Christmas In Ritual and Tradition,

Christian and Pagan

by Clement A. Miles

Published by
T. Fisher Unwin
1912

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI (DETAIL).

GENTILE DA FABRIANO

(Florence: Accademia)

5

PREFACE

In this volume I have tried to show how Christmas is or has
been kept in various lands and ages, and to trace as far as possible
the origin of the pagan elements that have mingled with the
Church’s feast of the Nativity.

In Part I. I have dealt with the festival on its distinctively
Christian side. The book has, however, been so planned that
readers not interested in this aspect of Christmas may pass over
Chapters II.-V., and proceed at once from the Introduction to
Part II., which treats of pagan survivals.

The book has been written primarily for the general reader,
but I venture to hope that, with all its imperfections, it may be
of some use to the more serious student, as a rough outline map
of the field of Christmas customs, and as bringing together
materials hitherto scattered through a multitude of volumes in
various languages. There is certainly room for a comprehensive
English book on Christmas, taking account of the results of
modern historical and folk-lore research.

The writer of a work of this kind necessarily owes an immense
debt to the labours of others. In my bibliographical notes I have
done my best to acknowledge the sources from which I have
drawn. It is only right that I should express here my special
obligation, both for information and for suggestions, to Mr. E. K.
Chambers’s “The Mediaeval Stage,” an invaluable storehouse of
fact, theory, and bibliographical references. I also owe much to
the important monographs of Dr. A. Tille, “Die Geschichte
der deutschen Weihnacht” and “Yule and Christmas”; to Dr.
Feilberg’s Danish work, “Jul,” the fullest account of Christmas6
customs yet written; and of course, like every student of folk-lore,
to Dr. Frazer’s “The Golden Bough.”

References to authorities will be found at the end of the
volume, and are indicated by small numerals in the text; notes
requiring to be read in close conjunction with the text are
printed at the foot of the pages to which they relate, and are
indicated by asterisks, &c.

[Transcriber’s Note: The ‘small numerals’ are represented in this
ebook by numbers in {curly braces}. The footnotes appear at the end
of the ebook and are indicated by numbers in [square brackets].]

I have to thank Mr. Frank Sidgwick for most kindly reading
my proofs and portions of my MS., and for some valuable suggestions.

7

CONTENTS

12

MADONNA AND CHILD.

By Albrecht Dürer.

13

ILLUSTRATIONS

151617

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The Origin and Purpose of Festivals—Ideas suggested by Christmas—Pagan and
Christian Elements—The Names of the Festival—Foundation of the Feast of the
Nativity—Its Relation to the Epiphany—December 25 and the Natalis Invicti—The
Kalends of January—Yule and Teutonic Festivals—The Church and Pagan
Survivals—Two Conflicting Types of Festival—Their Interaction—Plan of
the Book.

It has been an instinct in nearly all peoples, savage or civilized,
to set aside certain days for special ceremonial observances,
attended by outward rejoicing. This tendency to concentrate
on special times answers to man’s need to lift himself above the
commonplace and the everyday, to escape from the leaden weight
of monotony that oppresses him. “We tend to tire of the most
eternal splendours, and a mark on our calendar, or a crash of bells
at midnight maybe, reminds us that we have only recently been
created.”[1]{1}
That they wake people up is the great justification of
festivals, and both man’s religious sense and his joy in life have
generally tended to rise “into peaks and towers and turrets, into
superhuman exceptions which really prove the rule.”{2}
It is
difficult to be religious, impossible to be merry, at every moment
of life, and festivals are as sunlit peaks, testifying, above dark
valleys, to the eternal radiance. This is one view of the purpose
and value of festivals, and their function of cheering people and
giving them larger perspectives has no doubt been an important
reason for their maintenance in the past. If we could trace the
custom of festival-keeping back to its origins in primitive society
18we should find the same principle of specialization involved, though
it is probable that the practice came into being not for the sake of
its moral or emotional effect, but from man’s desire to lay up, so
to speak, a stock of sanctity, magical not ethical, for ordinary
days.

The first holy-day-makers were probably more concerned with
such material goods as food than with spiritual ideals, when they
marked with sacred days the rhythm of the seasons.{3}
As man’s
consciousness developed, the subjective aspect of the matter
would come increasingly into prominence, until in the festivals of
the Christian Church the main object is to quicken the devotion
of the believer by contemplation of the mysteries of the faith.
Yet attached, as we shall see, to many Christian festivals, are old
notions of magical sanctity, probably quite as potent in the minds
of the common people as the more spiritual ideas suggested by
the Church’s feasts.

In modern England we have almost lost the festival habit, but
if there is one feast that survives among us as a universal tradition
it is Christmas. We have indeed our Bank Holidays, but they
are mere days of rest and amusement, and for the mass of the
people Easter and Whitsuntide have small religious significance—Christmas
alone has the character of sanctity which marks the true
festival. The celebration of Christmas has often little or nothing
to do with orthodox dogma, yet somehow the sense of obligation
to keep the feast is very strong, and there are few English people,
however unconventional, who escape altogether the spell of
tradition in this matter.

Christmas—how many images the word calls up: we think of
carol-singers and holly-decked churches where people hymn in
time-honoured strains the Birth of the Divine Child; of frost and
snow, and, in contrast, of warm hearths and homes bright with
light and colour, very fortresses against the cold; of feasting and
revelry, of greetings and gifts exchanged; and lastly of vaguely
superstitious customs, relics of long ago, performed perhaps out of
respect for use and wont, or merely in jest, or with a deliberate
attempt to throw ourselves back into the past, to re-enter for a
moment the mental childhood of the race. These are a few of
19the pictures that rise pell-mell in the minds of English folk at the
mention of Christmas; how many other scenes would come
before us if we could realize what the festival means to men of
other nations. Yet even these will suggest what hardly needs
saying, that Christmas is something far more complex than a
Church holy-day alone, that the celebration of the Birth of Jesus,
deep and touching as is its appeal to those who hold the faith of
the Incarnation, is but one of many elements that have
entered into the great winter festival.

In the following pages I shall try to present a picture, sketchy
and inadequate though it must be, of what Christmas is and has
been to the peoples of Europe, and to show as far as possible the
various elements that have gone into its make-up. Most people
have a vague impression that these are largely pagan, but comparatively
few have any idea of the process by which the heathen
elements have become mingled with that which is obviously
Christian, and equal obscurity prevails as to the nature and
meaning of the non-Christian customs. The subject is vast,
and has not been thoroughly explored as yet, but the
labours of historians and folk-lorists have made certain conclusions
probable, and have produced hypotheses of great interest
and fascination.

I have spoken of “Christian”[2] and “pagan” elements. The
distinction is blurred to some extent by the clothing of heathen
customs in a superficial Christianity, but on the whole it is clear
enough to justify the division of this book into two parts, one
dealing with the Church’s feast of the Holy Birth, the other with
those remains of pagan winter festivals which extend from
November to January, but cluster especially round Christmas and
the Twelve Days.

Before we pass to the various aspects of the Church’s Christmas,
we must briefly consider its origins and its relation to certain
20pagan festivals, the customs of which will be dealt with in detail
in Part II.

The names given to the feast by different European peoples
throw a certain amount of light on its history. Let us take five
of them—Christmas, Weihnacht, Noël, Calendas, and Yule—and
see what they suggest.

I. The English Christmas and its Dutch equivalent Kerstmisse,
plainly point to the ecclesiastical side of the festival; the German
Weihnacht{4}
(sacred night) is vaguer, and might well be either
pagan or Christian; in point of fact it seems to be Christian, since
it does not appear till the year 1000, when the Faith was well
established in Germany.{5}
Christmas and Weihnacht, then, may
stand for the distinctively Christian festival, the history of which
we may now briefly study.

When and where did the keeping of Christmas begin? Many
details of its early history remain in uncertainty, but it is fairly
clear that the earliest celebration of the Birth of Christ on
December 25 took place at Rome about the middle of the fourth
century, and that the observance of the day spread from the
western to the eastern Church, which had before been wont
to keep January 6 as a joint commemoration of the Nativity and
the Baptism of the Redeemer.[3]

The first mention of a Nativity feast on December 25 is found
in a Roman document known as the Philocalian Calendar, dating
from the year 354, but embodying an older document evidently
belonging to the year 336. It is uncertain to which date the
Nativity reference belongs;[4] but further back than 336 at all
events the festival cannot be traced.

From Rome, Christmas spread throughout the West, with the
21conversion of the barbarians. Whether it came to England
through the Celtic Church is uncertain, but St. Augustine
certainly brought it with him, and Christmas Day, 598, witnessed
a great event, the baptism of more than ten thousand English
converts.{9}
In 567 the Council of Tours had declared the
Twelve Days, from Christmas to Epiphany, a festal tide;{10}
the
laws of Ethelred (991-1016) ordained it to be a time of peace
and concord among Christian men, when all strife must cease.{11}

In Germany Christmas was established by the Synod of Mainz in
813;{12}
in Norway by King Hakon the Good about the middle
of the tenth century.{13}

In the East, as has been seen, the Birth of the Redeemer was
at first celebrated not on December 25, but on January 6, the
feast of the Epiphany or manifestation of Christ’s glory. The
Epiphany can be traced as far back as the second century, among
the Basilidian heretics, from whom it may have spread to the
Catholic Church. It was with them certainly a feast of the
Baptism, and possibly also of the Nativity, of Christ. The
origins of the Epiphany festival{14}
are very obscure, nor can we say
with certainty what was its meaning at first. It may be that it
took the place of a heathen rite celebrating the birth of the
World or Æon from the Virgin on January 6.[5] At all events one
of its objects was to commemorate the Baptism, the appearance
of the Holy Dove, and the Voice from heaven, “Thou art my
beloved son, in whom I am well pleased” (or, as other MSS.
read, “This day have I begotten thee”).

22In some circles of early Christianity the Baptism appears to
have been looked upon as the true Birth of Christ, the moment
when, filled by the Spirit, He became Son of God; and the
carnal Birth was regarded as of comparatively little significance.
Hence the Baptism festival may have arisen first, and the
celebration of the Birth at Bethlehem may have been later
attached to the same day, partly perhaps because a passage in
St. Luke’s Gospel was supposed to imply that Jesus was baptized
on His thirtieth birthday. As however the orthodox belief
became more sharply defined, increasing stress was laid on the
Incarnation of God in Christ in the Virgin’s womb, and it may
have been felt that the celebration of the Birth and the Baptism
on the same day encouraged heretical views. Hence very likely
the introduction of Christmas on December 25 as a festival of the
Birth alone. In the East the concelebration of the two events
continued for some time after Rome had instituted the separate
feast of Christmas. Gradually, however, the Roman use spread:
at Constantinople it was introduced about 380 by the great
theologian, Gregory Nazianzen; at Antioch it appeared in 388,
at Alexandria in 432. The Church of Jerusalem long stood out,
refusing to adopt the new feast till the seventh century, it would
seem.{18}
One important Church, the Armenian, knows nothing of
December 25, and still celebrates the Nativity with the Epiphany
on January 6.{19}
Epiphany in the eastern Orthodox Church
has lost its connection with the Nativity and is now chiefly
a celebration of the Baptism of Christ, while in the West, as
every one knows, it is primarily a celebration of the Adoration by
the Magi, an event commemorated by the Greeks on Christmas
Day. Epiphany is, however, as we shall see, a greater festival
in the Greek Church than Christmas.

Such in bare outline is the story of the spread of Christmas as
an independent festival. Its establishment fitly followed the
triumph of the Catholic doctrine of the perfect Godhead or
Christ at the Council of Nicea in 325.

II. The French Noël is a name concerning whose origin
there has been considerable dispute; there can, however, be little
doubt that it is the same word as the Provençal Nadau or Nadal,
23the Italian Natale, and the Welsh Nadolig, all obviously derived
from the Latin natalis, and meaning “birthday.” One naturally
takes this as referring to the Birth of Christ, but it may at any
rate remind us of another birthday celebrated on the same date by
the Romans of the Empire, that of the unconquered Sun, who
on December 25, the winter solstice according to the Julian
calendar, began to rise to new vigour after his autumnal
decline.

Why, we may ask, did the Church choose December 25 for
the celebration of her Founder’s Birth? No one now imagines
that the date is supported by a reliable tradition; it is only one
of various guesses of early Christian writers. As a learned
eighteenth-century Jesuit{20}
has pointed out, there is not a single
month in the year to which the Nativity has not been assigned
by some writer or other. The real reason for the choice of the
day most probably was, that upon it fell the pagan festival just
mentioned.

The Dies Natalis Invicti was probably first celebrated in Rome
by order of the Emperor Aurelian (270-5), an ardent worshipper
of the Syrian sun-god Baal.{21}
With the Sol Invictus was
identified the figure of Mithra, that strange eastern god whose
cult resembled in so many ways the worship of Jesus, and who
was at one time a serious rival of the Christ in the minds of
thoughtful men.[6]{22}
It was the sun-god, poetically and philosophically
conceived, whom the Emperor Julian made the centre
of his ill-fated revival of paganism, and there is extant a fine
prayer of his to “King Sun.”{23}

What more natural than that the Church should choose this
day to celebrate the rising of her Sun of Righteousness with
healing in His wings, that she should strive thus to draw away to
His worship some adorers of the god whose symbol and representative
was the earthly sun! There is no direct evidence of
deliberate substitution, but at all events ecclesiastical writers soon
after the foundation of Christmas made good use of the idea
24that the birthday of the Saviour had replaced the birthday of
the sun.[7]

Little is known of the manner in which the Natalis Invicti
was kept; it was not a folk-festival, and was probably observed
by the classes rather than the masses.{24}
Its direct influence on
Christmas customs has probably been little or nothing. It fell,
however, just before a Roman festival that had immense
popularity, is of great importance for our subject, and is recalled
by another name for Christmas that must now be considered.

III. The Provençal Calendas or Calenos, the Polish Kolenda,
the Russian Kolyáda, the Czech Koleda and the Lithuanian
Kalledos, not to speak of the Welsh Calenig for Christmas-box, and
the Gaelic Calluinn for New Year’s Eve, are all derived from the
Latin Kalendae, and suggest the connection of Christmas with
the Roman New Year’s Day, the Kalends or the first day of
January, a time celebrated with many festive customs. What
these were, and how they have affected Christmas we shall see
in some detail in Part II.; suffice it to say here that the festival,
which lasted for at least three days, was one of riotous life, of
banqueting and games and licence. It was preceded, moreover,
by the Saturnalia (December 17 to 23) which had many like
features, and must have formed practically one festive season with
it. The word Saturnalia has become so familiar in modern
usage as to suggest sufficiently the character of the festival for
which it stands.

25Into the midst of this season of revelry and licence the Church
introduced her celebration of the beginning of man’s redemption
from the bondage of sin. Who can wonder that Christmas
contains incongruous elements, for old things, loved by the people,
cannot easily be uprooted.

IV. One more name yet remains to be considered, Yule
(Danish Jul), the ordinary word for Christmas in the Scandinavian
languages, and not extinct among ourselves. Its
derivation has been widely discussed, but so far no satisfactory
explanation of it has been found. Professor Skeat in the last
edition of his Etymological Dictionary (1910) has to admit that
its origin is unknown. Whatever its source may be, it is clearly
the name of a Germanic season—probably a two-month tide
covering the second half of November, the whole of December,
and the first half of January.{26}
It may well suggest to us the
element added to Christmas by the barbarian peoples who began
to learn Christianity about the time when the festival was
founded. Modern research has tended to disprove the idea that
the old Germans held a Yule feast at the winter solstice, and it is
probable, as we shall see, that the specifically Teutonic Christmas
customs come from a New Year and beginning-of-winter festival
kept about the middle of November. These customs transferred
to Christmas are to a great extent religious or magical rites
intended to secure prosperity during the coming year, and there
is also the familiar Christmas feasting, apparently derived in part
from the sacrificial banquets that marked the beginning of
winter.

We have now taken a general glance at the elements which
have combined in Christmas. The heathen folk-festivals
absorbed by the Nativity feast were essentially life-affirming, they
expressed the mind of men who said “yes” to this life, who
valued earthly good things. On the other hand Christianity, at
all events in its intensest form, the religion of the monks, was at
bottom pessimistic as regards this earth, and valued it only as a
place of discipline for the life to come; it was essentially a
religion of renunciation that said “no” to the world. The
26Christian had here no continuing city, but sought one to come.
How could the Church make a feast of the secular New Year;
what mattered to her the world of time? her eye was fixed upon
the eternal realities—the great drama of Redemption. Not upon
the course of the temporal sun through the zodiac, but upon the
mystical progress of the eternal Sun of Righteousness must she
base her calendar. Christmas and New Year’s Day—the two
festivals stood originally for the most opposed of principles.

Naturally the Church fought bitterly against the observance of
the Kalends; she condemned repeatedly the unseemly doings of
Christians in joining in heathenish customs at that season; she
tried to make the first of January a solemn fast; and from the
ascetic point of view she was profoundly right, for the old festivals
were bound up with a lusty attitude towards the world, a seeking
for earthly joy and well-being.

The struggle between the ascetic principle of self-mortification,
world-renunciation, absorption in a transcendent ideal, and the
natural human striving towards earthly joy and well-being, is,
perhaps, the most interesting aspect of the history of Christianity;
it is certainly shown in an absorbingly interesting way in the
development of the Christian feast of the Nativity. The conflict
is keen at first; the Church authorities fight tooth and nail
against these relics of heathenism, these devilish rites; but mankind’s
instinctive paganism is insuppressible, the practices continue
as ritual, though losing much of their meaning, and the Church,
weary of denouncing, comes to wink at them, while the pagan
joy in earthly life begins to colour her own festival.

The Church’s Christmas, as the Middle Ages pass on, becomes
increasingly “merry”—warm and homely, suited to the instincts
of ordinary humanity, filled with a joy that is of this earth, and
not only a mystical rapture at a transcendental Redemption.
The Incarnate God becomes a real child to be fondled and
rocked, a child who is the loveliest of infants, whose birthday is
the supreme type of all human birthdays, and may be kept with
feasting and dance and song. Such is the Christmas of popular
tradition, the Nativity as it is reflected in the carols, the cradle-rocking,
the mystery plays of the later Middle Ages. This
27Christmas, which still lingers, though maimed, in some Catholic
regions, is strongly life-affirming; the value and delight of
earthly, material things is keenly felt; sometimes, even, it passes
into coarseness and riot. Yet a certain mysticism usually penetrates
it, with hints that this dear life, this fair world, are not all,
for the soul has immortal longings in her. Nearly always there
is the spirit of reverence, of bowing down before the Infant God,
a visitor from the supernatural world, though bone of man’s bone,
flesh of his flesh. Heaven and earth have met together; the
rough stable is become the palace of the Great King.

This we might well call the “Catholic” Christmas, the
Christmas of the age when the Church most nearly answered to
the needs of the whole man, spiritual and sensuous. The
Reformation in England and Germany did not totally destroy
it; in England the carol-singers kept up for a while the old
spirit; in Lutheran Germany a highly coloured and surprisingly
sensuous celebration of the Nativity lingered on into the eighteenth
century. In the countries that remained Roman Catholic much
of the old Christmas continued, though the spirit of the Counter-Reformation,
faced by the challenge of Protestantism, made for
greater “respectability,” and often robbed the Catholic Christmas
of its humour, its homeliness, its truly popular stamp, substituting
pretentiousness for simplicity, sugary sentiment for naïve and
genuine poetry.

Apart from the transformation of the Church’s Christmas from
something austere and metaphysical into something joyous and
human, warm and kindly, we shall note in our Second Part the
survival of much that is purely pagan, continuing alongside of the
celebration of the Nativity, and often little touched by its influence.
But first we must consider the side of the festival suggested
by the English and French names: Christmas will stand for the
liturgical rites commemorating the wonder of the Incarnation—God
in man made manifest—Noël or “the Birthday,” for the
ways in which men have striven to realize the human aspect of
the great Coming.

