and reached a peak on Christmas Eve. It introduced a note of austerity into the daily and weekly services of the cathedral while fasting for the clergy was recommended and marked by monks who shaved their tonsures.
The Latin hymn Te Deum, sung at matins, and the Gloria in the mass, both ceased to allow for the liturgical proceedings of the next three weeks, to be instead consumed by the reading of the Book of Isaiah at matins, with its prophecies of Christ’s birth.
FOR cathedrals, the main joviality ran from the feast of St Nicholas (6 December) and ended on Holy Innocents’ Day (or Childermas) on the 28 December, which commemorates the young boys murdered by King Herod at the time of the nativity, and his failed attempt to murder the infant Jesus (thus, two days associated with childhood).
Perhaps bizarrely, considering the liturgical gravity of the occasion, cathedral chapters and monastic communities indulged in traditional festive role-reversal during this time — until it was outlawed in England by Elizabeth I.
At Rouen in France, a choirboy was declared “bishop” and began conducting services. The boy-bishop, dressed in silk tunic, cope, and mitre, led vespers on the eve (5 December) and presided over the entire liturgy, even taking his seat in the cathedra.
Finnbarr WebsterRory Law, a chorister at Salisbury Cathedral, dressed as a boy bishop at the start of December
The next day, the bishop’s baculus (crosier) was exchanged during the Magnificat (sung during vespers) and, accordingly, the real bishop began serving the appointed boy as “chaplain”. After compline, the boy-bishop would process home garbed in full vestments.
Other duties of this temporary episcopal usurper included giving blessings and censing devotees in the cathedral, and even leading a torchlit procession — at which, as at Old St Paul’s in London, he preached a nonsensical, irreverent homily on the final day of his “office”.
Within this jocund season fell the Christmas Octave, though celebrations continued for 12 days in reality: from Christmas Eve to the Twelfth Night or Twelfthtide. This period saw a particular combination of church rites with pagan winter solstice rituals. Naturally, the cathedral was a focal point, and services were well attended by all social classes for which they served an instructive as well as uplifting purpose.
Over time, the traditional services became more elaborate and included imaginative touches which brought the nativity story to life. Beginning on Christmas Day, three masses were celebrated, as on Easter Day. First was midnight mass, then another at dawn, followed by a third later at mid-morning (hence Christmas comes from the Middle English “Cristes Messe”).
The dawn mass was also lit by extra candles, while evergreens such as holly, ivy, and bay, or whatever the season afforded, provided decoration within the cathedral — and symbolised Christ driving out the darkness of sin and the promise of new life flowering in the spring.
During this period, the crib was also proudly displayed, in emulation of the tableau of Christ’s birth which Francis of Assisi arranged when he celebrated Christmas at a grotto in Greccio in 1223 (though cribs in Rome were witnessed as far back as the fifth century). The 16th-century Council of Trent put an end to these so-called “profane excesses”, outlawing performances during holy offices, and forcing nativity scenes to be instead held as street puppet shows.
ALTHOUGH attending a cathedral carol service today is an eagerly awaited custom of the festive merriment, throughout history, carols were beloved, but far less central to the Christmas liturgy. (The Nine Lessons and Carols service was not introduced until 1880.) Carols were originally dance-songs, in which people sang everything from joyful lullabies to meditations and even raucous ballads in English (or English and Latin), while they danced in a circle.
In fact, Christmas carols became so disruptive, with people cavorting in church aisles, that they were banned from being sung at mass; hence the revelries were taken out into the street and from door to door. Music still typified the Christmas celebrations, but in a more solemn manner.
The Sarum rite (the liturgical form developed at Old Sarum Cathedral and used in most English churches prior to the first Book of Common Prayer authorised in 1549) records the singing of prosae (melodic or textual embellishments added to plainchant) on Christmas Day and the three days following, which were also festivals — remembering the first martyr, St Stephen, St John the Evangelist, and the Holy Innocents.
Jason BryantWells Cathedral this month
Celebrations for these feast days at Salisbury Cathedral involved processions on the eve of the feast, with deacons, priests, and choirboys vested in silken copes and carrying lighted candles to the eastern altars, as a responsory (plainchant), based upon the melody from Christmas, was sung.
On the fifth day of Christmas, merry-making was paused for a short period to remember the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket — martyred on 29 December 1170 in his cathedral. Yet, when the feast of the Circumcision, held on 1 January, came around (this was not New Year’s Day, as until 1752, in the Julian calendar, the new year began on 25 March, the Annunciation), it was the turn of subdeacons who were this time given a brief licence to assume rites usually reserved for the bishop or the cantor.
Observing the biblical principle that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Corinthians 1.27), the customs varied regionally, but echoed those of the day of the Innocents. These “mock services” led to associated abuses and rule-breaking echoing its name “Feast of Fools”.
Reports tell of clergymen dressed in women’s clothes, in outfits inside-out, or decked in animal costumes, while donning masks (known as mumming or guising), and even minstrels singing lewd songs, eating black pudding on the altar, and dancing in the choir, as asses were led into the church and the clergy began imitating the sounds of the donkey. (This seasonal liturgy died out in cathedrals and collegiate churches by the 15th century, and rather burgeoned outside the close.)
The latter incidents occurred separately from similar customs for the Festival of the Ass (celebrating the flights into Egypt) on 14 January, when, in certain locations, young girls carried into the cathedral babies and small children upon an ass or donkey, and brays served in place of “Amen” at the conclusion of services.
It is from the feast of the Epiphany rather than Christmas Day, however, that our obsession with gift-giving was born (though gifts were associated with the feast of St Nicholas, too). Presents known as “yeresgives” were exchanged by the clergy as much as the laity. Thomas, Earl of Lancaster — one of the leaders of the baronial opposition to Edward II — purchased a “cloth of Russet” for the Bishop of Anjou in 1322, for an early St Nicholas costume, perhaps.
To round out this extended season, Candlemas, or the feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Virgin Mary, was celebrated on 2 February, exactly forty days after the birth of Christ. It was defined by a characteristic ritual in which people would bring candles to the cathedral for blessing during the mass, before taking them around their own parishes, and then keeping them all year.
Combining old and new were constant factors of the cyclical Christmastide feast. Therefore, in celebrating the end of the festive season, people looked not only backwards to Christ’s birth but equally forwards to his suffering on the cross. Both literally and metaphorically, winter was carried away by spring.
Emma Jane Wells is the author of Heaven on Earth: The lives and legacies of the world’s greatest cathedrals, published by Head of Zeus at £40 (Church Times Bookshop £36); 978-1-78854-194-7.
She is speaking at the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature in Winchester, 24-26 February: click here for more details and to book tickets.
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