⭐⭐⭐
I don't think I'd previously read Alison Weir, bestselling popular historian of the Tudors, and if I had, it was over 25 years ago. When I was younger, I was obsessed with 16th century England and also studied it formally. If I was going to read any more about the period these days, it would usually be something specialist. After seeing a positive post about this Christmas book from Roman Clodia, a longtime Amazon reviewer and Goodreads friend who is, I think, a literature academic, I thought it worth a look. Via Netgalley I received a free Advance Review Copy ebook from the publisher, Jonathan Cape / Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
----
I'd have loved this book as a Christmas present when I was growing up. (Even if there is more about Henry VIII's court and less about Elizabeth than I'd really have liked.) The combination of Tudors *and* lots of British Christmas-related historical customs and factoids would have seemed perfect. It's stuff I've gleaned over the years from many separate books, TV documentaries and articles, all in one place. At its best it's the sort of popular history that would work as text in an Usborne (or these days Dorling Kindersley) book.
It is mostly very cosy (if you are the sort of person who finds history cosy in the first place): plenty on Yule-log fires, evergreen decorations, communal revelry and the evolution of the Christmas pudding.
However, in some chapters, the info on royal customs and court etiquette may be excessively detailed for those without a particular interest. Unsurpisingly, given Alison Weir's specialism in pop-history of Henry VIII and his wives, there is a lot in the book about royalty, and rather less for those interested in the middlin' sort and the poor. For other readers, the quantities of meat and hunting in the food chapters may be somewhat unpleasant, and may find that their sentiments chime with one unnamed contemporary's phrase that "the beasts, fowl, and fish come to a general execution". (But, as I reminded myself it's probably still fewer creatures than go on the collective national table now, with twenty times as many people eating, even if 21st century Christmases do leave the likes of larks and wrens alone and usually base the main meal around one turkey per gathering.)
There is also considerably more than you might expect about the Jacobean. James I was enthusiastic about celebrating Christmas, an attitude which was welcome in England, unlike in Scotland, where celebrations were increasingly prohibited from the 1560s onwards and remained unpopular with the Kirk no matter what the King said. (See, for example, Hutton's Stations of the Sun for further details, because A Tudor Christmas does not have much on Scotland.) As Weir and Clarke say of one Jacobean broadside, "It may post-date the Tudor era, but little had changed between 1603 and 1625, and it certainly captures the essence of a Tudor Christmas."
The quantity of poems included in the book was a delightful surprise, and although my copy is only a Netgalley e-ARC, and this is a book which suits hardcopy / coffee-table browsing, I suspected when I read it in mid-December that I'd be looking back at the poems over the Christmas period. Most are by Robert Herrick (1591-1674) - I had no idea he wrote so many Christmas poems. There are a number of Shakespeare excerpts, although not the one which has long been my favourite Christmas verse of this era - even if the double entendre does sometimes get a little wearing - When icicles hang by the wall. (There are quite a few online recordings of it sung to Vaughn Williams' tune, but they are all frustratingly and absurdly operatic in style, very much at odds with its folky communal subject.) My dream book on Tudor Christmas would be a big fat social-history elaboration of what Christmas was like for the kind of workers described in that verse, probably by Ruth Goodman and Ronald Hutton - however I'm not entirely sure there's a whole book's worth of hard evidence to base it on.
I can't help thinking of this as a book suited to bright kids and teens, or to casual browsing for adults, as the scholarship could be a bit better (research can be top-notch regardless of writing style) and I see it as the sort of history which you start out with, and then gradually learn later that not everything was exactly as it says. I would say for bright pre-teens with advanced reading ages, as well as teenagers, but there are one or two passing references that conservative parents might mind - though not my own friends who have kids, or our parents 30-odd years ago who let us free range among the bookcases at home. It's the kind of book I'd have enjoyed looking through from about age 8 onwards - it has too few pictures to have been really interesting before that - and understanding more of it year on year as I re-opened it each Christmas.
There's a bit of repetition and sometimes the themed chapters means the book goes back and forth in history in ways that feel a tad disjointed - but I can't think of a better structure either, and you wouldn't notice if you didn't read the book quickly cover-to-cover. There are a handful of questionable assumptions about the origins of customs. There are, of course, no footnotes. And the bibliography could be better: some decent stuff, but also some a bit old, and a few too many other popular histories which themselves don't use footnotes (some fairly recent such as Ian Mortimer's), meaning that speculation may end up replicated as if it were fact.
There are times when a little elaboration would have added interest rather than complication:
"According to legend, when enemies met under mistletoe they had to lay down their arms and observe a truce until the next day" (Which legend, found where?)
"The Church was well aware of the pagan connection with evergreens, and in some countries such decorations were banned, but not in England" (Which countries?)
The apparent contradictions between midwinter as a spiritually dangerous time when ghosts walked, and a specially time specially protected by Jesus' birth could have been broken down better. (Although there is undeniable appeal to phrasings like this: "the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest at the time of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, and that spirits could walk the earth" showing part of the allure of the early modern period in being different enough from our own time to be fascinatingly different and alien, yet also with recognisable similarities in some customs and behaviour.)