How can we reach the inner meaning of the Nativity feast, its
significance for the faithful? Better, perhaps, by the way of
28poetry than by the way of ritual, for it is poetry that reveals the
emotions at the back of the outward observances, and we shall
understand these better when the singers of Christmas have laid
bare to us their hearts. We may therefore first give attention to
the Christmas poetry of sundry ages and peoples, and then go on
to consider the liturgical and popular ritual in which the Church
has striven to express her joy at the Redeemer’s birth. Ceremonial,
of course, has always mimetic tendencies, and in a further
chapter we shall see how these issued in genuine drama; how, in
the miracle plays, the Christmas story was represented by the forms
and voices of living men.

293031

Part I—The Christian Feast

CHAPTER II

CHRISTMAS POETRY (I)[8]{1}

Ancient Latin Hymns, their Dogmatic, Theological Character—Humanizing Influence
of Franciscanism—Jacopone da Todi’s Vernacular Verse—German
Catholic Poetry—Mediaeval English Carols.

MADONNA ENTHRONED WITH SAINTS AND ANGELS.

PESELLINO

(Empoli Gallery)

Christmas, as we have seen, had its beginning at the middle
of the fourth century in Rome. The new feast was not long in
finding a hymn-writer to embody in immortal Latin the emotions
called forth by the memory of the Nativity. “Veni, redemptor
gentium” is one of the earliest of Latin hymns—one of the few
that have come down to us from the father of Church song,
Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan (d. 397). Great as theologian
and statesman, Ambrose was great also as a poet and systematizer
of Church music. “Veni, redemptor gentium” is above all
things stately and severe, in harmony with the austere character
of the zealous foe of the Arian heretics, the champion of monasticism.
It is the theological aspect alone of Christmas, the
redemption of sinful man by the mystery of the Incarnation and
the miracle of the Virgin Birth, that we find in St. Ambrose’s
terse and pregnant Latin; there is no feeling for the human
pathos and poetry of the scene at Bethlehem—

Another fine hymn often heard in English churches is of a
slightly later date. “Corde natus ex Parentis” (“Of the
Father’s love begotten”) is a cento from a larger hymn by the
Spanish poet Prudentius (c. 348-413). Prudentius did not write
for liturgical purposes, and it was several centuries before “Corde
natus” was adopted into the cycle of Latin hymns. Its elaborate
rhetoric is very unlike the severity of “Veni, redemptor gentium,”
but again the note is purely theological; the Incarnation as
a world-event is its theme. It sings the Birth of Him who is

Other early hymns are “A solis ortus cardine” (“From east
to west, from shore to shore”), by a certain Coelius Sedulius
(d. c. 450), still sung by the Roman Church at Lauds on Christmas
Day, and “Jesu, redemptor omnium” (sixth century), the
office hymn at Christmas Vespers. Like the poems of Ambrose
and Prudentius, they are in classical metres, unrhymed, and based
upon quantity, not accent, and they have the same general
character, doctrinal rather than humanly tender.

In the ninth and tenth centuries arose a new form of hymnody,
the Prose or Sequence sung after the Gradual (the anthem
between the Epistle and Gospel at Mass). The earliest writer
of sequences was Notker, a monk of the abbey of St. Gall, near
33the Lake of Constance. Among those that are probably his
work is the Christmas “Natus ante saecula Dei filius.” The
most famous Nativity sequence, however, is the “Laetabundus,
exsultet fidelis chorus” of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153),
once sung all over Europe, and especially popular in England and
France. Here are its opening verses:—

The “Laetabundus” is in rhymed stanzas; in this it differs
from most early proses. The writing of rhymed sequences,
however, became common through the example of the Parisian
monk, Adam of St. Victor, in the second half of the twelfth
century. He adopted an entirely new style of versification and
music, derived from popular songs; and he and his successors in
34the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wrote various proses for
the Christmas festival.

If we consider the Latin Christmas hymns from the fourth
century to the thirteenth, we shall find that however much they
differ in form, they have one common characteristic: they are
essentially theological—dwelling on the Incarnation and the
Nativity as part of the process of man’s redemption—rather than
realistic. There is little attempt to imagine the scene in the
stable at Bethlehem, little interest in the Child as a child, little
sense of the human pathos of the Nativity. The explanation
is, I think, very simple, and it lights up the whole observance
of Christmas as a Church festival in the centuries we are considering:
this poetry is the poetry of monks, or of men imbued with
the monastic spirit.

The two centuries following the institution of Christmas saw
the break-up of the Roman Empire in the west, and the
incursions of barbarians threatening the very existence of the
Christian civilization that had conquered classic paganism. It
was by her army of monks that the Church tamed and Christianized
the barbarians, and both religion and culture till the
middle of the twelfth century were predominantly monastic.
“In writing of any eminently religious man of this period” [the
eleventh century], says Dean Church, “it must be taken almost
as a matter of course that he was a monk.”{5}
And a monastery
was not the place for human feeling about Christmas; the monk
was—at any rate in ideal—cut off from the world; not for him
were the joys of parenthood or tender feelings for a new-born
child. To the monk the world was, at least in theory, the vale
of misery; birth and generation were, one may almost say,
tolerated as necessary evils among lay folk unable to rise to the
heights of abstinence and renunciation; one can hardly imagine
a true early Benedictine filled with “joy that a man is born into
the world.” The Nativity was an infinitely important event,
to be celebrated with a chastened, unearthly joy, but not, as
it became for the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a matter
upon which human affection might lavish itself, which imagination
might deck with vivid concrete detail. In the later Christmas
35the pagan and the Christian spirit, or delight in earthly things
and joy in the invisible, seem to meet and mingle; to the true
monk of the Dark and Early Middle Ages they were incompatible.

What of the people, the great world outside the monasteries?
Can we imagine that Christmas, on its Christian side, had a
deep meaning for them? For the first ten centuries, to quote
Dean Church again, Christianity “can hardly be said to have
leavened society at all…. It acted upon it doubtless with
enormous power; but it was as an extraneous and foreign agent,
which destroys and shapes, but does not mingle or renew….
Society was a long time unlearning heathenism; it has not done
so yet; but it had hardly begun, at any rate it was only just
beginning, to imagine the possibility of such a thing in the
eleventh century.”{6}

“The practical religion of the illiterate,” says another ecclesiastical
historian, Dr. W. R. W. Stephens, “was in many respects
merely a survival of the old paganism thinly disguised. There
was a prevalent belief in witchcraft, magic, sortilegy, spells,
charms, talismans, which mixed itself up in strange ways with
Christian ideas and Christian worship…. Fear, the note of
superstition, rather than love, which is the characteristic of a
rational faith, was conspicuous in much of the popular religion.
The world was haunted by demons, hobgoblins, malignant spirits
of divers kinds, whose baneful influence must be averted by
charms or offerings.”{7}

The writings of ecclesiastics, the decrees of councils and
synods, from the fourth century to the eleventh, abound in
condemnations of pagan practices at the turn of the year. It
is in these customs, and in secular mirth and revelry, not in
Christian poetry, that we must seek for the expression of early
lay feeling about Christmas. It was a feast of material good
things, a time for the fulfilment of traditional heathen usages,
rather than a joyous celebration of the Saviour’s birth. No
doubt it was observed by due attendance at church, but the
services in a tongue not understanded of the people cannot
have been very full of meaning to them, and we can imagine
36their Christmas church-going as rather a duty inspired by fear
than an expression of devout rejoicing. It is noteworthy that
the earliest of vernacular Christmas carols known to us, the
early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman “Seignors, ore entendez
à nus,” is a song not of religion but of revelry. Its last verse
is typical:

Not till the close of the thirteenth century do we meet with
any vernacular Christmas poetry of importance. The verses
of the troubadours and trouvères of twelfth-century France had
little to do with Christianity; their songs were mostly of
earthly and illicit love. The German Minnesingers of the
thirteenth century were indeed pious, but their devout lays
were addressed to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, the ideal
of womanhood, holding in glory the Divine Child in her arms,
rather than to the Babe and His Mother in the great humility
of Bethlehem.

The first real outburst of Christmas joy in a popular tongue
is found in Italy, in the poems of that strange “minstrel of the
Lord,” the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi (b. 1228, d. 1306).
Franciscan, in that name we have an indication of the change
in religious feeling that came over the western world, and
37especially Italy, in the thirteenth century.{9}
For the twenty
all-too-short years of St. Francis’s apostolate have passed, and
a new attitude towards God and man and the world has become
possible. Not that the change was due solely to St. Francis;
he was rather the supreme embodiment of the ideals and tendencies
of his day than their actual creator; but he was the spark
that kindled a mighty flame. In him we reach so important
a turning-point in the history of Christmas that we must linger
awhile at his side.

Early Franciscanism meant above all the democratizing, the
humanizing of Christianity; with it begins that “carol spirit”
which is the most winning part of the Christian Christmas, the
spirit which, while not forgetting the divine side of the Nativity,
yet delights in its simple humanity, the spirit that links the
Incarnation to the common life of the people, that brings human
tenderness into religion. The faithful no longer contemplate
merely a theological mystery, they are moved by affectionate
devotion to the Babe of Bethlehem, realized as an actual living
child, God indeed, yet feeling the cold of winter, the roughness
of the manger bed.

St. Francis, it must be remembered, was not a man of high
birth, but the son of a silk merchant, and his appeal was made
chiefly to the traders and skilled workmen of the cities, who, in
his day, were rising to importance, coming, in modern Socialist
terms, to class-consciousness. The monks, although boys of low
birth were sometimes admitted into the cloister, were in sympathy
one with the upper classes, and monastic religion and
culture were essentially aristocratic. The rise of the Franciscans
meant the bringing home of Christianity to masses of town-workers,
homely people, who needed a religion full of vivid
humanity, and whom the pathetic story of the Nativity would
peculiarly touch.

Love to man, the sense of human brotherhood—that was the
great thing which St. Francis brought home to his age. The
message, certainly, was not new, but he realized it with infectious
intensity. The second great commandment, “Thou shall love
thy neighbour as thyself,” had not indeed been forgotten by
38mediaeval Christianity; the common life of monasticism was
an attempt to fulfil it; yet for the monk love to man was often
rather a duty than a passion. But to St. Francis love was very
life; he loved not by duty but by an inner compulsion, and his
burning love of God and man found its centre in the God-man,
Christ Jesus. For no saint, perhaps, has the earthly life of Christ
been the object of such passionate devotion as for St. Francis;
the Stigmata were the awful, yet, to his contemporaries, glorious
fruit of his meditations on the Passion; and of the ecstasy with
which he kept his Christmas at Greccio we shall read when we
come to consider the Presepio. He had a peculiar affection for the
festival of the Holy Child; “the Child Jesus,” says Thomas of
Celano, “had been given over to forgetfulness in the hearts of
many in whom, by the working of His grace, He was raised up
again through His servant Francis.”{10}

To the Early Middle Ages Christ was the awful Judge, the
Rex tremendae majestatis, though also the divine bringer of
salvation from sin and eternal punishment, and, to the mystic,
the Bridegroom of the Soul. To Francis He was the little
brother of all mankind as well. It was a new human joy that
came into religion with him. His essentially artistic nature was
the first to realize the full poetry of Christmas—the coming of
infinity into extremest limitation, the Highest made the lowliest,
the King of all kings a poor infant. He had, in a supreme
degree, the mingled reverence and tenderness that inspire the
best carols.

Though no Christmas verses by St. Francis have come
down to us, there is a beautiful “psalm” for Christmas Day
at Vespers, composed by him partly from passages of Scripture.
A portion of Father Paschal Robinson’s translation may
be quoted:—

It is in the poetry of Jacopone da Todi, born shortly after the
death of St. Francis, that the Franciscan Christmas spirit finds
its most intense expression. A wild, wandering ascetic, an
impassioned poet, and a soaring mystic, Jacopone is one of the
greatest of Christian singers, unpolished as his verses are. Noble
by birth, he made himself utterly as the common people for
whom he piped his rustic notes. “Dio fatto piccino” (“God
made a little thing”) is the keynote of his music; the Christ
Child is for him “our sweet little brother”; with tender
affection he rejoices in endearing diminutives—“Bambolino,”
“Piccolino,” “Jesulino.” He sings of the Nativity with extraordinary
realism.[13] Here, in words, is a picture of the Madonna
and her Child that might well have inspired an early Tuscan
artist:—

But there is an intense sense of the divine, as well as the
human, in the Holy Babe; no one has felt more vividly the
paradox of the Incarnation:—

JACOPONE IN ECSTASY BEFORE THE VIRGIN.

From “Laude di Frate Jacopone da Todi”

(Florence, 1490).

Here, again, are some sweet and homely lines about preparation
for the Infant Saviour:—

42There have been few more rapturous poets than Jacopone;
men deemed him mad; but, “if he is mad,” says a modern
Italian writer, “he is mad as the lark”—“Nessun poeta canta
a tutta gola come questo frate minore. S’ è pazzo, è pazzo come
l’ allodola.”

To him is attributed that most poignant of Latin hymns, the
“Stabat Mater dolorosa”; he wrote also a joyous Christmas
pendant to it:—

In the fourteenth century we find a blossoming forth of
Christmas poetry in another land, Germany.{16}
There are indeed
Christmas and Epiphany passages in a poetical Life of Christ
by Otfrid of Weissenburg in the ninth century, and a twelfth-century
poem by Spervogel, “Er ist gewaltic unde starc,” opens
with a mention of Christmas, but these are of little importance
for us. The fourteenth century shows the first real outburst,
and that is traceable, in part at least, to the mystical movement in
the Rhineland caused by the preaching of the great Dominican,
Eckhart of Strasburg, and his followers. It was a movement
towards inward piety as distinguished from, though not excluding,
external observances, which made its way largely by sermons
listened to by great congregations in the towns. Its impulse
came not from the monasteries proper, but from the convents
of Dominican friars, and it was for Germany in the fourteenth
century something like what Franciscanism had been for Italy
in the thirteenth. One of the central doctrines of the school
43was that of the Divine Birth in the soul of the believer;
according to Eckhart the soul comes into immediate union
with God by “bringing forth the Son” within itself; the
historic Christ is the symbol of the divine humanity to which
the soul should rise: “when the soul bringeth forth the Son,”
he says, “it is happier than Mary.”{17}
Several Christmas sermons
by Eckhart have been preserved; one of them ends with the
prayer, “To this Birth may that God, who to-day is new born
as man, bring us, that we, poor children of earth, may be born in
Him as God; to this may He bring us eternally! Amen.”{18}

With this profound doctrine of the Divine Birth, it was natural
that the German mystics should enter deeply into the festival
of Christmas, and one of the earliest of German Christmas carols,
“Es komt ein schif geladen,” is the work of Eckhart’s disciple,
John Tauler (d. 1361). It is perhaps an adaptation of a
secular song:—

The doctrine of the mystics, “Die in order to live,” fills
the last verses:—

To the fourteenth century may perhaps belong an allegorical
carol still sung in both Catholic and Protestant Germany:—

In a fourteenth-century Life of the mystic Heinrich Suso
it is told how one day angels came to him to comfort him
in his sufferings, how they took him by the hand and led him
to dance, while one began a glad song of the child Jesus,
“In dulci jubilo.” To the fourteenth century, then, dates back
that most delightful of German carols, with its interwoven lines
of Latin. I may quote the fine Scots translation in the “Godlie
and Spirituall Sangis” of 1567:—

The music of “In dulci jubilo”[19] has, with all its religious
feeling, something of the nature of a dance, and unites in a
strange fashion solemnity, playfulness, and ecstatic delight. No
other air, perhaps, shows so perfectly the reverent gaiety of
the carol spirit.

The fifteenth century produced a realistic type of German carol.
Here is the beginning of one such:—

It goes on to tell in naïve language the story of the wanderings
of the Holy Family during the Flight into Egypt.

This carol type lasted, and continued to develop, in Austria and
the Catholic parts of Germany through the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth centuries, and even in the nineteenth. In
Carinthia in the early nineteenth century, almost every parish
had its local poet, who added new songs to the old treasury.{23}

Particularly popular were the Hirtenlieder or shepherd songs,
in which the peasant worshippers joined themselves to the
shepherds of Bethlehem, and sought to share their devout
46emotions. Often these carols are of the most rustic character
and in the broadest dialect. They breathe forth a great
kindliness and homeliness, and one could fill pages with
quotations. Two more short extracts must, however, suffice
to show their quality.

How warm and hearty is their feeling for the Child:—

And what fatherly affection is here:—

47We have been following on German ground a mediaeval
tradition that has continued unbroken down to modern days;
but we must now take a leap backward in time, and consider
the beginnings of the Christmas carol in England.

Not till the fifteenth century is there any outburst of
Christmas poetry in English, though other forms of religious
lyrics were produced in considerable numbers in the thirteenth
and early fourteenth centuries. When the carols come at last,
they appear in the least likely of all places, at the end of a
versifying of the whole duty of man, by John Awdlay, a blind
chaplain of Haghmon, in Shropshire. In red letters he writes:—

and then follows a collection of twenty-five songs, some of
which are genuine Christmas carols, as one now understands
the word.{26}

A carol, in the modern English sense, may perhaps be defined
as a religious song, less formal and solemn than the ordinary
Church hymn—an expression of popular and often naïve devotional
feeling, a thing intended to be sung outside rather than
within church walls. There still linger about the word some
echoes of its original meaning, for “carol” had at first a secular
or even pagan significance: in twelfth-century France it was used
to describe the amorous song-dance which hailed the coming of
spring; in Italian it meant a ring- or song-dance; while by
English writers from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century it
was used chiefly of singing joined with dancing, and had no necessary
connection with religion. Much as the mediaeval Church,
with its ascetic tendencies, disliked religious dancing, it could not
always suppress it; and in Germany, as we shall see, there was
choral dancing at Christmas round the cradle of the Christ
Child. Whether Christmas carols were ever danced to in England
48is doubtful; many of the old airs and words have, however,
a glee and playfulness as of human nature following its natural
instincts of joy even in the celebration of the most sacred
mysteries. It is probable that some of the carols are religious
parodies of love-songs, written for the melodies of the originals,
and many seem by their structure to be indirectly derived from
the choral dances of farm folk, a notable feature being their
burden or refrain, a survival of the common outcry of the
dancers as they leaped around.

Awdlay’s carols are perhaps meant to be sung by “wassailing
neighbours, who make their rounds at Christmastide to drink a
cup and take a gift, and bring good fortune upon the house”{27}
—predecessors
of those carol-singers of rural England in the
nineteenth century, whom Mr. Hardy depicts so delightfully in
“Under the Greenwood Tree.” Carol-singing by a band of
men who go from house to house is probably a Christianization
of such heathen processions as we shall meet in less altered forms
in Part II.

It must not be supposed that the carols Awdlay gives are his
own work; and their exact date it is impossible to determine. Part
of his book was composed in 1426, but one at least of the carols
was probably written in the last half of the fourteenth century.
They seem indeed to be the later blossomings of the great springtime
of English literature, the period which produced Chaucer
and Langland, an innumerable company of minstrels and ballad-makers,
and the mystical poet, Richard Rolle of Hampole.[23]

Through the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth,
the flowering continued; and something like two hundred
carols of this period are known. It is impossible to attempt here
anything like representative quotation; I can only sketch in
49roughest outline the main characteristics of English carol literature,
and refer the reader for examples to Miss Edith Rickert’s
comprehensive collection, “Ancient English Carols, MCCCC-MDCC,”
or to the smaller but fine selection in Messrs. E. K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick’s “Early English Lyrics.” Many
may have been the work of goliards or wandering scholars, and a
common feature is the interweaving of Latin with English words.

Some, like the exquisite “I sing of a maiden that is makeles,”{29}

are rather songs to or about the Virgin than strictly Christmas
carols; the Annunciation rather than the Nativity is their
theme. Others again tell the whole story of Christ’s life. The
feudal idea is strong in such lines as these:—

On the whole, in spite of some mystical exceptions, the
mediaeval English carol is somewhat external in its religion;
there is little deep individual feeling; the caroller sings as a
member of the human race, whose curse is done away, whose
nature is exalted by the Incarnation, rather than as one whose
soul is athirst for God:—

Salvation is rather an objective external thing than an inward
and spiritual process. A man has but to pray devoutly to the
dear Mother and Child, and they will bring him to the heavenly
court. It is not so much personal sin as an evil influence in
humanity, that is cured by the great event of Christmas:—

But now that Christ is born, and man redeemed, one may be
blithe indeed:—

Sometimes the religious spirit almost vanishes, and the carol
becomes little more than a gay pastoral song:—

51But to others again, especially the lullabies, the hardness of
the Nativity, the shadow of the coming Passion, give a deep
note of sorrow and pathos; there is the thought of the sword
that shall pierce Mary’s bosom:—

The lullabies are quite the most delightful, as they are the
most human, of the carols. Here is an exquisitely musical verse
from one of 1530:—

52535455

CHAPTER III

CHRISTMAS POETRY (II)

The French Noël—Latin Hymnody in Eighteenth-century France—Spanish Christmas
Verse—Traditional Carols of Many Countries—Christmas Poetry in Protestant
Germany—Post-Reformation Verse in England—Modern English Carols.

THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS.

By Fouquet.

(Musée Condé, Chantilly.)

The Reformation marks a change in the character of Christmas
poetry in England and the larger part of Germany, and, instead
of following its development under Protestantism, it will be well
to break off and turn awhile to countries where Catholic tradition
remained unbroken. We shall come back later to Post-Reformation
England and Protestant Germany.

In French{1}
there is little or no Christmas poetry, religious in
character, before the fifteenth century; the earlier carols that
have come down to us are songs rather of feasting and worldly
rejoicing than of sacred things. The true Noël begins to appear
in fifteenth-century manuscripts, but it was not till the following
century that it attained its fullest vogue and was spread all over
the country by the printing presses. Such Noëls seem to have
been written by clerks or recognized poets, either for old airs or
for specially composed music. “To a great extent,” says Mr.
Gregory Smith, “they anticipate the spirit which stimulated the
Reformers to turn the popular and often obscene songs into good
and godly ballads.”{2}

Some of the early Noëls are not unlike the English carols of
the period, and are often half in Latin, half in French. Here
are a few such “macaronic” verses:—

The sixteenth century is the most interesting Noël period;
we find then a conflict of tendencies, a conflict between
Gallic realism and broad humour and the love of refined language
due to the study of the ancient classics. There are many anonymous
pieces of this time, but three important Noëlistes stand out
by name: Lucas le Moigne, Curé of Saint Georges, Puy-la-Garde,
near Poitiers; Jean Daniel, called “Maître Mitou,” a
priest-organist at Nantes; and Nicholas Denisot of Le Mans,
whose Noëls appeared posthumously under the pseudonym of
“Comte d’Alsinoys.”

Lucas le Moigne represents the esprit gaulois, the spirit that is
often called “Rabelaisian,” though it is only one side of the
genius of Rabelais. The good Curé was a contemporary of
57the author of “Pantagruel.” His “Chansons de Noëls nouvaulx”
was published in 1520, and contains carols in very varied styles,
some naïve and pious, others hardly quotable at the present day.
One of his best-known pieces is a dialogue between the Virgin
and the singers of the carol: Mary is asked and answers questions
about the wondrous happenings of her life. Here are four verses
about the Nativity:—

The influence of the “Pléiade,” with its care for form, its
respect for classical models, its enrichment of the French tongue
with new Latin words, is shown by Jean Daniel, who also owes
something to the poets of the late fifteenth century. Two
stanzas may be quoted from him:—

As for Denisot, I may give two charming verses from one of
his pastorals:—

One result of the Italian influences which came over
France in the sixteenth century was a fondness for diminutives.
Introduced into carols, these have sometimes a very
graceful effect:—

These diminutives are found again, though fewer, in a
particularly delightful carol:—

The singer goes on to tell how he went with his fellow-shepherds
and shepherdesses to Bethlehem:—

This is but one of a large class of French Noëls which make
the Nativity more real, more present, by representing the singer
as one of a company of worshippers going to adore the Child.
Often these are shepherds, but sometimes they are simply the
inhabitants of a parish, a town, a countryside, or a province, bearing
presents of their own produce to the little Jesus and His
parents. Barrels of wine, fish, fowls, sucking-pigs, pastry, milk,
fruit, firewood, birds in a cage—such are their homely gifts.
Often there is a strongly satiric note: the peculiarities and weaknesses
of individuals are hit off; the reputation of a place is
suggested, a village whose people are famous for their stinginess
offers cider that is half rain-water; elsewhere the inhabitants are
so given to law-suits that they can hardly find time to go to
Bethlehem.

Such Noëls with their vivid local colour, are valuable pictures
of the manners of their time. They are, unfortunately, too long
for quotation here, but any reader who cares to follow up the
subject will find some interesting specimens in a little collection
of French carols that can be bought for ten centimes.{9}
They are
of various dates; some probably were written as late as the
eighteenth century. In that century, and indeed in the seventeenth,
the best Christmas verses are those of a provincial and
rustic character, and especially those in patois; the more cultivated
poets, with their formal classicism, can ill enter into the spirit of
the festival. Of the learned writers the best is a woman, Françoise
Paschal, of Lyons (b. about 1610); in spite of her
Latinity she shows a real feeling for her subjects. Some of her
Noëls are dialogues between the sacred personages; one presents
62Joseph and Mary as weary wayfarers seeking shelter at all the
inns of Bethlehem and everywhere refused by host or hostess:—

The most remarkable of the patois Noëlistes of the seventeenth
century are the Provençal Saboly and the Burgundian La
Monnoye, the one kindly and tender, the other witty and
sarcastic. Here is one of Saboly’s Provençal Noëls:—

As for La Monnoye, here is a translation of one of his satirical
verses:—“When in the time of frost Jesus Christ came into
the world the ass and ox warmed Him with their breath in the
stable. How many asses and oxen I know in this kingdom of
Gaul! How many asses and oxen I know who would not
have done as much!”{12}

Apart from the rustic Noëls, the eighteenth century produced
little French Christmas poetry of any charm. Some of the carols
most sung in French churches to-day belong, however, to this
period, e.g., the “Venez, divin Messie” of the Abbé Pellegrin.{13}

One cannot leave the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries without some mention of its Latin hymnody. From a
date near 1700, apparently, comes the sweet and solemn “Adeste,
fideles”; by its music and its rhythm, perhaps, rather than by its
actual words it has become the best beloved of Christmas hymns.
The present writer has heard it sung with equal reverence and
heartiness in English, German, French, and Italian churches, and
no other hymn seems so full of the spirit of Christmas devotion—wonder,
64awe, and tenderness, and the sense of reconciliation
between Heaven and earth. Composed probably in France,
“Adeste, fideles” came to be used in English as well as French
Roman Catholic churches during the eighteenth century. In
1797 it was sung at the chapel of the Portuguese Embassy in
London; hence no doubt its once common name of “Portuguese
hymn.” It was first used in an Anglican church in 1841, when
the Tractarian Oakley translated it for his congregation at
Margaret Street Chapel, London.

Another fine Latin hymn of the eighteenth-century French
Church is Charles Coffin’s “Jam desinant suspiria.”{14}
It
appeared in the Parisian Breviary in 1736, and is well known in
English as “God from on high hath heard.”

The Revolution and the decay of Catholicism in France seem
to have killed the production of popular carols. The later nineteenth
century, however, saw a revival of interest in the Noël as a
literary form. In 1875 the bicentenary of Saboly’s death was
celebrated by a competition for a Noël in the Provençal tongue,
and something of the same kind has been done in Brittany.{15}

The Noël has attracted by its aesthetic charm even poets who are
anything but devout; Théophile Gautier, for instance, wrote a
graceful Christmas carol, “Le ciel est noir, la terre est blanche.”

On a general view of the vernacular Christmas poetry of
France it must be admitted that the devotional note is not very
strong; there is indeed a formal reverence, a courtly homage,
paid to the Infant Saviour, and the miraculous in the Gospel
story is taken for granted; but there is little sense of awe and
mystery. In harmony with the realistic instincts of the nation,
everything is dramatically, very humanly conceived; at times,
indeed, the personages of the Nativity scenes quite lose their sacred
character, and the treatment degenerates into grossness. At its
best, however, the French Noël has a gaiety and a grace, joined
to a genuine, if not very deep, piety, that are extremely charming.
Reading these rustic songs, we are carried in imagination to
French countrysides; we think of the long walk through the
snow to the Midnight Mass, the cheerful réveillon spread on the
65return, the family gathered round the hearth, feasting on wine
and chestnuts and boudins, and singing in traditional strains the
joys of Noël.

Across the Pyrenees, in Spain, the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries saw a great output of Christmas verse.
Among the chief writers were Juan López de Ubeda, Francisco
de Ocaña, and José de Valdivielso.{16}
Their villancicos remind one
of the paintings of Murillo; they have the same facility, the
same tender and graceful sentiment, without much depth. They
lack the homely flavour, the quaintness that make the French and
German folk-carols so delightful; they have not the rustic tang,
and yet they charm by their simplicity and sweetness.

Here are a few stanzas by Ocaña:—

More of a peasant flavour is found in some snatches of
Christmas carols given by Fernan Caballero in her sketch, “La
Noche de Navidad.”

In nearly every western language one finds traditional Christmas
carols. Europe is everywhere alive with them; they spring up
like wild flowers. Some interesting Italian specimens are given
by Signor de Gubernatis in his “Usi Natalizi.” Here are a
few stanzas from a Bergamesque cradle-song of the Blessed
Virgin:—

68With this lullaby may be compared a singularly lovely and
quite untranslatable Latin cradle-song of unknown origin:—

Curious little poems are found in Latin and other languages,
making a dialogue of the cries of animals at the news of
Christ’s birth.{22}
The following French example is fairly
typical:—

In Wales, in the early nineteenth century, carol-singing was
more popular, perhaps, than in England; the carols were sung to
the harp, in church at the Plygain or early morning service on
Christmas Day, in the homes of the people, and at the doors of
the houses by visitors.{24}
In Ireland, too, the custom of carol-singing
then prevailed.{25}
Dr. Douglas Hyde, in his “Religious
Songs of Connacht,” gives and translates an interesting Christmas
hymn in Irish, from which two verses may be quoted. They set
forth the great paradox of the Incarnation:—

Even in dour Scotland, with its hatred of religious festivals,
some kind of carolling survived here and there among Highland
folk, and a remarkable and very “Celtic” Christmas song has
been translated from the Gaelic by Mr. J. A. Campbell. It
begins:—

THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT: THE REST BY THE WAY

MASTER OF THE SEVEN SORROWS OF MARY

(ALSO ATTRIBUTED TO JOACHIM PATINIR)

(Vienna: Imperial Gallery)

SINGING “VOM HIMMEL HOCH” FROM A CHURCH TOWER AT CHRISTMAS.

By Ludwig Richter.

Before I close this study with a survey of Christmas poetry in
England after the Reformation, it may be interesting to follow the
developments in Protestant Germany. The Reformation gave a
great impetus to German religious song, and we owe to it some
of the finest of Christmas hymns. It is no doubt largely due to
Luther, that passionate lover of music and folk-poetry, that hymns
have practically become the liturgy of German Protestantism;
yet he did but give typical expression to the natural instincts
of his countrymen for song. Luther, though a rebel, was no
Puritan; we can hardly call him an iconoclast; he had a conservative
mind, which only gradually became loosened from its
old attachments. His was an essentially artistic nature: “I
would fain,” he said, “see all arts, especially music, in the service
of Him who has given and created them,” and in the matter of
hymnody he continued, in many respects, the mediaeval German
tradition. Homely, kindly, a lover of children, he had a deep
feeling for the festival of Christmas; and not only did he translate
into German “A solis ortus cardine” and “Veni, redemptor
71gentium,” but he wrote for his little son Hans one of the most
delightful and touching of all Christmas hymns—“Vom Himmel
hoch, da komm ich her.”

72“Vom Himmel hoch” has qualities of simplicity, directness,
and warm human feeling which link it to the less ornate forms of
carol literature. Its first verse is adapted from a secular song; its
melody may, perhaps, have been composed by Luther himself.
There is another Christmas hymn of Luther’s, too—“Vom
Himmel kam der Engel Schar”—written for use when “Vom
Himmel hoch” was thought too long, and he also composed
additional verses for the mediaeval “Gelobet seist du, Jesu
Christ.”

The first stanza alone is mediaeval, the remaining six of the
hymn are Luther’s.

The Christmas hymns of Paul Gerhardt, the seventeenth-century
Berlin pastor, stand next to Luther’s. They are more
subjective, more finished, less direct and forcible. Lacking the
finest qualities of poetry, they are nevertheless impressive by their
dignity and heartiness. Made for music, the words alone hardly
convey the full power of these hymns. They should be heard
sung to the old chorales, massive, yet sweet, by the lusty voices
of a German congregation. To English people they are probably
best known through the verses introduced into the “Christmas
Oratorio,” where the old airs are given new beauty by Bach’s
marvellous harmonies. The tone of devotion, one feels, in
Gerhardt and Bach is the same, immeasurably greater as is the
genius of the composer; in both there is a profound joy in the
Redemption begun by the Nativity, a robust faith joined to a
deep sense of the mystery of suffering, and a keen sympathy with
childhood, a tender fondness for the Infant King.

74The finest perhaps of Gerhardt’s hymns is the Advent “Wie
soll ich dich empfangen?” (“How shall I fitly meet Thee?”),
which comes early in the “Christmas Oratorio.” More closely
connected with the Nativity, however, are the Weihnachtslieder,
“Wir singen dir, Emanuel,” “O Jesu Christ, dein Kripplein ist,”
“Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen,” “Ich steh an deiner
Krippen hier,” and others. I give a few verses from the third:—

75One more German Christmas hymn must be mentioned,
Gerhard Tersteegen’s “Jauchzet, ihr Himmel, frohlocket, ihr
englischen Chöre.” Tersteegen represents one phase of the
mystical and emotional reaction against the religious formalism
and indifference of the eighteenth century. In the Lutheran
Church the Pietists, though they never seceded, somewhat
resembled the English Methodists; the Moravians formed a
separate community, while from the “Reformed” or Calvinistic
Church certain circles of spiritually-minded people, who drew
inspiration from the mediaeval mystics and later writers like
Böhme and Madame Guyon, gathered into more or less independent
groups for religious intercourse. Of these last Tersteegen
is a representative singer. Here are three verses from his best
known Christmas hymn:—

The note of personal religion, as distinguished from theological
doctrine, is stronger in German Christmas poetry than in
that of any other nation—the birth of Christ in the individual
soul, not merely the redemption of man in general, is a central
idea.

We come back at last to England. The great carol period is,
as has already been said, the fifteenth, and the first half of the
sixteenth, century; after the Reformation the English domestic
Christmas largely loses its religious colouring, and the best carols
of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are songs of
77feasting and pagan ceremonies rather than of the Holy Child and
His Mother. There is no lack of fine Christmas verse in the
Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, but for the most part it
belongs to the oratory and the chamber rather than the hall.
The Nativity has become a subject for private contemplation, for
individual devotion, instead of, as in the later Middle Ages, a
matter for common jubilation, a wonder-story that really
happened, in which, all alike and all together, the serious and the
frivolous could rejoice, something that, with all its marvel, could
be taken as a matter of course, like the return of the seasons or
the rising of the sun on the just and on the unjust.

English Christmas poetry after the mid-sixteenth century is,
then, individual rather than communal in its spirit; it is also a
thing less of the people, more of the refined and cultivated few.
The Puritanism which so deeply affected English religion was
abstract rather than dramatic in its conception of Christianity, it
was concerned less with the events of the Saviour’s life than with
Redemption as a transaction between God and man; St. Paul
and the Old Testament rather than the gospels were its inspiration.
Moreover, the material was viewed not as penetrated by
and revealing the spiritual, but as sheer impediment blocking out
the vision of spiritual things. Hence the extremer Puritans were
completely out of touch with the sensuous poetry of Christmas,
a festival which, as we shall see, they actually suppressed when
they came into power.

The singing of sacred carols by country people continued,
indeed, but the creative artistic impulse was lost. True carols
after the Reformation tend to be doggerel, and no doubt many of
the traditional pieces printed in such collections as Bramley and
Stainer’s[33]{37}
are debased survivals from the Middle Ages, or
perhaps new words written for old tunes. Such carols as “God
rest you merry, gentlemen,” have unspeakably delightful airs,
and the words charm us moderns by their quaintness and rusticity,
but they are far from the exquisite loveliness of the mediaeval
78things. Gleams of great beauty are, however, sometimes found
amid matter that in the process of transmission has almost ceased
to be poetry. Here, for instance, are five stanzas from the
traditional “Cherry-tree Carol”:—

The old carols sung by country folk have often not much to
do with the Nativity; they are sometimes rhymed lives of Christ
or legends of the Holy Childhood. Of the latter class the
strangest is “The Bitter Withy,” discovered in Herefordshire by
Mr. Frank Sidgwick. It tells how the little Jesus asked three
lads to play with Him at ball. But they refused:—

From these popular ballads, mediaeval memories in the rustic
mind, we must return to the devotional verse of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. Two of the greatest poets of the
Nativity, the Roman priests Southwell and Crashaw, are deeply
affected by the wave of mysticism which passed over Europe in
their time. Familiar as is Southwell’s “The Burning Babe,”
few will be sorry to find it here:—

As for Crashaw,

such are the wondrous paradoxes celebrated in his glowing
imagery. The contrast of the winter snow with the burning
81heat of Incarnate Love, of the blinding light of Divinity with
the night’s darkness, indeed the whole paradox of the Incarnation—Infinity
in extremest limitation—is nowhere realized with such
intensity as by him. Yet, magnificent as are his best lines, his
verse sometimes becomes too like the seventeenth-century Jesuit
churches, with walls overladen with decoration, with great
languorous pictures and air heavy with incense; and then we
long for the dewy freshness of the early carols.

The representative Anglican poets of the seventeenth century,
Herbert and Vaughan, scarcely rise to their greatest heights in
their treatment of Christmas, but with them as with the
Romanists it is the mystical note that is dominant. Herbert
sings:—

And Vaughan:—

In Herrick—how different a country parson from Herbert!—we
find a sort of pagan piety towards the Divine Infant which,
82though purely English in its expression, makes us think of some
French Noëliste or some present-day Italian worshipper of the
Bambino:—

Poems such as Herrick’s to the Babe of Bethlehem reveal in
their writers a certain childlikeness, an insouciance without
irreverence, the spirit indeed of a child which turns to its God
quite simply and naturally, which makes Him after its own child-image,
and sees Him as a friend who can be pleased with trifles—almost,
in fact, as a glorious playmate. Such a nature has no
intense feeling of sin, but can ask for forgiveness and then forget;
religion for it is rather an outward ritual to be duly and gracefully
performed than an inward transforming power. Herrick is a
strange exception among the Anglican singers of Christmas.

Milton’s great Nativity hymn, with its wondrous blending of
pastoral simplicity and classical conceits, is too familiar for quotation
here; it may be suggested, however, that this work of the
poet’s youth is far more Anglican than Puritan in its spirit.

Sweet and solemn Spenserian echoes are these verses from
Giles Fletcher’s “Christ’s Victory in Heaven”:—83

The old lullaby tradition is continued by Wither, though the
infant in the cradle is an ordinary human child, who is rocked to
sleep with the story of his Lord:—

When we come to the eighteenth century we find, where we
might least expect it, among the moral verses of Dr. Watts, a
charming cradle-song conceived in just the same way:—84

It is to the eighteenth century that the three most
popular of English Christmas hymns belong. Nahum Tate’s
“While shepherds watched their flocks by night”—one
of the very few hymns (apart from metrical psalms)
in common use in the Anglican Church before the
nineteenth century—is a bald and apparently artless
paraphrase of St. Luke which, by some accident, has
attained dignity, and is aided greatly by the simple and noble
tune now attached to it. Charles Wesley’s “Hark, the herald
angels sing,” or—as it should be—“Hark, how all the welkin
rings,” is much admired by some, but to the present writer seems
a mere piece of theological rhetoric. Byrom’s “Christians,
awake, salute the happy morn,” has the stiffness and formality or
its period, but it is not without a certain quaintness and dignity.
One could hardly expect fine Christmas poetry of an age whose
religion was on the one hand staid, rational, unimaginative, and
on the other “Evangelical” in the narrow sense, finding its centre
in the Atonement rather than the Incarnation.