In a book which has so much to say about minutiae of court etiquette, a few words could have been spared to explain that some surviving (later) Norse ideas include interpolations from Christianity, as this unsourced one presumably does: "Norse tradition had it that at Yule, the god Woden, the lord of magic and healing, came down to earth on his eight-legged horse called Sleipnir."
Or, closer to the Tudor period, that the enforcement, and effectiveness of enforcement, of prohibitions on various public sports and games was often limited.
The Green Man is a nebulous figure, with many interpretations based on a sort of mystical free-association; I'm not sure if this sort of thing has a place in a history book with no further info:
"the ancient legendary fertility figure of the Green Man, or ‘Ing’, who represents rebirth. The symbol of Ing is the boar, and in ancient times, a boar’s head was traditionally served on a bed of greenery on Midwinter Day."
However, there are also occasions when the authors debunk popular misconceptions, for example, Elizabeth I's order that everyone should eat goose at Christmas to celebrate the victory over the Spanish Armada. This was repeated, for example, by a Harrods manager speaking in an otherwise pretty good BBC documentary about Charles Dickens and Christmas that was repeated this year. "as the Armada was won in August, it is unlikely that Elizabeth ever gave such an order; she would have known that her poorer subjects could not have obeyed it, as goose was an expensive luxury."
There is plenty of fun material here as well, among the less well-known stuff, and it can easily be made multimedia, for want of a better word. Anyone who read A Tudor Christmas this year and also watched the BBC televised church service from Oldham on Christmas Day will have seen a revival of the child bishop tradition, albeit conducted in a more sensible for the 21st century, and more egalitarian, as it was a girl not a boy. There is a video of the est.1344 procession by the Worshipful Company of Butchers - not using a real boar's head in 2014, a stylised model one. If desired you can listen to music, such as William Byrd's Out of the Orient Crystal Skies, described by the authors as "one of the finest musical pieces of the English Renaissance". The writers anticipated endeavours to use the book interactively - they advise companionably at the beginning that recipes "may not appeal to a modern palate, some ingredients are not easy to come by, and quantities may be gargantuan!". Before considering trying them, it might help to look at bloggers' attempts at these historical and literary dishes, for example Perdita's warden [pear] pie from A Winter's Tale: one; two. (Neither is quite GBBO presentation standard but very interesting nonetheless.) Others try out old games, such as shove groat. And in the 21st century, the popularity of hoodies must make hoodman-blind easier than it had been at any time since the medieval: "people turned their hoods back to front, or pulled them forward over their eyes, then chased the other players until they caught one. That person became the next hoodman."
It was interesting from a personal perspective to find myself with more understanding and sympathy for Puritans than I used to have - especially compared with pre-university days when I read only popular histories like this, and Puritans were baddies in boring clothes. I've still regularly used 'puritan' as a perjorative in matters of prudery and language, but in material terms, for environmental and social equality reasons I am totally on board with disapproval of overindulgence, inessentials, the replacement of items that still work or are fixable, and so forth. On a felt level, I realised I found Puritans very relatable - their motivations are just different and their zeal for criticism and change encompassed some things which I consider good.
Such as, for example, the Twelve Days of Christmas, around which the book's chapters are rather delightfully structured. This gives space for discussion of customs which are passed over in other popular histories, including those for Holy Innocents on the 28th and the feast of Thomas a Becket on the 29th. Since childhood it has bothered me that the twelve days are no longer observed: I could never understand why a Catholic school which recognised Epiphany nevertheless started its winter/spring term before 7th January. (Whilst I had to concede that recognising the solstice would never be their thing.) And these days, modern green or left wing forms of material 'puritanism' take as evils overconsumption, overproduction and overwork, so a bit *more* holiday, not less, is good (provided it's not used for long-haul holidays and shopping till you drop) - in contrast to the early modern religious puritan who felt that people needed to work more. It would no doubt be a popular idea with quite a lot of people, like the participants at the end of another BBC programme shown in the last few days, the Victorian Bakers Christmas special. Unfortunately it's a luxury available largely to those who can arrange their annual leave thus and who also have the stamina to manage with less rest at other times of year, or to the better-off self employed in occupations that give scope for it. (It was nice to notice a couple of days after reading this book that George Monbiot had said on his Twitter page that he was staying offline until 7th January.) Although the length of observance in some parts of the country indicates that extended Christmas celebration co-existed alongside work. Not only did a few areas of England keep decorations up until Candlemas, "Some kept open house from Martinmas (11 November) to Candlemas (2 February), welcoming friends and visitors and mitigating the privations of the winter months for the poor who came to receive their charity."
This is an appealing book to browse and to have around at home, and is to be taken in very much the same way as many TV documentaries - not 100% correct, but often enough to be worthwhile, and an interesting and friendly presence. (Some Amazon reviews mention that the physical book is smaller than they expected, however.) If you want a more detailed and referenced take on the same subjects, have a look at Hutton's Stations of the Sun or The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review on Goodreads.)
No comments:
Post a Comment