The revived mediaevalism, religious and aesthetic, of the nineteenth
century, produced a number of Christmas carols. Some,
like Swinburne’s “Three damsels in the queen’s chamber,” with
85its exquisite verbal music and delightful colour, and William
Morris’s less successful “Masters, in this hall,” and “Outlanders,
whence come ye last?” are the work of unbelievers and bear
witness only to the aesthetic charm of the Christmas story; but
there are others, mostly from Roman or Anglo-Catholic sources,
of real religious inspiration.[34] The most spontaneous are Christina
Rossetti’s, whose haunting rhythms and delicate feeling are
shown at their best in her songs of the Christ Child. More
studied and self-conscious are the austere Christmas verses of
Lionel Johnson and the graceful carols of Professor Selwyn
Image. In one poem Mr. Image strikes a deeper and stronger
note than elsewhere; its solemn music takes us back to an earlier
century:—

Not a few contemporary poets have given us Christmas carols
or poems. Among the freshest and most natural are those of
Katharine Tynan, while Mr. Gilbert Chesterton has written
some Christmas lyrics full of colour and vitality, and with a true
mystical quality. Singing of Christmas, Mr. Chesterton is at
his best; he has instinctive sympathy with the spirit of the
festival, its human kindliness, its democracy, its sacramentalism,
its exaltation of the child:—

Thus opens a fine poem on the Nativity as symbolizing
miracle of birth, of childhood with its infinite possibilities,
eternal renewal of faith and hope.

878889

CHAPTER IV

CHRISTMAS IN LITURGY AND POPULAR DEVOTION

Advent and Christmas Offices of the Roman Church—The Three Masses of Christmas,
their Origin and their Celebration in Rome—The Midnight Mass in Many Lands—Protestant
Survivals of the Night Services—Christmas in the Greek Church—The
Eastern Epiphany and the Blessing of the Waters—The Presepio or Crib, its
Supposed Institution by St. Francis—Early Traces of the Crib—The Crib in
Germany, Tyrol, &c.—Cradle-rocking in Mediaeval Germany—Christmas Minstrels
in Italy and Sicily—The Presepio in Italy—Ceremonies with the Culla and
the Bambino in Rome—Christmas in Italian London—The Spanish Christmas—Possible
Survivals of the Crib in England.

THE NATIVITY.

From Add. MS. 32454 in the British Museum

(French, 15th century).

From a study of Christmas as reflected in lyric poetry, we now
pass to other forms of devotion in which the Church has
welcomed the Redeemer at His birth. These are of two kinds—liturgical
and popular; and they correspond in a large degree to
the successive ways of apprehending the meaning of Christmas
which we traced in the foregoing chapters. Strictly liturgical
devotions are little understanded of the people: only the clergy
can fully join in them; for the mass of the lay folk they are
mysterious rites in an unknown tongue, to be followed with
reverence, as far as may be, but remote and little penetrated with
humanity. Side by side with these, however, are popular devotions,
full of vivid colour, highly anthropomorphic, bringing the
mysteries of religion within the reach of the simplest minds, and
warm with human feeling. The austere Latin hymns of the
earlier centuries belong to liturgy; the vernacular Christmas
poetry of later ages is largely associated with popular devotion.

90Liturgiology is a vast and complicated, and except to the few,
an unattractive, subject. To attempt here a survey of the liturgies
in their relation to Christmas is obviously impossible; we must
be content to dwell mainly upon the present-day Roman offices,
which, in spite of various revisions, give some idea of the
mediaeval services of Latin Christianity, and to cast a few glances
at other western rites, and at those of the Greek Church.

Whatever may be his attitude towards Catholicism, or, indeed,
Christianity, no one sensitive to the music of words, or the
suggestions of poetic imagery, can read the Roman Breviary and
Missal without profound admiration for the amazing skill with
which the noblest passages of Hebrew poetry are chosen and
fitted to the expression of Christian devotion, and the gold of
psalmists, prophets, and apostles is welded into coronals for the
Lord and His saints. The office-books of the Roman Church
are, in one aspect, the greatest of anthologies.

Few parts of the Roman Breviary have more beauty than the
Advent[35] offices, where the Church has brought together the
majestic imagery of the Hebrew prophets, the fervent exhortation
of the apostles, to prepare the minds of the faithful for the
coming of the Christ, for the celebration of the Nativity.

Advent begins with a stirring call. If we turn to the opening
service of the Christian Year, the First Vespers of the First
Sunday in Advent, we shall find as the first words in the
“Proper of the Season” the trumpet-notes of St. Paul:
“Brethren, it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now is
our salvation nearer than when we believed.” This, the Little
Chapter for the office, is followed by the ancient hymn, “Creator
alme siderum,”{1}
chanting in awful tones the two comings of
91Christ, for redemption and for judgment; and then are sung the
words that strike the keynote of the Advent services, and are
heard again and again.

Rorate, coeli, desuper—Advent is a time of longing expectancy.
It is a season of waiting patiently for the Lord, whose coming in
great humility is to be commemorated at Christmas, to whose
coming again in His glorious majesty to judge both the quick
and the dead the Christian looks forward with mingled hope and
awe. There are four weeks in Advent, and an ancient symbolical
explanation interprets these as typifying four comings of
the Son of God: the first in the flesh, the second in the hearts
of the faithful through the Holy Spirit, the third at the death of
every man, and the fourth at the Judgment Day. The fourth
week is never completed (Christmas Eve is regarded as not part
of Advent), because the glory bestowed on the saints at the Last
Coming will never end.

The great Eucharistic hymn, “Gloria in excelsis,” is omitted
in Advent, in order, say the symbolists, that on Christmas night,
when it was first sung by the angels, it may be chanted with the
greater eagerness and devotion. The “Te Deum” at Matins
too is left unsaid, because Christ is regarded as not yet come.
But “Alleluia” is not omitted, because Advent is only half a
time of penitence: there is awe at the thought of the Coming
for Judgment, but joy also in the hope of the Incarnation to be
celebrated at Christmas, and the glory in store for the faithful.{3}

Looking forward is above all things the note of Advent; the
Church seeks to share the mood of the Old Testament saints,
and she draws more now than at any other season, perhaps, on
the treasures of Hebrew prophecy for her lessons, antiphons,
versicles, and responds. Looking for the glory that shall be
revealed, she awaits, at this darkest time of the year, the rising
92of the Sun of Righteousness. Rorate, coeli, desuper—the mood
comes at times to all idealists, and even those moderns who hope
not for a supernatural Redeemer, but for the triumph of social
justice on this earth, must be stirred by the poetry of the
Advent offices.

It is at Vespers on the seven days before Christmas Eve that
the Church’s longing finds its noblest expression—in the antiphons
known as the “Great O’s,” sung before and after the
“Magnificat,” one on each day. “O Sapientia,” runs the first,
“O Wisdom, which camest out of the mouth of the Most High,
and reachest from one end to another, mightily and sweetly
ordering all things: come and teach us the way of prudence.”
“O Adonai,” “O Root of Jesse,” “O Key of David,” “O Day-spring,
Brightness of Light Everlasting,” “O King of the
Nations,” thus the Church calls to her Lord, “O Emmanuel,
our King and Lawgiver, the Desire of all nations, and their
Salvation: come and save us, O Lord our God.”{4}

At last Christmas Eve is here, and at Vespers we feel the
nearness of the great Coming. “Lift up your heads: behold
your redemption draweth nigh,” is the antiphon for the last
psalm. “To-morrow shall be done away the iniquity of the
earth,” is the versicle after the Office Hymn. And before and
after the “Magnificat” the Church sings: “When the sun
shall have risen, ye shall see the King of kings coming forth
from the Father, as a bridegroom out of his chamber.”

Yet only with the night office of Matins does the glory of the
festival begin. There is a special fitness at Christmas in the
Church’s keeping watch by night, like the shepherds of Bethlehem,
and the office is full of the poetry of the season, full of
exultant joy. To the “Venite, exultemus Domino” a Christmas
note is added by the oft-repeated Invitatory, “Unto us the Christ
is born: O come, let us adore Him.” Psalms follow—among
them the three retained by the Anglican Church in her Christmas
Matins—and lessons from the Old and New Testaments and
the homilies of the Fathers, interspersed with Responsories
bringing home to the faithful the wonders of the Holy Night.
Some are almost dramatic; this, for instance:—93

It is the wonder of the Incarnation, the marvel of the spotless
Birth, the song of the Angels, the coming down from heaven of
true peace, the daybreak of redemption and everlasting joy, the
glory of the Only-begotten, now beheld by men—the supernatural
side, in fact, of the festival, that the Church sets forth in
her radiant words; there is little thought of the purely human
side, the pathos of Bethlehem.

It was customary at certain places, in mediaeval times, to lay
on the altar three veils, and remove one at each nocturn of
Christmas Matins. The first was black, and symbolised the
time of darkness before the Mosaic Law; the second white,
typifying, it would seem, the faith of those who lived under
that Law of partial revelation; the third red, showing the love
of Christ’s bride, the Church, in the time of grace flowing from
the Incarnation.{5}

A stately ceremony took place in England in the Middle Ages
at the end of Christmas Matins—the chanting of St. Matthew’s
genealogy of Christ. The deacon, in his dalmatic, with acolytes
carrying tapers, with thurifer and cross-bearer, all in albs and
unicles, went in procession to the pulpit or the rood-loft, to
sing this portion of the Gospel. If the bishop were present,
he it was who chanted it, and a rich candlestick was held to
light him.[36] Then followed the chanting of the “Te Deum.”{6}

The ceremony does not appear in the ordinary Roman books,
but it is still performed by the Benedictines, as one may read
in the striking account of the monastic Christmas given by
Huysmans in “L’Oblat.”{7}

94Where, as in religious communities, the offices of the Church
are performed in their full order, there follows on Matins that
custom peculiar to Christmas, the celebration of Midnight Mass.
On Christmas morning every priest is permitted to say three
Masses, which should in strictness be celebrated at midnight,
at dawn, and in full daylight. Each has its own Collect, Epistle,
and Gospel, each its own Introit, Gradual, and other anthems.
In many countries the Midnight Mass is the distinctive Christmas
service, a great and unique event in the year, something which
by its strangeness gives to the feast of the Nativity a place
by itself. Few Catholic rites are more impressive than this
Midnight Mass, especially in country places; through the
darkness and cold of the winter’s night, often for long distances,
the faithful journey to worship the Infant Saviour in the splendour
of the lighted church. It is a re-enactment of the visit of the
shepherds to the cave at Bethlehem, aglow with supernatural
light.

Various symbolical explanations of the three Masses were
given by mediaeval writers. The midnight celebration was
supposed to represent mankind’s condition before the Law of
Moses, when thick darkness covered the earth; the second, at
dawn, the time of the Law and the Prophets with its growing
light; the third, in full daylight, the Christian era of light and
grace. Another interpretation, adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas,
is more mystical; the three Masses stand for the threefold birth
of Christ, the first typifying the dark mystery of the eternal
generation of the Son, the second the birth of Christ the morning-star
within the hearts of men, the third the bodily birth of the
Son of Mary.{8}

At the Christmas Masses the “Gloria in excelsis” resounds
again. This song of the angels was at first chanted only at
Christmas; it was introduced into Rome during the fifth
century at Midnight Mass in imitation of the custom of the
Church of Jerusalem.{9}

It is, indeed, from imitation of the services at Jerusalem and
Bethlehem that the three Roman Masses of Christmas seem to
have sprung. From a late fourth-century document known as
95the “Peregrinatio Silviae,” the narrative of a pilgrimage to the
holy places of the east by a great lady from southern Gaul, it
appears that at the feast of the Epiphany—when the Birth of
Christ was commemorated in the Palestinian Church—two
successive “stations” were held, one at Bethlehem, the other
at Jerusalem. At Bethlehem the station was held at night
on the eve of the feast, then a procession was made to the
church of the Anastasis or Resurrection—where was the Holy
Sepulchre—arriving “about the hour when one man begins
to recognise another, i.e., near daylight, but before the day
has fully broken.” There a psalm was sung, prayers were
said, and the catechumens and faithful were blessed by the
bishop. Later, Mass was celebrated at the Great Church at
Golgotha, and the procession returned to the Anastasis, where
another Mass was said.{10}

At Bethlehem at the present time impressive services are
held on the Latin Christmas Day. The Patriarch comes from
Jerusalem, with a troop of cavalry and Kavasses in gorgeous
array. The office lasts from 10 o’clock on Christmas Eve
until long after midnight. “At the reading of the Gospel
the clergy and as many of the congregation as can follow leave
the church, and proceed by a flight of steps and a tortuous
rock-hewn passage to the Grotto of the Nativity, an irregular
subterranean chamber, long and narrow. They carry with
them a waxen image of an infant—the bambino—wrap it in
swaddling bands and lay it on the site which is said to be
that of the manger.”{11}

The Midnight Mass appears to have been introduced into
Rome in the first half of the fifth century. It was celebrated
by the Pope in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, while
the second Mass was sung by him at Sant’ Anastasia—perhaps
because of the resemblance of the name to the Anastasis at
Jerusalem—and the third at St. Peter’s.{12}
On Christmas Eve
the Pope held a solemn “station” at Santa Maria Maggiore,
and two Vespers were sung, the first very simple, the second, at
which the Pope pontificated, with elaborate ceremonial. Before
the second Vespers, in the twelfth century, a good meal had to
96be prepared for the papal household by the Cardinal-Bishop of
Albano. After Matins and Midnight Mass at Santa Maria
Maggiore, the Pope went in procession to Sant’ Anastasia for
Lauds and the Mass of the Dawn. The third Mass, at St.
Peter’s, was an event of great solemnity, and at it took place
in the year 800 that profoundly significant event, the coronation
of Charlemagne by Leo III.—a turning-point in European
history.{13}

Later it became the custom for the Pope, instead of proceeding
to St. Peter’s, to return to Santa Maria Maggiore for
the third Mass. On his arrival he was given a cane with a
lighted candle affixed to it; with this he had to set fire to
some tow placed on the capitals of the columns.{14}
The
ecclesiastical explanation of this strange ceremony was that
it symbolised the end of the world by fire, but one may conjecture
that some pagan custom lay at its root. Since 1870
the Pope, as “the prisoner of the Vatican,” has of course ceased
to celebrate at Santa Maria Maggiore or Sant’ Anastasia. The
Missal, however, still shows a trace of the papal visit to Sant’
Anastasia in a commemoration of this saint which comes as
a curious parenthesis in the Mass of the Dawn.

On Christmas Day in the Vatican the Pope blesses a hat
and a sword, and these are sent as gifts to some prince. The
practice is said to have arisen from the mediaeval custom for
the Holy Roman Emperor or some other sovereign to read
one of the lessons at Christmas Matins, in the papal chapel,
with his sword drawn.{15}

Celebrated in countries as distant from one another, both
geographically and in character, as Ireland and Sicily, Poland
and South America, the Midnight Mass naturally varies greatly
in its tone and setting. Sometimes it is little more than a
fashionable function, sometimes the devotion of those who attend
is shown by a tramp over miles of snow through the darkness
and the bitter wind.

In some charming memories of the Christmas of her childhood,
Madame Th. Bentzon thus describes the walk to the Midnight
Mass in a French country place about sixty years ago:—97

“I can see myself as a little girl, bundled up to the tip of my nose
in furs and knitted shawls, tiny wooden shoes on my feet, a lantern in
my hand, setting out with my parents for the Midnight Mass of Christmas
Eve…. We started off, a number of us, together in a stream
of light…. Our lanterns cast great shadows on the white road, crisp
with frost. As our little group advanced it saw others on their way,
people from the farm and from the mill, who joined us, and once on
the Place de l’Église we found ourselves with all the parishioners in a
body. No one spoke—the icy north wind cut short our breath; but
the voice of the chimes filled the silence…. We entered, accompanied
by a gust of wind that swept into the porch at the same time
we did; and the splendours of the altar, studded with lights, green
with pine and laurel branches, dazzled us from the threshold.”{16}

In devout Tyrol, the scenes on Christmas Eve before the Midnight
Mass are often extremely impressive, particularly in narrow
valleys where the houses lie scattered on the mountain slopes.
Long before midnight the torches lighting the faithful on their
way to Mass begin to twinkle; downward they move, now
hidden in pine-woods and ravines, now reappearing on the open
hill-side. More and more lights show themselves and throw ruddy
flashes on the snow, until at last, the floor of the valley reached,
they vanish, and only the church windows glow through the
darkness, while the solemn strains of the organ and chanting
break the silence of the night.{17}

Not everywhere has the great Mass been celebrated amid
scenes so still and devotional. In Madrid, says a writer of the
early nineteenth century, “the evening of the vigil is scarcely
dark when numbers of men, women, and boys are seen traversing
the streets with torches, and many of them supplied
with tambourines, which they strike loudly as they move
along in a kind of Bacchanal procession. There is a tradition
here that the shepherds who visited Bethlehem on the day of
the Nativity had instruments of this sort upon which they
expressed the sentiment of joy that animated them when
they received the intelligence that a Saviour was born.” At
the Midnight Mass crowds of people who, perhaps, had been
traversing the streets the whole night, came into the church
98with their tambourines and guitars, and accompanied the organ.
The Mass over, they began to dance in the very body of the
church.{18}
A later writer speaks of the Midnight Mass in
Madrid as a fashionable function to which many gay young
people went in order to meet one another.{19}
Such is the
character of the service in the Spanish-American cities. In
Lima the streets on Christmas Eve are crowded with gaily
dressed and noisy folks, many of them masked, and everybody
goes to the Mass.{20}
In Paris the elaborate music attracts
enormous and often not very serious crowds. In Sicily there
is sometimes extraordinary irreverence at the midnight services:
people take provisions with them to eat in church, and from time
to time go out to an inn for a drink, and between the offices
they imitate the singing of birds.{21}
We may see in such things
the licence of pagan festivals creeping within the very walls of the
sanctuary.

In the Rhineland Midnight Mass has been abolished, because
the conviviality of Christmas Eve led to unseemly behaviour at
the solemn service, but Mass is still celebrated very early—at four
or five—and great crowds of worshippers attend. It is a stirring
thing, this first Mass of Christmas, in some ancient town, when
from the piercing cold, the intense stillness of the early morning,
one enters a great church thronged with people, bright with
candles, warm with human fellowship, and hears the vast congregation
break out into a slow solemn chorale, full of devout joy that

It is interesting to trace survivals of the nocturnal Christmas
offices in Protestant countries. In German “Evangelical”
churches, midnight or early morning services were common in
the eighteenth century; but they were forbidden in some places
because of the riot and drunkenness which accompanied them.
The people seem to have regarded them as a part of their Christmas
revellings rather than as sacred functions; one writer compares
the congregation to a crowd of wild drunken sailors in a
99tavern, another gives disgusting particulars of disorders in a
church where the only sober man was the preacher.{22}

In Sweden the Christmas service is performed very early in the
morning, the chancel is lighted up with many candles, and the
celebrant is vested in a white chasuble with golden orphreys.{23}

A Midnight Mass is now celebrated in many Anglican
churches, but this is purely a modern revival. The most distinct
British survival is to be found in Wales in the early service
known as Plygain (dawn), sometimes a celebration of the
Communion. At Tenby at four o’clock on Christmas morning
it was customary for the young men of the town to escort the
rector with lighted torches from his house to the church.
Extinguishing their torches in the porch, they went in to the early
service, and when it was ended the torches were relighted and
the procession returned to the rectory. At St. Peter’s Church,
Carmarthen, an early service was held, to the light of coloured
candles brought by the congregation. At St. Asaph, Caerwys,
at 4 or 5 a.m., Plygain, consisting of carols sung round the
church in procession, was held.{24}
The Plygain continued in
Welsh churches until about the eighteen-fifties, and, curiously
enough, when the Established Church abandoned it, it was
celebrated in Nonconformist chapels.{25}

In the Isle of Man on Christmas Eve, or Oiel Verry (Mary’s
Eve), “a number of persons used to assemble in each parish
church and proceed to shout carols or ‘Carvals.’ There was no
unison or concert about the chanting, but a single person would
stand up with a lighted candle in his or her hand, and chant in
a dismal monotone verse after verse of some old Manx ‘Carval,’
until the candle was burnt out. Then another person would
start up and go through a similar performance. No fresh candles
might be lighted after the clock had chimed midnight.”{26}

One may conjecture that the common English practice of
ringing bells until midnight on Christmas Eve has also some
connection with the old-time Midnight Mass.

For the Greek Church Christmas is a comparatively unimportant
festival by the side of the Epiphany, the celebration of
100Christ’s Baptism; the Christmas offices are, however, full of
fine poetry. There is far less restraint, far less adherence to the
words of Scripture, far greater richness of original composition,
in the Greek than in the Roman service-books, and while there
is less poignancy there is more amplitude and splendour.
Christmas Day, with the Greeks, is a commemoration of the
coming of the Magi as well as of the Nativity and the adoration
of the shepherds, and the Wise Men are very prominent in the
services. The following hymn of St. Anatolius (fifth century),
from the First Vespers of the feast, is fairly typical of the
character of the Christmas offices:—

A beautiful rite called the “Peace of God” is performed in
Slavonic churches at the end of the “Liturgy” or Mass on
Christmas morning—the people kiss one another on both cheeks,
saying, “Christ is born!” To this the answer is made, “Of a
truth He is born!” and the kisses are returned. This is repeated
till everyone has kissed and been kissed by all present.{28}

We must pass rapidly over the feasts of saints within the
Octave of the western Christmas, St. Stephen (December 26),
St. John the Evangelist (December 27), the Holy Innocents
(December 28), and St. Sylvester (December 31). None of
these, except the feast of the Holy Innocents, have any special
connection with the Nativity or the Infancy, and the popular
customs connected with them will come up for consideration
in our Second Part.

The commemoration of the Circumcision (“when eight days
were accomplished for the circumcising of the child”) falls
naturally on January 1, the Octave of Christmas. It is not of
Roman origin, and was not observed in Rome until it had long
been established in the Byzantine and Gallican Churches.{29}
In
Gaul, as is shown by a decree of the Council of Tours in 567,
a solemn fast was held on the Circumcision and the two days
following it, in order to turn away the faithful from the pagan
festivities of the Kalends.{30}

The feast of the Epiphany on January 6, as we have seen, is
in the eastern Church a commemoration of the Baptism of Christ.
In the West it has become primarily the festival of the adoration
102of the Magi, the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. Still
in the Roman offices many traces of the baptismal commemoration
remain, and the memory of yet another manifestation of
Christ’s glory appears in the antiphon at “Magnificat” at the
Second Vespers of the feast:—

“We keep holy a day adorned by three wonders: to-day a star led
the Magi to the manger; to-day at the marriage water was made
wine; to-day for our salvation Christ was pleased to be baptized of
John in Jordan. Alleluia.”

On the Octave of the Epiphany at Matins the Baptism is the
central idea, and the Gospel at Mass bears on the same subject.
In Rome itself even the Blessing of the Waters, the distinctive
ceremony of the eastern Epiphany rite, is performed in certain
churches according to a Latin ritual.{31}
At Sant’ Andrea della
Valle, Rome, during the Octave of the Epiphany a Solemn Mass
is celebrated every morning in Latin, and afterwards, on each
of the days from January 7-13, there follows a Mass according
to one of the eastern rites: Greco-Slav, Armenian, Chaldean,
Coptic, Greco-Ruthenian, Greco-Melchite, and Greek.{32}
It is
a week of great opportunities for the liturgiologist and the lover
of strange ceremonial.

The Blessing of the Waters is an important event in all
countries where the Greek Church prevails. In Greece the
“Great Blessing,” as it is called, is performed in various ways
according to the locality; sometimes the sea is blessed, sometimes
a river or reservoir, sometimes merely water in a church. In
seaport towns, where the people depend on the water for their
living, the celebration has much pomp and elaborateness. At
the Piraeus enormous and enthusiastic crowds gather, and there
is a solemn procession of the bishop and clergy to the harbour,
where the bishop throws a little wooden cross, held by a long
blue ribbon, into the water, withdraws it dripping wet, and
sprinkles the bystanders. This is done three times. At Nauplia
and other places a curious custom prevails: the archbishop throws
a wooden cross into the waters of the harbour, and the fishermen
103of the place dive in after it and struggle for its possession; he
who wins it has the right of visiting all the houses of the town
and levying a collection, which often brings in a large sum. In
Samos all the women send to the church a vessel full of water
to be blessed by the priest; with this water the fields and the
trees are sprinkled.{33}

The sense attached to the ceremony by the Church is shown
in this prayer:—

“Thou didst sanctify the streams of Jordan by sending from
Heaven Thy Holy Spirit, and by breaking the heads of the dragons
lurking there. Therefore, O King, Lover of men, be Thou Thyself
present also now by the visitation of Thy Holy Spirit, and sanctify
this water. Give also to it the grace of ransom, the blessing of
Jordan: make it a fountain of incorruption; a gift of sanctification;
a washing away of sins; a warding off of diseases; destruction to
demons; repulsion to the hostile powers; filled with angelic strength;
that all who take and receive of it may have it for purification of
souls and bodies, for healing of sicknesses, for sanctification of houses,
and meet for every need.”{34}

Though for the Church the immersion of the cross represents
the Baptism of Christ, and the blessings springing from that
event are supposed to be carried to the people by the sprinkling
with the water, it is held by some students that the whole
practice is a Christianization of a primitive rain-charm—a piece
of sympathetic magic intended to produce rain by imitating the
drenching which it gives. An Epiphany song from Imbros
connects the blessing of rain with the Baptism of Christ, and
another tells how at the river Jordan “a dove came down, white
and feathery, and with its wings opened; it sent rain down on
the Lord, and again it rained and rained on our Lady, and again
it rained and rained on its wings.”{35}

The Blessing of the Waters is performed in the Greek church
of St. Sophia, Bayswater, London, on the morning of the
Epiphany, which, through the difference between the old and
new “styles,” falls on our 19th of January. All is done within
the church; the water to be blessed is placed on a table under
104the dome, and is sanctified by the immersion of a small cross;
afterwards it is sprinkled on everyone present, and some is taken
home by the faithful in little vessels.{36}

In Moscow and St. Petersburg the Blessing is a function of
great magnificence, but it is perhaps even more interesting as
performed in Russian country places. Whatever may be the
orthodox significance of the rite, to the country people it is the
chasing away of “forest demons, sprites, and fairies, once the gods
the peasants worshipped, but now dethroned from their high
estate,” who in the long dark winter nights bewitch and vex the
sons of men. A vivid and imaginative account of the ceremony
and its meaning to the peasants is given by Mr. F. H. E. Palmer
in his “Russian Life in Town and Country.” The district in
which he witnessed it was one of forests and of lakes frozen in
winter. On one of these lakes had been erected “a huge cross,
constructed of blocks of ice, that glittered like diamonds in the
brilliant winter sunlight…. At length, far away could be
heard the sound of human voices, singing a strange, wild melody.
Presently there was a movement in the snow among the trees,
and waving banners appeared as a procession approached,
headed by the pope in his vestments, and surrounded by the
village dignitaries, venerable, grey-bearded patriarchs.” A wide
space in the procession was left for “a strange and motley
band of gnomes and sprites, fairies and wood-nymphs,” who, as
the peasants believed, had been caught by the holy singing and
the sacred sign on the waving banner. The chanting still went
on as the crowd formed a circle around the glittering cross, and
all looked on with awe while half a dozen peasants with their axes
cut a large hole in the ice. “And now the priest’s voice is
heard, deep and sonorous, as he pronounces the words of doom.
Alas for the poor sprites! Into that yawning chasm they must
leap, and sink deep, deep below the surface of that ice-cold
water.”{37}

Following these eastern Epiphany rites we have wandered far
from the cycle of ideas generally associated with Christmas. We
105must now pass to those popular devotions to the Christ Child
which, though they form no part of the Church’s liturgy, she has
permitted and encouraged. It is in the West that we shall find
them; the Latin Church, as we have seen, makes far more of
Christmas than the Greek.

Rome is often condemned for using in her liturgy the dead
language of Latin, but it must not be forgotten that in every
country she offers to the faithful a rich store of devotional literature
in their own tongue, and that, supplementary to the liturgical
offices, there is much public prayer and praise in the vernacular.
Nor, in that which appeals to the eye, does she limit herself to
the mysterious symbolism of the sacraments and the ritual which
surrounds them; she gives to the people concrete, pictorial images
to quicken their faith. How ritual grew in mediaeval times into
full-fledged drama we shall see in the next chapter; here let us
consider that cult of the Christ Child in which the scene of
Bethlehem is represented not by living actors but in plastic art,
often most simple and homely.

The use of the “crib” (French crèche, Italian presepio, German
krippe) at Christmas is now universally diffused in the Roman
Church. Most readers of this book must have seen one of these
structures representing the stable at Bethlehem, with the Child in
the manger, His mother and St. Joseph, the ox and the ass, and
perhaps the shepherds, the three kings, or worshipping angels.
They are the delight of children, who through the season of
Christmas and Epiphany wander into the open churches at all
times of day to gaze wide-eyed on the life-like scene and offer a
prayer to their Little Brother. No one with anything of the
child-spirit can fail to be touched by the charm of the Christmas
crib. Faults of artistic taste there may often be, but these are
wont to be softened down by the flicker of tapers, the glow of
ruby lights, amidst the shades of some dim aisle or chapel, and the
scene of tender humanity, gently, mysteriously radiant, as though
with “bright shoots of everlastingness,” is full of religious and
poetic suggestions.

The institution of the presepio is often ascribed to St. Francis
of Assisi, who in the year 1224 celebrated Christmas at Greccio
106with a Bethlehem scene with a real ox and ass. About fifteen
days before the Nativity, according to Thomas of Celano, the
blessed Francis sent for a certain nobleman, John by name, and
said to him: “If thou wilt that we celebrate the present festival
of the Lord at Greccio, make haste to go before and diligently
prepare what I tell thee. For I would fain make memorial of
that Child who was born in Bethlehem, and in some sort behold
with bodily eyes His infant hardships; how He lay in a manger
on the hay, with the ox and the ass standing by.” The
good man prepared all that the Saint had commanded, and at
last the day of gladness drew nigh. The brethren were called
from many convents; the men and women of the town prepared
tapers and torches to illuminate the night. Finding all things
ready, Francis beheld and rejoiced: the manger had been prepared,
the hay was brought, and the ox and ass were led in.
“Thus Simplicity was honoured, Poverty exalted, Humility commended,
and of Greccio there was made as it were a new
Bethlehem. The night was lit up as the day, and was
delightsome to men and beasts…. The woodland rang with
voices, the rocks made answer to the jubilant throng.” Francis
stood before the manger, “overcome with tenderness and
filled with wondrous joy”; Mass was celebrated, and he, in
deacon’s vestments, chanted the Holy Gospel in an “earnest,
sweet, and loud-sounding voice.” Then he preached to the
people of “the birth of the poor King and the little town of
Bethlehem.” “Uttering the word ‘Bethlehem’ in the manner
of a sheep bleating, he filled his mouth with the sound,” and in
naming the Child Jesus “he would, as it were, lick his lips,
relishing with happy palate and swallowing the sweetness of that
word.” At length, the solemn vigil ended, each one returned
with joy to his own place.{38}

It has been suggested by Countess Martinengo{39}
that this
beautiful ceremony was “the crystallization of haunting memories
carried away by St. Francis from the real Bethlehem”; for he
visited the east in 1219-20, and the Greccio celebration took
place in 1224. St. Francis and his followers may well have
helped greatly to popularize the use of the presepio, but it can be
107traced back far earlier than their time. In the liturgical drama
known as the “Officium Pastorum,” which probably took shape
in the eleventh century, we find a praesepe behind the altar as the
centre of the action{40}
; but long before this something of the kind
seems to have been in existence in the church of Santa Maria
Maggiore in Rome—at one time called “Beata Maria ad praesepe.”
Here Pope Gregory III. (731-41) placed “a golden image of the
Mother of God embracing God our Saviour, in various gems.”{41}

According to Usener’s views this church was founded by Pope
Liberius (352-66), and was intended to provide a special home
for the new festival of Christmas introduced by him, while an
important part of the early Christmas ritual there was the celebration
of Mass over a “manger” in which the consecrated Host
was laid, as once the body of the Holy Child in the crib at Bethlehem.{42}

Further, an eastern homily of the late fourth century
suggests that the preacher had before his eyes a representation of
the Nativity. Such material representations, Usener conjectures,
may have arisen from the devotions of the faithful at the supposed
actual birthplace at Bethlehem, which would naturally be adorned
with the sacred figures of the Holy Night.{43}

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the crib can be traced
at Milan, Parma, and Modena, and an Italian example carved in
1478 still exists.{44}
The Bavarian National Museum at Munich
has a fine collection of cribs of various periods and from various
lands—Germany, Tyrol, Italy, and Sicily—showing what
elaborate care has been bestowed upon the preparation of these
models. Among them is a great erection made at Botzen in the
first half of the nineteenth century, and large enough to fill a
fair-sized room. It represents the central square of a town, with
imposing buildings, including a great cathedral not unlike our
St. Paul’s. Figures of various sizes were provided to suit the
perspective, and the crib itself was probably set up in the porch of
the church, while processions of puppets were arranged on the
wide open square. Another, made in Munich, shows the
adoration of the shepherds in a sort of ruined castle, while others,
from Naples, lay the scene among remains of classical temples.
One Tyrolese crib has a wide landscape background with a
108village and mountains typical of the country. The figures are
often numerous, and, as their makers generally dressed them in
the costume of their contemporaries, are sometimes exceedingly
quaint. An angel with a wasp-waist, in a powdered wig, a hat
trimmed with big feathers, and a red velvet dress with heavy gold
embroidery, seems comic to us moderns, yet this is how the
Ursuline nuns of Innsbruck conceived the heavenly messenger.
Many of the cribs and figures, however, are of fine artistic
quality, especially those from Naples and Sicily, and to the
student of costume the various types of dress are of great
interest.{45}

The use of the Christmas crib is by no means confined to
churches; it is common in the home in many Catholic regions,
and in at least one Protestant district, the Saxon Erzgebirge.{46}
In
Germany the krippe is often combined with the Christmas-tree;
at Treves, for instance, the present writer saw a magnificent tree
covered with glittering lights and ornaments, and underneath it
the cave of the Nativity with little figures of the holy persons.
Thus have pagan and Christian symbols met together.

There grew up in Germany, about the fourteenth century, the
extremely popular Christmas custom of “cradle-rocking,” a
response to the people’s need of a life-like and homely presentation
of Christianity. By the Kindelwiegen the lay-folk were brought
into most intimate touch with the Christ Child; the crib became
a cradle (wiege) that could be rocked, and the worshippers were
thus able to express in physical action their devotion to the new-born
Babe. The cradle-rocking seems to have been done at first
by priests, who impersonated the Virgin and St. Joseph, and sang
over the Child a duet:—

A NEAPOLITAN “PRESEPIO.”

Photo] [Meisenbach, Riffarth & Co., Munich.

109The choir and people took their part in the singing; and
dancing, to the old Germans a natural accompaniment of festive
song, became common around the cradle, which in time the
people were allowed to rock with their own hands.{47}
“In dulci
jubilo” has the character of a dance, and the same is true of
another delightful old carol, “Lasst uns das Kindlein wiegen,”
still used, in a form modified by later editors, in the churches of
the Rhineland. The present writer has heard it sung, very
slowly, in unison, by vast congregations, and very beautiful is its
mingling of solemnity, festive joy, and tender sentiment:—

Two Latin hymns, “Resonet in laudibus” and “Quem
pastores laudavere,”{49}
were also sung at the Kindelwiegen, and
110a charming and quite untranslatable German lullaby has come
down to us:—

It was by appeals like this Kindelwiegen to the natural, homely
instincts of the folk that the Church gained a real hold over the
masses, making Christianity during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries a genuinely popular religion in Germany.
Dr. Alexander Tille, the best historian of the German Christmas,
has an interesting passage on the subject: “In the dancing and
jubilation around the cradle,” he writes, “the religion of the
Cross, however much it might in its inmost character be opposed
to the nature of the German people and their essential healthiness,
was felt no longer as something alien. It had become naturalized,
but had lost in the process its very core. The preparation for a
life after death, which was its Alpha and Omega, had passed into
the background. It was not joy at the promised ‘Redemption’
that expressed itself in the dance around the cradle; for the
German has never learnt to feel himself utterly vile and sinful:
it was joy at the simple fact that a human being, a particular
human being in peculiar circumstances, was born into the
world…. The Middle Ages showed in the cradle-rocking ‘a
true German and most lovable childlikeness.’ The Christ Child
was the ‘universal little brother of all children of earth,’ and they
acted accordingly, they lulled Him to sleep, they fondled and
rocked Him, they danced before Him and leapt around Him in
dulci jubilo.”{51}
There is much here that is true of the cult of the
Christ Child in other countries than Germany, though perhaps
Dr. Tille underestimates the religious feeling that is often
joined to the human sentiment.

The fifteenth century was the great period for the Kindelwiegen,
the time when it appears to have been practised in all the
churches of Germany; in the sixteenth it began to seem
111irreverent to the stricter members of the clergy, and the
figure of the infant Jesus was in many places no longer rocked
in the cradle but enthroned on the altar.{52}
This usage is
described by Naogeorgus (1553):—

The placing of a “Holy Child” above the altar at Christmas
is still customary in many Roman Catholic churches.

Protestantism opposed the Kindelwiegen, on the grounds both
of superstition and of the disorderly proceedings that accompanied
it, but it was long before it was utterly extinguished even in the
Lutheran churches. In Catholic churches the custom did not
altogether die out, though the unseemly behaviour which often
attended it—and the growth of a pseudo-classical taste—caused
its abolition in most places.{54}

At Tübingen as late as 1830 at midnight on Christmas Eve
an image of the Christ Child was rocked on the tower of the
chief church in a small cradle surrounded with lights, while the
spectators below sang a cradle-song.{55}
According to a recent
writer the “rocking” is still continued in the Upper Innthal.{56}

In the Tyrolese cathedral city of Brixen it was once performed
every day between Christmas and Candlemas by the sacristan
or boy-acolytes. That the proceedings had a tendency to be
disorderly is shown by an eighteenth-century instruction to the
sacristan: “Be sure to take a stick or a thong of ox-hide, for the
boys are often very ill-behaved.”{57}

There are records of other curious ceremonies in German
or Austrian churches. At St. Peter am Windberge in
Mühlkreis in Upper Austria, during the service on Christmas
night a life-sized wooden figure of the Holy Child was offered in
112a basket to the congregation; each person reverently kissed it
and passed it on to his neighbour. This was done as late as
1883.{58}
At Crimmitschau in Saxony a boy, dressed as an
angel, used to be let down from the roof singing Luther’s
“Vom Himmel hoch,” and the custom was only given up when
the breaking of the rope which supported the singer had
caused a serious accident.{59}

It is in Italy, probably, that the cult of the Christ Child is
most ardently practised to-day. No people have a greater love
of children than the Italians, none more of that dramatic instinct
which such a form of worship demands. “Easter,” says
Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, “is the great popular feast in
the eastern Church, Christmas in the Latin—especially in Italy.
One is the feast of the next world, and the other of this. Italians
are fond of this world.”{60}
Christmas is for the poorer Italians
a summing up of human birthdays, an occasion for pouring
out on the Bambino parental and fraternal affection as well as
religious worship.

In Rome, Christmas used to be heralded by the arrival, ten
days before the end of Advent, of the Calabrian minstrels or
pifferari with their sylvan pipes (zampogne), resembling the
Scottish bagpipe, but less harsh in sound. These minstrels were
to be seen in every street in Rome, playing their wild plaintive
music before the shrines of the Madonna, under the traditional
notion of charming away her labour-pains. Often they would
stop at a carpenter’s shop “per politezza al messer San
Giuseppe.”{61}
Since 1870 the pifferari have become rare in Rome,
but some were seen there by an English lady quite recently.
At Naples, too, there are zampognari before Christmas, though
far fewer than there used to be; for one lira they will pipe their
rustic melodies before any householder’s street Madonna through
a whole novena.{62}

CALABRIAN SHEPHERDS PLAYING IN ROME AT CHRISTMAS.

After an Etching by D. Allan.

From Hone’s “Every-day Book” (London, 1826).

In Sicily, too, men come down from the mountains nine days
before Christmas to sing a novena to a plaintive melody accompanied
by ‘cello and violin. “All day long,” writes Signora
Caico about Montedoro in Caltanissetta, “the melancholy dirge
113was sung round the village, house after house, always the same
minor tune, the words being different every day, so that in nine
days the whole song was sung out…. I often looked out of
the window to see them at a short distance, grouped before a
house, singing their stanzas, well muffled in shawls, for the air
is cold in spite of the bright sunshine…. The flat, white
houses all round, the pure sky overhead, gave an Oriental setting
to the scene.”

Another Christmas custom in the same place was the singing
of a novena not outside but within some of the village houses
before a kind of altar gaily decorated and bearing at the top a
waxen image of the Child Jesus. “Close to it the orchestra was
grouped—a ’cello, two violins, a guitar, and a tambourine. The
kneeling women huddled in front of the altar. All had on their
heads their black mantelline. They began at once singing the
novena stanzas appointed for that day; the tune was primitive
and very odd: the first half of the stanza was quick and merry,
the second half became a wailing dirge.” A full translation of
a long and very interesting and pathetic novena is given by
Signora Caico.[39]{63}

The presepio both in Rome and at Naples is the special Christmas
symbol in the home, just as the lighted tree is in Germany. In
Rome the Piazza Navona is the great place for the sale of little
clay figures of the holy persons. (Is there perchance a survival
here of the sigillaria, the little clay dolls sold in Rome at the
Saturnalia?) These are bought in the market for two soldi each,
and the presepi or “Bethlehems” are made at home with cardboard
and moss.{64}
The home-made presepi at Naples are well
described by Matilde Serao; they are pasteboard models of the
landscape of Bethlehem—a hill with the sacred cave beneath it
and two or three paths leading down to the grotto, a little tavern,
a shepherd’s hut, a few trees, sometimes a stream in glittering
glass. The ground is made verdant with moss, and there is
114straw within the cave for the repose of the infant Jesus; singing
angels are suspended by thin wires, and the star of the Wise Men
hangs by an invisible thread. There is little attempt to realize
the scenery of the East; the Child is born and the Magi adore
Him in a Campanian or Calabrian setting.{66}

Italian churches, as well as Italian homes, have their presepi.
“Thither come the people, bearing humble gifts of chestnuts,
apples, tomatoes, and the like, which they place as offerings in
the hands of the figures. These are very often life-size. Mary
is usually robed in blue satin, with crimson scarf and white head-dress.
Joseph stands near her dressed in the ordinary working-garb.
The onlookers are got up like Italian contadini. The
Magi are always very prominent in their grand clothes, with
satin trains borne by black slaves, jewelled turbans, and satin tunics
all over jewels.”{67}

ST. FRANCIS INSTITUTES THE “PRESEPIO” AT GRECCIO.

By Giotto.

(Upper Church of St Francis, Assissi)

THE “BAMBINO” OF ARA COELI.

In Rome the two great centres of Christmas devotion are the
churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, where are preserved the relics
of the cradle of Christ, and Ara Coeli, the home of the most
famous Bambino in the world. A vivid picture of the scene at
Santa Maria Maggiore in the early nineteenth century is given
by Lady Morgan. She entered the church at midnight on
Christmas Eve to wait for the procession of the culla, or cradle.
“Its three ample naves, separated by rows of Ionic columns of
white marble, produced a splendid vista. Thousands of wax
tapers marked their form, and contrasted their shadows; some
blazed from golden candlesticks on the superb altars of the
lateral chapels…. Draperies of gold and crimson decked the
columns, and spread their shadows from the inter-columniations
over the marble pavement. In the midst of this imposing display
of church magnificence, sauntered or reposed a population which
displayed the most squalid misery. The haggard natives of
the mountains … were mixed with the whole mendicity of
Rome…. Some of these terrific groups lay stretched in
heaps on the ground, congregating for warmth; and as their
dark eyes scowled from beneath the mantle which half hid a
sheepskin dress, they had the air of banditti awaiting their
prey; others with their wives and children knelt, half asleep,
115round the chapel of the Santa Croce…. In the centre of
the nave, multitudes of gay, gaudy, noisy persons, the petty
shopkeepers, laquais, and popolaccio of the city, strolled and
laughed, and talked loud.” About three o’clock the service
began, with a choral swell, blazing torches, and a crowded
procession of priests of every rank and order. It lasted for two
hours; then began the procession to the cell where the cradle
lay, enshrined in a blaze of tapers and guarded by groups of
devotees. Thence it was borne with solemn chants to the
chapel of Santa Croce. A musical Mass followed, and the
culla being at last deposited on the High Altar, the wearied
spectators issued forth just as the dome of St. Peter’s caught
the first light of the morning.{68}

Still to-day the scene in the church at the five o’clock High
Mass on Christmas morning is extraordinarily impressive, with the
crowds of poor people, the countless lights at which the children
gaze in open-eyed wonder, the many low Masses said in the side
chapels, the imposing procession and the setting of the silver
casket on the High Altar. The history of the relics of the
culla—five long narrow pieces of wood—is obscure, but it is
admitted even by some orthodox Roman Catholics that there is
no sufficient evidence to connect them with Bethlehem.{69}

The famous Bambino at the Franciscan church of Ara Coeli on
the citadel of Rome is “a flesh-coloured doll, tightly swathed in
gold and silver tissue, crowned, and sparkling with jewels,” no
thing of beauty, but believed to have miraculous powers. An
inscription in the sacristy of the church states that it was made by
a devout Minorite of wood from the Mount of Olives, and given
flesh-colour by the interposition of God Himself. It has its own
servants and its own carriage in which it drives out to visit the
sick. There is a strange story of a theft of the wonder-working
image by a woman who feigned sickness, obtained permission to
have the Bambino left with her, and then sent back to the friars
another image dressed in its clothes. That night the Franciscans
heard great ringing of bells and knockings at the church door,
and found outside the true Bambino, naked in the wind and rain.
Since then it has never been allowed out alone.{70}

116All through the Christmas and Epiphany season Ara Coeli is
crowded with visitors to the Bambino. Before the presepio, where
it lies, is erected a wooden platform on which small boys and
girls of all ranks follow one another with little speeches—“preaching”
it is called—in praise of the infant Lord. “They
say their pieces,” writes Countess Martinengo, “with an infinite
charm that raises half a smile and half a tear.” They have the
vivid dramatic gift, the extraordinary absence of self-consciousness,
typical of Italian children, and their “preaching” is anything but
a wooden repetition of a lesson learned by heart. Nor is there
any irksome constraint; indeed to northerners the scene in the
church might seem irreverent, for the children blow toy trumpets
and their parents talk freely on all manner of subjects. The
church is approached by one hundred and twenty-four steps, making
an extraordinarily picturesque spectacle at this season, when they
are thronged by people ascending and descending, and by vendors
of all sorts of Christmas prints and images. On the Octave of
the Epiphany there is a great procession, ending with the blessing
of Rome by the Holy Child. The Bambino is carried out to the
space at the top of the giddy flight of marble steps, and a priest
raises it on high and solemnly blesses the Eternal City.{71}

A glimpse of the southern Christmas may be had in London
in the Italian colony in and around Eyre Street Hill, off the
Clerkenwell Road, a little town of poor Italians set down in the
midst of the metropolis. The steep, narrow Eyre Street Hill, with
its shops full of southern wares, is dingy enough by day, but after
dark on Christmas Eve it looks like a bit of Naples. The
windows are gay with lights and coloured festoons, there are
lantern-decked sweetmeat stalls, one old man has a presepio in his
room, other people have little altars or shrines with candles
burning, and bright pictures of saints adorn the walls. It is a
strangely pathetic sight, this festa of the children of the South,
this attempt to keep an Italian Christmas amid the cold damp
dreariness of a London slum. The colony has its own church,
San Pietro, copied from some Renaissance basilica at Rome, a
building half tawdry, half magnificent, which transports him who
enters it far away to the South. Like every Italian church, it is
117at once the Palace of the Great King and the refuge of the
humblest—no other church in London is quite so intimately the
home of the poor. Towards twelve o’clock on Christmas Eve
the deep-toned bell of San Pietro booms out over the colony, and
the people crowd to the Midnight Mass, and pay their devotions
at a great presepio set up for the veneration of the faithful.
When on the Octave of the Epiphany[40] the time comes to close
the crib, an impressive and touching ceremony takes place. The
afternoon Benediction over, the priest, with the acolytes, goes to
the presepio and returns to the chancel with the Bambino. Holding
it on his arm, he preaches in Italian on the story of the Christ
Child. The sermon ended, the notes of “Adeste, fideles” are
heard, and while the Latin words are sung the faithful kneel
at the altar rails and reverently kiss the Holy Babe. It is their
farewell to the Bambino till next Christmas.

A few details may here be given about the religious customs at
Christmas in Spain. The Midnight Mass is there the great
event of the festival. Something has already been said as to its
celebration in Madrid. The scene at the midnight service in a
small Andalusian country town is thus described by an English
traveller:—“The church was full; the service orderly; the people
of all classes. There were muleteers, wrapped in their blue and
white checked rugs; here, Spanish gentlemen, enveloped in their
graceful capas, or capes … here, again, were crowds of the
commonest people,—miners, fruitsellers, servants, and the like,—the
women kneeling on the rush matting of the dimly-lit church,
the men standing in dark masses behind, or clustering in
groups round every pillar…. At last, from under the altar,
the senior priest … took out the image of the Babe New-born,
reverently and slowly, and held it up in his hands for adoration.
Instantly every one crossed himself, and fell on his knees in silent
worship.”{72}
The crib is very popular in Spanish homes and is
the delight of children, as may be learnt from Fernan Caballero’s
interesting sketch of Christmas Eve in Spain, “La Noche de
Navidad.”{73}

118In England the Christmas crib is to be found nowadays in
most Roman, and a few Anglican, churches. In the latter it
is of course an imitation, not a survival. It is, however, possible
that the custom of carrying dolls about in a box at Advent or
Christmas time, common in some parts of England in the nineteenth
century, is a survival, from the Middle Ages, of something
like the crib. The so-called “vessel-cup” was “a box
containing two dolls, dressed up to represent the Virgin and the
infant Christ, decorated with ribbons and surrounded by flowers
and apples.” The box had usually a glass lid, was covered by
a white napkin, and was carried from door to door by a woman.{74}

It was esteemed very unlucky for any household not to be visited
by the “Advent images” before Christmas Eve, and the bearers
sang the well-known carol of the “Joys of Mary.”{75}
In
Yorkshire only one image was carried about.{76}
At Gilmorton,
Leicestershire, a friend of the present writer remembers that the
children used to carry round what they called a “Christmas
Vase,” an open box without lid in which lay three dolls side by
side, with oranges and sprigs of evergreen. Some people regarded
these as images of the Virgin, the Christ Child, and Joseph.[41]

In this study of the feast of the Nativity as represented in
liturgy and ceremonial we have already come close to what may
strictly be called drama; in the next chapter we shall cross the
border line and consider the religious plays of the Middle Ages
and the relics of or parallels to them found in later times.

119120121

CHAPTER V

CHRISTMAS DRAMA

Origins of the Mediaeval Drama—Dramatic Tendencies in the Liturgy—Latin
Liturgical Plays—The Drama becomes Laicized—Characteristics of the Popular
Drama—The Nativity in the English Miracle Cycles—Christmas Mysteries in
France—Later French Survivals of Christmas Drama—German Christmas
Plays—Mediaeval Italian Plays and Pageants—Spanish Nativity Plays—Modern
Survivals in Various Countries—The Star-singers, &c.

THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS.

From Broadside No. 305 in the Collection of the
Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House
(by permission).

(Photo lent by Mr. F. Sidgwick, who has published the print on a modern Christmas broadside.)

In this chapter the Christian side only of the Christmas drama
will be treated. Much folk-drama of pagan origin has gathered
round the festival, but this we shall study in our Second Part.
Our subject here is the dramatic representation of the story of the
Nativity and the events immediately connected with it. The
Christmas drama has passed through the same stages as the poetry
of the Nativity. There is first a monastic and hieratic stage,
when the drama is but an expansion of the liturgy, a piece of
ceremonial performed by clerics with little attempt at verisimilitude
and with Latin words drawn mainly from the Bible
or the offices of the Church. Then, as the laity come to take
a more personal interest in Christianity, we find fancy beginning
to play around the subject, bringing out its human pathos and
charm, until, after a transitional stage, the drama leaves the
sanctuary, passes from Latin to the vulgar tongue, is played
by lay performers in the streets and squares of the city, and,
while its framework remains religious, takes into itself episodes
of a more or less secular character. The Latin liturgical plays
are to the “miracles” and “mysteries” of the later Middle
Ages as a Romanesque church, solemn, oppressive, hieratic, to
122a Gothic cathedral, soaring, audacious, reflecting every phase of
the popular life.

The mediaeval religious drama{1}
was a natural development
from the Catholic liturgy, not an imitation of classical models.
The classical drama had expired at the break-up of the Roman
Empire; its death was due largely, indeed, to the hostility
of Christianity, but also to the rude indifference of the barbarian
invaders. Whatever secular dramatic impulses remained in the
Dark Ages showed themselves not in public and organized
performances, but obscurely in the songs and mimicry of
minstrels and in traditional folk-customs. Both of these classes
of practices were strongly opposed by the Church, because of
their connection with heathenism and the licence towards which
they tended. Yet the dramatic instinct could not be suppressed.
The folk-drama in such forms as the Feast of Fools found its
way, as we shall see, even into the sanctuary, and—most remarkable
fact of all—the Church’s own services took on more and
more a dramatic character.

While the secular stage decayed, the Church was building up
a stately system of ritual. It is needless to dwell upon the
dramatic elements in Catholic worship. The central act of
Christian devotion, the Eucharist, is in its essence a drama,
a representation of the death of the Redeemer and the participation
of the faithful in its benefits, and around this has gathered
in the Mass a multitude of dramatic actions expressing different
aspects of the Redemption. Nor, of course, is there merely
symbolic action; the offices of the Church are in great part
dialogues between priest and people, or between two sets of
singers. It was from this antiphonal song, this alternation
of versicle and respond, that the religious drama of the Middle
Ages took its rise. In the ninth century the “Antiphonarium”
traditionally ascribed to Pope Gregory the Great had become
insufficient for ambitious choirs, and the practice grew up of
supplementing it by new melodies and words inserted at the
beginning or end or even in the middle of the old antiphons.
The new texts were called “tropes,” and from the ninth to the
thirteenth century many were written. An interesting Christmas
123example is the following ninth-century trope ascribed to Tutilo
of St. Gall:—

“Hodie cantandus est nobis puer, quem gignebat ineffabiliter ante
tempora pater, et eundem sub tempore generavit inclyta mater.
(To-day must we sing of a Child, whom in unspeakable wise His
Father begat before all times, and whom, within time, a glorious mother
brought forth.)

Int[errogatio].

Quis est iste puer quem tam magnis praeconiis dignum vociferatis?
Dicite nobis ut collaudatores esse possimus. (Who is this Child whom
ye proclaim worthy of so great laudations? Tell us that we also may
praise Him.)

Resp[onsio].

Hic enim est quem praesagus et electus symmista Dei ad terram
venturum praevidens longe ante praenotavit, sicque praedixit. (This
is He whose coming to earth the prophetic and chosen initiate into the
mysteries of God foresaw and pointed out long before, and thus
foretold.)”

Here followed at once the Introit for the third Mass of Christmas
Day, “Puer natus est nobis, et filius datus est nobis, &c. (Unto
us a child is born, unto us a son is given.)” The question and
answer were no doubt sung by different choirs.{2}

One can well imagine that this might develop into a regular
little drama. As a matter of fact, however, it was from an
Easter trope in the same manuscript, the “Quem quaeritis,”
a dialogue between the three Maries and the angel at the
sepulchre, that the liturgical drama sprang. The trope became
very popular, and was gradually elaborated into a short symbolic
drama, and its popularity led to the composition of similar pieces
for Christmas and Ascensiontide. Here is the Christmas trope
from a St. Gall manuscript:—

“On the Nativity of the Lord at Mass let there be ready two deacons
having on dalmatics, behind the altar, saying:

Quem quaeritis in praesepe, pastores, dicite? (Whom seek ye in the
manger, say, ye shepherds?)124

Let two cantors in the choir answer:

Salvatorem Christum Dominum, infantem pannis involutum,
secundum sermonem angelicum. (The Saviour, Christ the Lord, a
child wrapped in swaddling clothes, according to the angelic word.)

And the deacons:

Adest hic parvulus cum Maria, matre sua, de qua, vaticinando,
Isaias Propheta: ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium; et nuntiantes
dicite quia natus est. (Present here is the little one with Mary, His
Mother, of whom Isaiah the prophet foretold: Behold, a virgin shall
conceive, and shall bring forth a son; and do ye say and announce that
He is born.)

Then let the cantor lift up his voice and say:

Alleluia, alleluia, jam vere scimus Christum natum in terris, de quo
canite, omnes, cum Propheta dicentes: Puer natus est! (Alleluia,
alleluia. Now we know indeed that Christ is born on earth, of whom
sing ye all, saying with the Prophet: Unto us a child is born.)”{3}

The dramatic character of this is very marked. A comparison
with later liturgical plays suggests that the two deacons in their
broad vestments were meant to represent the midwives mentioned
in the apocryphal Gospel of St. James, and the cantors the
shepherds.

A development from this trope, apparently, was the “Office of
the Shepherds,” which probably took shape in the eleventh
century, though it is first given in a Rouen manuscript of the
thirteenth. It must have been an impressive ceremony as performed
in the great cathedral, dimly lit with candles, and full of
mysterious black recesses and hints of infinity. Behind the high
altar a praesepe or “crib” was prepared, with an image of the
Virgin. After the “Te Deum” had been sung five canons or
their vicars, clad in albs and amices, entered by the great door of
the choir, and proceeded towards the apse. These were the
shepherds. Suddenly from high above them came a clear boy’s
voice: “Fear not, behold I bring you good tidings of great joy,”
and the rest of the angelic message. The “multitude of the
heavenly host” was represented by other boys stationed probably
125in the triforium galleries, who broke out into the exultant
“Gloria in excelsis.” Singing a hymn, “Pax in terris
nunciatur,” the shepherds advanced towards the crib where two
priests—the midwives—awaited them. These addressed to the
shepherds the question “Whom seek ye in the manger?” and
then came the rest of the “Quem quaeritis” which we already
know, a hymn to the Virgin being sung while the shepherds
adored the Infant. Mass followed immediately, the little drama
being merely a prelude.{4}

More important than this Office of the Shepherds is an
Epiphany play called by various names, “Stella,” “Tres Reges,”
“Magi,” or “Herodes,” and found in different forms at Limoges,
Rouen, Laon, Compiègne, Strasburg, Le Mans, Freising in
Bavaria, and other places. Mr. E. K. Chambers suggests that
its kernel is a dramatized Offertory. It was a custom for
Christian kings to present gold, frankincense, and myrrh at the
Epiphany—the offering is still made by proxy at the Chapel
Royal, St. James’s—and Mr. Chambers takes “the play to have
served as a substitute for this ceremony, when no king actually
regnant was present.”{5}
Its most essential features were the
appearance of the Star of Bethlehem to the Magi, and their
offering of the mystic gifts. The star, bright with candles,
hung from the roof of the church, and was sometimes made
to move.

In the Rouen version of the play it is ordered that on the day
of the Epiphany, Terce having been sung, three clerics, robed as
kings, shall come from the east, north, and south, and meet before
the altar, with their servants bearing the offerings of the Magi.
The king from the east, pointing to the star with his stick,
exclaims:—

“Stella fulgore nimio rutilat. (The star glows with exceeding
brightness.)”

The second monarch answers:

“Quae regem regum natum demonstrat. (Which shows the birth
of the King of Kings.)”126

And the third:

“Quem venturum olim prophetiae signaverant. (To whose coming
the prophecies of old had pointed.)”

Then the Magi kiss one another and together sing:

“Eamus ergo et inquiramus eum, offerentes ei munera: aurum, thus,
et myrrham. (Let us therefore go and seek Him, offering unto Him
gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.)”

Antiphons are sung, a procession is formed, and the Magi go to
a certain altar above which an image of the Virgin has been
placed with a lighted star before it. Two priests in dalmatics—apparently
the midwives—standing on either side of the altar,
inquire who the Magi are, and receiving their answer, draw aside
a curtain and bid them approach to worship the Child, “for He is
the redemption of the world.” The three kings do adoration,
and offer their gifts, each with a few pregnant words:—

The clergy and people then make their offerings, while the
Magi fall asleep and are warned by an angel to return home
another way. This they do symbolically by proceeding back to
the choir by a side aisle.{6}

In its later forms the Epiphany play includes the appearance of
Herod, who is destined to fill a very important place in the
mediaeval drama. Hamlet’s saying “he out-Herods Herod”
sufficiently suggests the raging tyrant whom the playwrights of the
Middle Ages loved. His appearance marks perhaps the first introduction
into the Christian religious play of the evil principle so
necessary to dramatic effect. At first Herod holds merely a mild
conversation with the Magi, begging them to tell him when they
have found the new-born King; in later versions of the play,
however, his wrath is shown on learning that the Wise Men have
127departed home by another way; he breaks out into bloodthirsty
tirades, orders the slaying of the Innocents, and in one form takes
a sword and brandishes it in the air. He becomes in fact the outstanding
figure in the drama, and one can understand why it was
sometimes named after him.

In the Laon “Stella” the actual murder of the Innocents was
represented, the symbolical figure of Rachel weeping over her
children being introduced. The plaint and consolation of Rachel,
it should be noted, seem at first to have formed an independent
little piece performed probably on Holy Innocents’ Day.{7}
This
later coalesced with the “Stella,” as did also the play of the
shepherds, and, at a still later date, another liturgical drama which
we must now consider—the “Prophetae.”

This had its origin in a sermon (wrongly ascribed to St.
Augustine) against Jews, Pagans, and Arians, a portion of which
was used in many churches as a Christmas lesson. It begins
with a rhetorical appeal to the Jews who refuse to accept Jesus
as the Messiah in spite of the witness of their own prophets.
Ten prophets are made to give their testimony, and then three
Pagans are called upon, Virgil, Nebuchadnezzar and the
Erythraean Sibyl. The sermon has a strongly dramatic
character, and when chanted in church the parts of the preacher
and the prophets were possibly distributed among different
choristers. In time it developed into a regular drama, and
more prophets were brought in. It was, indeed, the germ of the
great Old Testament cycles of the later Middle Ages.{8}

An extension of the “Prophetae” was the Norman or Anglo-Norman
play of “Adam,” which began with the Fall, continued
with Cain and Abel, and ended with the witness of the prophets.
In the other direction the “Prophetae” was extended by the
addition of the “Stella.” It so happens that there is no text of a
Latin drama containing both these extensions at the same time,
but such a play probably existed. From the mid-thirteenth to
the mid-fourteenth century, indeed, there was a tendency for the
plays to run together into cycles and become too long and
too elaborate for performance in church. In the eleventh
century, even, they had begun to pass out into the churchyard or
128the market-place, and to be played not only by the clergy but by
laymen. This change had extremely important effects on their
character. In the first place the vulgar tongue crept in. As
early, possibly, as the twelfth century are the Norman “Adam”
and the Spanish “Misterio de los Reyes Magos,” the former, as
we have seen, an extended vernacular “Prophetae,” the latter, a
fragment of a highly developed vernacular “Stella.” They are
the first of the popular as distinguished from the liturgical plays;
they were meant, as their language shows, for the instruction and
delight of the folk; they were not to be listened to, like the
mysterious Latin of the liturgy, in uncomprehending reverence,
but were to be understanded of the people.

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a progressive
supplanting of Latin by the common speech, until, in the great
cycles, only a few scraps of the church language were left to tell
of the liturgical origin of the drama. The process of popularization,
the development of the plays from religious ceremonial to
lively drama, was probably greatly helped by the goliards or
vagabond scholars, young, poor, and fond of amusement, who
wandered over Europe from teacher to teacher, from monastery
to monastery, in search of learning. Their influence is shown
not merely in the broadening of the drama, but also in its passing
from the Latin of the monasteries to the language of the
common folk.

A consequence of the outdoor performance of the plays was
that Christmas, in the northern countries at all events, was found
an unsuitable time for them. The summer was naturally
preferred, and we find comparatively few mentions of plays at
Christmas in the later Middle Ages. Whitsuntide and Corpus
Christi became more popular dates, especially in England, and
the pieces then performed were vast cosmic cycles, like the York,
Chester, Towneley, and “Coventry” plays, in which the
Christmas and Epiphany episodes formed but links in an immense
chain extending from the Creation to the Last Judgment, and
representing the whole scheme of salvation. It is in these
Nativity scenes, however, that we have the only English
renderings of the Christmas story in drama,{9}
and though they
129were actually performed not at the winter festival[42] but in the
summer, they give in so striking a way the feelings, the point of
view, of our mediaeval forefathers in regard to the Nativity that
we are justified in dealing with them here at some length.

As the drama became laicized, it came to reflect that strange
medley of conflicting elements, pagan and Christian, materialistic
and spiritual, which was the actual religion of the folk, as
distinguished from the philosophical theology of the doctors and
councils and the mysticism of the ascetics. The popularizing of
Christianity had reached its climax in most countries of western
Europe in the fifteenth century, approximately the period of the
great “mysteries.” However little the ethical teaching of Jesus
may have been acted upon, the Christian religion on its external
side had been thoroughly appropriated by the people and wrought
into a many-coloured polytheism, a true reflection of their minds.

The figures of the drama are contemporaries of the spectators
both in garb and character; they are not Orientals of ancient
times, but Europeans of the end of the Middle Ages. Bethlehem
is a “faier borow,” Herod a “mody king,” like unto some
haughty, capricious, and violent monarch of the time, the
shepherds are rustics of England or Germany or France or Italy,
the Magi mighty potentates with gorgeous trains, and the Child
Himself is a little being subject to all the pains and necessities of
infancy, but delighted with sweet and pleasant things like a bob
of cherries or a ball. The realism of the writers is sometimes
astounding, and comic elements often appear—to the people of
the Middle Ages religion was so real and natural a thing that
they could laugh at it without ceasing to believe in or to
love it.

The English mediaeval playwrights, it may safely be said, are
surpassed by no foreigners in their treatment of Christmas
subjects. To illustrate their way of handling the scenes I may
130gather from the four great cycles a few of the most interesting
passages.

From the so-called “Ludus Coventriae” I take the arrival of
Joseph and Mary at Bethlehem; they ask a man in the street
where they may find an inn:—

The scene immediately after the Nativity is delicately and
reverently presented in the York cycle. The Virgin worships
the Child, saluting Him thus:—

Joseph, who has gone out to get a light, returns, and this
dialogue follows:—

The playwrights are at their best in the shepherd scenes;
indeed these are the most original parts of the cycles, for here
the writers found little to help them in theological tradition, and
were thrown upon their own wit. In humorous dialogue and
naïve sentiment the lusty burgesses of the fifteenth century were
thoroughly at home, and the comedy and pathos of these scenes
must have been as welcome a relief to the spectators, from the
133long-winded solemnity of many of the plays, as they are to
modern readers. In the York mysteries the shepherds make
uncouth exclamations at the song of the angels and ludicrously
try to imitate it. The Chester shepherds talk in a very natural
way of such things as the diseases of sheep, sit down with much
relish to a meal of “ale of Halton,” sour milk, onions, garlick
and leeks, green cheese, a sheep’s head soused in ale, and other
items; then they call their lad Trowle, who grumbles because
his wages have not been paid, refuses to eat, wrestles with his
masters and throws them all. They sit down discomfited; then
the Star of Bethlehem appears, filling them with wonder, which
grows when they hear the angels’ song of “Gloria in excelsis.”
They discuss what the words were—“glore, glare with a glee,”
or, “glori, glory, glorious,” or, “glory, glory, with a glo.” At
length they go to Bethlehem, and arrived at the stable, the
first shepherd exclaims:—

Joseph is strangely described:—

Their gifts to the Infant are a bell, a flask, a spoon to eat
pottage with, and a cape. Trowle the servant has nought to
offer but a pair of his wife’s old hose; four boys follow with
presents of a bottle, a hood, a pipe, and a nut-hook. Quaint are
the words of the last two givers:—

Let no one deem this irreverent; the spirit of this adoration
of the shepherds is intensely devout; they go away longing to
tell all the world the wonder they have seen; one will become a
pilgrim; even the rough Trowle exclaims that he will forsake
the shepherd’s craft and will betake himself to an anchorite’s
hard by, in prayers to “wache and wake.”

More famous than this Chester “Pastores” are the two
shepherd plays in the Towneley cycle.{16}
The first begins with
racy talk, leading to a wrangle between two of the shepherds
about some imaginary sheep; then a third arrives and makes fun
of them both; a feast follows, with much homely detail; they
go to sleep and are awakened by the angelic message; after
much debate over its meaning and over the foretellings of the
prophets—one of them, strangely enough, quotes a Latin passage
from Virgil—they go to Bethlehem and present to the Child a
“lytyll spruse cofer,” a ball, and a gourd-bottle.

The second play surpasses in humour anything else in the
mediaeval drama of any country. We find the shepherds first
complaining of the cold and their hard lot; they are “al lappyd
in sorow.” They talk, almost like modern Socialists, of the
oppressions of the rich:—

To these shepherds joins himself Mak, a thieving neighbour.
Going to sleep, they make him lie between them, for they doubt
his honesty. But for all their precautions he manages to steal
a sheep, and carries it home to his wife. She thinks of an
ingenious plan for concealing it from the shepherds if they visit
the cottage seeking their lost property: she will pretend that she
is in child-bed and that the sheep is the new-born infant. So it
is wrapped up and laid in a cradle, and Mak sings a lullaby.
The shepherds do suspect Mak, and come to search his house;
his wife upbraids them and keeps them from the cradle. They
depart, but suddenly an idea comes to one of them:—

Mak tries to put him off, but the shepherd will have
his way:—

So the secret is out. Mak’s wife gives a desperate explanation:—

136Naturally this avails nothing, and her husband is given a
good tossing by the shepherds until they are tired out and lie
down to rest. Then comes the “Gloria in excelsis” and the
call of the angel:—

The shepherds wonder at the song, and one of them tries to
imitate it; then they go even unto Bethlehem, and there follows
the quaintest and most delightful of Christmas carols:—

The charm of this will be felt by every reader; it lies in a
curious incongruity—extreme homeliness joined to awe; the
Infinite is contained within the narrowest human bounds; God
Himself, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, a weak,
helpless child. But a step more, and all would have been
irreverence; as it is we have devotion, human, naïve, and
touching.

It would be interesting to show how other scenes connected
with Christmas are handled in the English miracle-plays: how
Octavian (Caesar Augustus) sent out the decree that all the
world should be taxed, and learned from the Sibyl the birth of
Christ; how the Magi were led by the star and offered their
symbolic gifts; how the raging of the boastful tyrant Herod, the
138Slaughter of the Innocents, and the Flight into Egypt are
treated; but these scenes, though full of colour, are on the whole
less remarkable than the shepherd and Nativity pieces, and space
forbids us to dwell upon them. They contain many curious
anachronisms, as when Herod invokes Mahounde, and talks
about his princes, prelates, barons, baronets and burgesses.[73]

The religious play in England did not long survive the
Reformation. Under the influence of Protestantism, with its
vigilant dread of profanity and superstition, the cycles were
shorn of many of their scenes, the performances became irregular,
and by the end of the sixteenth century they had mostly ceased
to be. Not sacred story, but the play of human character, was
henceforth the material of the drama. The rich, variegated
religion of the people, communal in its expression, tinged everywhere
with human colour, gave place to a sterner, colder, more
individual faith, fearful of contamination by the use of the
outward and visible.

There is little or no trace in the vernacular Christmas plays
of direct translation from one language into another, though
there was some borrowing of motives. Thus the Christmas
drama of each nation has its own special flavour.

If we turn to France, we find a remarkable fifteenth-century
cycle that belongs purely to the winter festival, and shows the
strictly Christmas drama at its fullest development. This great
mystery of the “Incarnacion et nativité de nostre saulveur et
redempteur Jesuchrist” was performed out-of-doors at Rouen
in 1474, an exceptional event for a northern city in winter-time.
The twenty-four establies or “mansions” set up for the various
scenes reached across the market-place from the “Axe and
Crown” Inn to the “Angel.”

139After a prologue briefly explaining its purpose, the mystery
begins, like the old liturgical plays, with the witness of the
prophets; then follows a scene in Limbo where Adam is shown
lamenting his fate, and another in Heaven where the Redemption
of mankind is discussed and the Incarnation decided upon. With
the Annunciation and the Visitation of the Virgin the first day
closed. The second day opened with the ordering by Octavian
of the world-census. The edict is addressed:—

Joseph, in order to fulfil the command of Cyrenius, governor
of Syria, leaves Nazareth for Bethlehem. A comic shepherds’
scene follows, with a rustic song:—

When Joseph and Mary reach the stable where the Nativity
is to take place, there is a charming dialogue. Joseph laments
over the meanness of the stable, Mary accepts it with calm
resignation.

At last Christ is born, welcomed by the song of the angels,
adored by His mother. In the heathen temples the idols fall;
Hell mouth opens and shows the rage of the demons, who make a
hideous noise; fire issues from the nostrils and eyes and ears of
Hell, which shuts up with the devils within it. And then the
angels in the stable worship the Child Jesus. The adoration of
the shepherds was shown with many naïve details for the delight
of the people, and the performance ended with the offering of a
sacrifice in Rome by the Emperor Octavian to an image of the
Blessed Virgin.{19}

The French playwrights, quite as much as the English, love
comic shepherd scenes with plenty of eating and drinking and
brawling. A traditional figure is the shepherd Rifflart, always a
laughable type. In the strictly mediaeval plays the shepherds are
true French rustics, but with the progress of the Renaissance
classical elements creep into the pastoral scenes; in a mystery
printed in 1507 Orpheus with the Nymphs and Oreads is
introduced. As might be expected, anachronisms often occur;
a peculiarly piquant instance is found in the S. Geneviève
mystery, where Caesar Augustus gets a piece of Latin translated
into French for his convenience.

THE SHEPHERDS OF BETHLEHEM.

From “Le grant Kalendrier compost des Bergiers”
(N. le Rouge, Troyes, 1529).

(Reproduced from a modern broadside published by Mr. F. Sidgwick.)

141Late examples of French Christmas mysteries are the so-called
“comedies” of the Nativity, Adoration of the Kings, Massacre
of the Innocents, and Flight into Egypt contained in the
“Marguerites” (published in 1547) of Marguerite, Queen of
Navarre, sister of François I. Intermingled with the traditional
figures treated more or less in the traditional way are personified
abstractions like Philosophy, Tribulation, Inspiration, Divine
Intelligence, and Contemplation, which largely rob the plays of
dramatic effect. There is some true poetry in these pieces, but
too much theological learning and too little simplicity, and in one
place the ideas of Calvin seem to show themselves.{20}

The French mystery began to fall into decay about the middle
of the sixteenth century. It was attacked on every side: by the
new poets of the Renaissance, who preferred classical to Christian
subjects; by the Protestants, who deemed the religious drama a
trifling with the solemn truths of Scripture; and even by the
Catholic clergy, who, roused to greater strictness by the challenge
of Protestantism, found the comic elements in the plays offensive
and dangerous, and perhaps feared that too great familiarity with
the Bible as represented in the mysteries might lead the people
into heresy.{21}
Yet we hear occasionally of Christmas dramas in
France in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
In the neighbourhood of Nantes, for instance, a play of the
Nativity by Claude Macée, hermit, probably written in the
seventeenth century, was commonly performed in the first half
of the nineteenth.{22}
At Clermont the adoration of the shepherds
was still performed in 1718, and some kind of representation of
the scene continued in the diocese of Cambrai until 1834, when
it was forbidden by the bishop. In the south, especially at
Marseilles, “pastorals” were played towards the end of the nineteenth
century; they had, however, largely lost their sacred
character, and had become a kind of review of the events of
the year.{23}
At Dinan, in Brittany, some sort of Herod play
was performed, though it was dying out, in 1886. It was
acted by young men on the Epiphany, and there was an
“innocent” whose throat they pretended to cut with a wooden
sword.{24}

142An interesting summary of a very full Nativity play performed
in the churches of Upper Gascony on Christmas Eve is given by
Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco.{25}
It ranges from the arrival of
Joseph and Mary at Bethlehem to the Flight into Egypt and the
Murder of the Innocents, but perhaps the most interesting parts
are the shepherd scenes. After the message of the angel—a child
in a surplice, with wings fastened to his shoulders, seated on a
chair drawn up to the ceiling and supported by ropes—the
shepherds leave the church, the whole of which is now regarded
as the stable of the Divine Birth. They knock for admittance,
and Joseph, regretting that the chamber is “so badly lighted,”
lets them in. They fall down before the manger, and so do the
shepherdesses, who “deposit on the altar steps a banner covered
with flowers and greenery, from which hang strings of small
birds, apples, nuts, chestnuts, and other fruits. It is their Christmas
offering to the curé; the shepherds have already placed a
whole sheep before the altar, in a like spirit.” The play is not
mere dumb-show, but has a full libretto.

A rather similar piece of dramatic ceremonial is described by
Barthélemy in his edition of Durandus,{26}
as customary in the
eighteenth century at La Villeneuve-en-Chevrie, near Mantes.
At the Midnight Mass a crèche with a wax figure of the Holy
Child was placed in the choir, with tapers burning about it.
After the “Te Deum” had been sung, the celebrant, accompanied
by his attendants, censed the crèche, to the sound of violins,
double-basses, and other instruments. A shepherd then prostrated
himself before the crib, holding a sheep with a sort of
little saddle bearing sixteen lighted candles. He was followed by
two shepherdesses in white with distaffs and tapers. A second
shepherd, between two shepherdesses, carried a laurel branch, to
which were fastened oranges, lemons, biscuits, and sweetmeats.
Two others brought great pains-bénits and lighted candles; then
came four shepherdesses, who made their adoration, and lastly
twenty-six more shepherds, two by two, bearing in one hand a
candle and in the other a festooned crook. The same ceremonial
was practised at the Offertory and after the close of the Mass.
All was done, it is said, with such piety and edification that
143St. Luke’s words about the Bethlehem shepherds were true of
these French swains—they “returned glorifying and praising
God for all the things they had heard and seen.”

In German there remain very few Christmas plays earlier than
the fifteenth century. Later periods, however, have produced
a multitude, and dramatic performances at Christmas have
continued down to quite modern times in German-speaking
parts.

At Oberufer near Pressburg—a German Protestant village in
Hungary—some fifty years ago, a Christmas play was performed
under the direction of an old farmer, whose office as instructor
had descended from father to son. The play took place at
intervals of from three to ten years and was acted on all Sundays
and festivals from Advent to the Epiphany. Great care was
taken to ensure the strictest piety and morality in the actors, and
no secular music was allowed in the place during the season for
the performances. The practices began as early as October.
On the first Sunday in Advent there was a solemn procession to
the hall hired for the play. First went a man bearing a gigantic
star—he was called the “Master Singer”—and another carrying
a Christmas-tree decked with ribbons and apples; then came all
the actors, singing hymns. There was no scenery and no
theatrical apparatus beyond a straw-seated chair and a wooden
stool. When the first was used, the scene was understood to be
Jerusalem, when the second, Bethlehem. The Christmas drama,
immediately preceded by an Adam and Eve play, and succeeded
by a Shrove Tuesday one, followed mediaeval lines, and included
the wanderings of Joseph and Mary round the inns of Bethlehem,
the angelic tidings to the shepherds, their visit to the manger, the
adoration of the Three Kings, and various Herod scenes.
Protestant influence was shown by the introduction of Luther’s
“Vom Himmel hoch,” but the general character was very much
that of the old mysteries, and the dialogue was full of quaint
naïveté.{27}

At Brixlegg, in Tyrol, as late as 1872 a long Christmas play
was acted under Catholic auspices; some of its dialogue was in
144the Tyrolese patois and racy and humorous, other parts, and
particularly the speeches of Mary and Joseph—out of respect for
these holy personages—had been rewritten in the eighteenth
century in a very stilted and undramatic style. Some simple
shepherd plays are said to be still presented in the churches of
the Saxon Erzgebirge.{28}

The German language is perhaps richer in real Christmas plays,
as distinguished from Nativity and Epiphany episodes in great
cosmic cycles, than any other. There are some examples in
mediaeval manuscripts, but the most interesting are shorter pieces
performed in country places in comparatively recent times, and
probably largely traditional in substance. Christianity by the
fourteenth century had at last gained a real hold upon the
German people, or perhaps one should rather say the German
people had laid a strong hold upon Christianity, moulding it into
something very human and concrete, materialistic often, yet not
without spiritual significance. In cradle-rocking and religious
dancing at Christmas the instincts of a lusty, kindly race expressed
themselves, and the same character is shown in the short popular
Christmas dramas collected by Weinhold and others.{29}
Many of
the little pieces—some are rather duets than plays—were sung or
acted in church or by the fireside in the nineteenth century, and
perhaps even now may linger in remote places. They are in
dialect, and the rusticity of their language harmonizes well with
their naïve, homely sentiment. In them we behold the scenes of
Bethlehem as realized by peasants, and their mixture of rough
humour and tender feeling is thoroughly in keeping with the
subject.

One is made to feel very vividly the amazement of the shepherds
at the wondrous and sudden apparition of the angels:—

The cold is keenly brought home to us when they come to the
manger:—

Very homely are their presents to the Child:—

One of the dialogues ends with a curious piece of ordinary
human kindliness, as if the Divine nature of the Infant were
quite forgotten for the moment:—

Far more interesting in their realism and naturalness are these
little plays of the common folk than the elaborate Christmas
dramas of more learned German writers, Catholic and Lutheran,
who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became increasingly
stilted and bombastic.

The Italian religious drama{34}
evolved somewhat differently from
that of the northern countries. The later thirteenth century saw
the outbreak of the fanaticism of the Flagellants or Battuti, vast
crowds of people of all classes who went in procession from church
to church, from city to city, scourging their naked bodies in terror
and repentance till the blood flowed. When the wild enthusiasm
of this movement subsided it left enduring traces in the foundation
of lay communities throughout the land, continuing in a more
sober way the penitential practices of the Flagellants. One of
their aids to devotion was the singing or reciting of vernacular
poetry, less formal than the Latin hymns of the liturgy, and
known as laude.[78] These laude developed a more or less dramatic
form, which gained the name of divozioni.[79] They were, perhaps
(though not certainly, for there seems to have been another tradition
derived from the regular liturgical drama), the source from
which sprang the gorgeously produced sacre rappresentazioni of
the fifteenth century.

The sacre rappresentazioni corresponded, though with considerable
differences, to the miracle-plays of England and France.
Their great period was the fifty years from 1470 to 1520, and
147they were performed, like the divozioni, by confraternities of
religious laymen. The actors were boys belonging to the
brotherhoods, and the plays were intended to be edifying for
youth. They are more refined than the northern religious
dramas, but only too often fall into insipidity.

Among the texts given by D’Ancona in his collection of sacre
rappresentazioni is a Tuscan “Natività,”{36}
opening with a pastoral
scene resembling those in the northern mysteries, but far less
vigorous. It cannot compare, for character and humour, with
the Towneley plays. Still the shepherds, whose names are Bobi
del Farucchio, Nencio di Pucchio, Randello, Nencietto, Giordano,
and Falconcello, are at least meant to have a certain rusticity, as
they feast on bread and cheese and wine, play to the Saviour on
bagpipe or whistle, and offer humble presents like apples and
cheese. The scenes which follow, the coming of the Magi
and the Murder of the Innocents, are not intrinsically of great
interest.

It is possible that this play may have been the spectacle
performed in Florence in 1466, as recorded by Machiavelli,
“to give men something to take away their thoughts from
affairs of state.” It “represented the coming of the three Magi
Kings from the East, following the star which showed the
Nativity of Christ, and it was of so great pomp and magnificence
that it kept the whole city busy for several months in arranging
and preparing it.”{37}

An earlier record of an Italian pageant of the Magi is this
account by the chronicler Galvano Flamma of what took place
at Milan in 1336:—

“There were three kings crowned, on great horses, … and an
exceeding great train. And there was a golden star running through
the air, which went before these three kings, and they came to the
columns of San Lorenzo, where was King Herod in effigy, with the
scribes and wise men. And they were seen to ask King Herod where
Christ was born, and having turned over many books they answered,
that He should be born in the city of David distant five miles from
Jerusalem. And having heard this, those three kings, crowned with
golden crowns, holding in their hands golden cups with gold, incense,
148and myrrh, came to the church of Sant’ Eustorgio, the star preceding
them through the air, … and a wonderful train, with resounding
trumpets and horns going before them, with apes, baboons, and
diverse kinds of animals, and a marvellous tumult of people. There
at the side of the high altar was a manger with ox and ass, and in the
manger was the little Christ in the arms of the Virgin Mother. And
those kings offered gifts unto Christ; then they were seen to sleep,
and a winged angel said to them that they should not return by the
region of San Lorenzo but by the Porta Romana; which also was
done. There was so great a concourse of the people and soldiers and
ladies and clerics that scarce anything like it was ever beheld. And it
was ordered that every year this festal show should be performed.”{38}

How suggestive this is of the Magi pictures of the fifteenth
century, with their gorgeous eastern monarchs and retinues of
countless servants and strange animals. No other story in the
New Testament gives such opportunity for pageantry as the Magi
scene. All the wonder, richness, and romance of the East,
all the splendour of western Renaissance princes could lawfully
be introduced into the train of the Three Kings. With
Gentile da Fabriano and Benozzo Gozzoli it has become a
magnificent procession; there are trumpeters, pages, jesters,
dwarfs, exotic beasts—all the motley, gorgeous retinue of the
monarchs of the time, while the kings themselves are romantic
figures in richest attire, velvet, brocade, wrought gold, and
jewels. It may be that much of this splendour was suggested
to the painters by dramatic spectacles which actually passed before
their eyes.

I have already alluded to the Spanish “Mystery of the Magi
Kings,” a mere fragment, but of peculiar interest to the historian
of the drama as one of the two earliest religious plays in a modern
European language. Though plays are known to have been
performed in Spain at Christmas and Easter in the Middle Ages,{39}

we have no further texts until the very short “Representation
of the Birth of Our Lord,” by Gómez Manrique, Señor de
Villazopeque (1412-91), acted at the convent at Calabazanos,
of which the author’s sister was Superior. The characters
149introduced are the Virgin, St. Joseph, St. Gabriel, St. Michael,
St. Raphael, another angel, and three shepherds.{40}

Touched by the spirit of the Renaissance, and particularly by
the influence of Virgil, is Juan del Encina of Salamanca (1469-1534),
court poet to the Duke of Alba, and author of two
Christmas eclogues.{41}
The first introduces four shepherds who
bear the names of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John, and are curiously mixed personages, their words being
half what might be expected from the shepherds of Bethlehem
and half sayings proper only to the authors of the Gospels. It
ends with a villancico or carol. The second eclogue is far more
realistic, and indeed resembles the English and French pastoral
scenes. The shepherds grumble about the weather—it has
been raining for two months, the floods are terrible, and no
fords or bridges are left; they talk of the death of a sacristan,
a fine singer; and they play a game with chestnuts; then comes
the angel—whom one of them calls a “smartly dressed lad”
(garzon repìcado)—to tell them of the Birth, and they go to
adore the Child, taking Him a kid, butter-cakes, eggs, and other
presents.

Infinitely more ambitious is “The Birth of Christ”{42}
by the
great Lope de Vega (1562-1635). It opens in Paradise,
immediately after the Creation, and ends with the adoration
of the Three Kings. Full of allegorical conceits and personified
qualities, it will hardly please the taste of modern minds.
Another work of Lope’s, “The Shepherds of Bethlehem,” a
long pastoral in prose and verse, published in 1612, contains,
amid many incongruities, some of the best of his shorter poems;
one lullaby, sung by the Virgin in a palm-grove while her Child
sleeps, has been thus translated by Ticknor:—

Apart from such modern revivals of the Christmas drama as
Mr. Laurence Housman’s “Bethlehem,” Miss Buckton’s
“Eager Heart,” Mrs. Percy Dearmer’s “The Soul of the
World,” and similar experiments in Germany and France, a
genuine tradition has lingered on in some parts of Europe into
modern times. We have already noticed some French and
German instances; to these may be added a few from other
countries.

In Naples there is no Christmas without the “Cantata dei
pastori”; it is looked forward to no less than the Midnight
Mass. Two or three theatres compete for the public favour in
the performance of this play in rude verse. It begins with Adam
and Eve and ends with the birth of Jesus and the adoration of
the shepherds. Many devils are brought on the stage, their
arms and legs laden with brass chains that rattle horribly. Awful
are their names, Lucifero, Satanasso, Belfegor, Belzebù, &c.
They not only tempt Adam and Eve, but annoy the Virgin and
St. Joseph, until an angel comes and frightens them away. Two
non-Biblical figures are introduced, Razzullo and Sarchiapone,
who are tempted by devils and aided by angels.{44}
In Sicily too
the Christmas play still lingers under the name of Pastorale.{45}

151A nineteenth-century Spanish survival of the “Stella” is
described in Fernan Caballero’s sketch, “La Noche de Navidad.”{46}

At the foot of the altar of the village church, according to
this account, images of the Virgin and St. Joseph were placed,
with the Holy Child between them, lying on straw. On either
side knelt a small boy dressed as an angel. Solemnly there
entered the church a number of men attired as shepherds, bearing
their offerings to the Child; afterwards they danced with slow
and dignified movements before the altar. The shepherds were
followed by the richest men of the village dressed as the Magi
Kings, mounted on horseback, and followed by their train.
Before them went a shining star. On reaching the church they
dismounted; the first, representing a majestic old man with
white hair, offered incense to the Babe; the others, Caspar and
Melchior, myrrh and gold respectively. This was done on the
feast of the Epiphany.

A remnant possibly of the “Stella” is to be found in a
Christmas custom extremely widespread in Europe and surviving
even in some Protestant lands—the carrying about of a star in
memory of the Star of Bethlehem. It is generally borne by a
company of boys, who sing some sort of carol, and expect a gift
in return.

The practice is—or was—found as far north as Sweden. All
through the Christmas season the “star youths” go about from
house to house. Three are dressed up as the Magi Kings, a
fourth carries on a stick a paper lantern in the form of a six-pointed
star, made to revolve and lighted by candles. There are
also a Judas, who bears the purse for the collection, and,
occasionally, a King Herod. A doggerel rhyme is sung, telling
the story of the Nativity and offering good wishes.{47}
In
Norway and Denmark processions of a like character were
formerly known.{48}

In Normandy at Christmas children used to go singing through
the village streets, carrying a lantern of coloured paper on a long
osier rod.{49}
At Pleudihen in Brittany three young men representing
the Magi sang carols in the cottages, dressed in their
holiday clothes covered with ribbons.{50}

152In England there appears to be no trace of the custom, which
is however found in Germany, Austria, Holland, Italy, Bohemia,
Roumania, Poland, and Russia.{51}

In Thuringia a curious carol used to be sung, telling how
Herod tried to tempt the Wise Men—

But they answer:—

In Tyrol the “star-singing” is very much alive at the present
day. In the Upper Innthal three boys in white robes, with
blackened faces and gold paper crowns, go to every house on
Epiphany Eve, one of them carrying a golden star on a pole.
They sing a carol, half religious, half comic—almost a little
drama—and are given money, cake, and drink. In the Ilsethal
the boys come on Christmas Eve, and presents are given them by
well-to-do people. In some parts there is but one singer, an old
man with a white beard and a turban, who twirls a revolving
star. A remarkable point about the Tyrolese star-singers is that
before anything is given them they are told to stamp on the
snowy fields outside the houses, in order to promote the growth
of the crops in summer.{53}

In Little Russia the “star” is made of pasteboard and has a
transparent centre with a picture of Christ through which the
light of a candle shines. One boy carries the star and another
twirls the points.{54}
In Roumania it is made of wood and
adorned with frills and little bells. A representation of the
“manger,” illuminated from behind, forms the centre, and the
star also shows pictures of Adam and Eve and angels.{55}

153A curious traditional drama, in which pagan elements seem
to have mingled with the Herod story, is still performed by the
Roumanians during the Christmas festival. It is called in
Wallachia “Vicleim” (from Bethlehem), in Moldavia and
Transylvania “Irozi” (plural from Irod = Herod). At least ten
persons figure in it: “Emperor” Herod, an old grumbling
monarch who speaks in harsh tones to his followers; an officer
and two soldiers in Roman attire; the three Magi, in Oriental
garb, a child, and “two comical figures—the paiaţa (the clown)
and the moşul, or old man, the former in harlequin accoutrement,
the latter with a mask on his face, a long beard, a hunch on his
back, and dressed in a sheepskin with the wool on the outside.
The plot of the play is quite simple. The officer brings the
news that three strange men have been caught, going to Bethlehem
to adore the new-born Messiah; Herod orders them to be
shown in: they enter singing in a choir. Long dialogues ensue
between them and Herod, who at last orders them to be taken to
prison. But then they address the Heavenly Father, and shout
imprecations on Herod, invoking celestial punishment on him, at
which unaccountable noises are heard, seeming to announce the
fulfilment of the curse. Herod falters, begs the Wise Men’s
forgiveness, putting off his anger till more opportune times. The
Wise Men retire…. Then a child is introduced, who goes
on his knees before Herod, with his hands on his breast, asking
pity. He gives clever answers to various questions and
foretells the Christ’s future career, at which Herod stabs him.
The whole troupe now strikes up a tune of reproach to Herod,
who falls on his knees in deep repentance.” The play is sometimes
performed by puppets instead of living actors.{56}

Christmas plays performed by puppets are found in other
countries too. In Poland “during the week between Christmas
and New Year is shown the Jaselki or manger, a travelling series
of scenes from the life of Christ or even of modern peasants, a
small travelling puppet-theatre, gorgeous with tinsel and candles,
and something like our ‘Punch and Judy’ show. The market-place
of Cracow, especially at night, is a very pretty spectacle, its
sidewalks all lined with these glittering Jaselki.”{57}
In Madrid
154at the Epiphany a puppet-play was common, in which the events
of the Nativity and the Infancy were mimed by wooden figures,{58}

and in Provence, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Christmas
scenes were represented in the same way.{59}

Last may be mentioned a curious Mexican mixture of religion
and amusement, a sort of drama called the “Posadas,” described
by Madame Calderon de la Barca in her “Life in Mexico”
(1843).{60}
The custom was based upon the wanderings of the
Virgin and St. Joseph in Bethlehem in search of repose. For
eight days these wanderings of the holy pair to the different
posadas were represented. On Christmas Eve, says the narrator,
“a lighted candle was put into the hand of each lady [this was at
a sort of party], and a procession was formed, two by two, which
marched all through the house … the whole party singing the
Litanies…. A group of little children, dressed as angels, joined
the procession…. At last the procession drew up before a
door, and a shower of fireworks was sent flying over our heads,
I suppose to represent the descent of the angels; for a group of
ladies appeared, dressed to represent the shepherds…. Then
voices, supposed to be those of Mary and Joseph, struck up a
hymn, in which they begged for admittance, saying that the
night was cold and dark, that the wind blew hard, and that they
prayed for a night’s shelter. A chorus of voices from within
refused admittance. Again those without entreated shelter, and
at length declared that she at the door, who thus wandered in the
night, and had not where to lay her head, was the Queen of
Heaven! At this name the doors were thrown wide open, and
the Holy Family entered singing. The scene within was very
pretty: a nacimiento…. One of the angels held a waxen baby
in her arms…. A padre took the baby from the angel and
placed it in the cradle, and the posada was completed. We then
returned to the drawing-room—angels, shepherds, and all, and
danced till supper-time.”{60}
Here the religious drama has sunk to
little more than a “Society” game.

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. MASACCIO

(Berlin: Kaiser Friedrich Museum)

155

POSTSCRIPT

Before we pass on to the pagan aspects of Christmas, let us
gather up our thoughts in an attempt to realize the peculiar
appeal of the Feast of the Nativity, as it has been felt in the past,
as it is felt to-day even by moderns who have no belief in the
historical truth of the story it commemorates.

This appeal of Christmas seems to lie in the union of two
modes of feeling which may be called the carol spirit and the
mystical spirit. The carol spirit—by this we may understand the
simple, human joyousness, the tender and graceful imagination,
the kindly, intimate affection, which have gathered round the
cradle of the Christ Child. The folk-tune, the secular song
adapted to a sacred theme—such is the carol. What a sense of
kindliness, not of sentimentality, but of genuine human feeling,
these old songs give us, as though the folk who first sang them
were more truly comrades, more closely knit together than we
under modern industrialism.

One element in the carol spirit is the rustic note that finds
its sanction as regards Christmas in St. Luke’s story of the
shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. One thinks
of the stillness over the fields, of the hinds with their rough talk,
“simply chatting in a rustic row,” of the keen air, and the great
burst of light and song that dazes their simple wits, of their
journey to Bethlehem where “the heaven-born Child all meanly
wrapt in the rude manger lies,” of the ox and ass linking the
beasts of the field to the Christmas adoration of mankind.[80]

For many people, indeed, the charm of Christmas is inseparably
associated with the country; it is lost in London—the city is too
vast, too modern, too sophisticated. It is bound up with the
thought of frosty fields, of bells heard far away, of bare trees
156against the starlit sky, of carols sung not by trained choirs but by
rustic folk with rough accent, irregular time, and tunes learnt by
ear and not by book.

Again, without the idea of winter half the charm of Christmas
would be gone. Transplanted in the imagination of western
Christendom from an undefined season in the hot East to Europe
at midwinter, the Nativity scenes have taken on a new pathos
with the thought of the bitter cold to which the great Little One
lay exposed in the rough stable, with the contrast between the
cold and darkness of the night and the fire of love veiled beneath
that infant form. Lux in tenebris is one of the strongest notes of
Christmas: in the bleak midwinter a light shines through the
darkness; when all is cold and gloom, the sky bursts into
splendour, and in the dark cave is born the Light of the World.

There is the idea of royalty too, with all it stands for of colour
and magnificence, though not so much in literature as in painting
is this side of the Christmas story represented. The Epiphany is
the great opportunity for imaginative development of the regal
idea. Then is seen the union of utter poverty with highest
kingship; the monarchs of the East come to bow before the
humble Infant for whom the world has found no room in the inn.
How suggestive by their long, slow syllables are the Italian names
of the Magi. Gasparre, Baldassarre, Melchiorre—we picture
Oriental monarchs in robes mysteriously gorgeous, wrought with
strange patterns, heavy with gold and precious stones. With
slow processional motion they advance, bearing to the King of
Kings their symbolic gifts, gold for His crowning, incense for
His worship, myrrh for His mortality, and with them come the
mystery, colour, and perfume of the East, the occult wisdom
which bows itself before the revelation in the Child.

Above all, as the foregoing pages have shown, it is the childhood
of the Redeemer that has won the heart of Europe for Christmas;
it is the appeal to the parental instinct, the love for the tender,
weak, helpless, yet all-potential babe, that has given the Church’s
festival its strongest hold. And this side of Christmas is
penetrated often by the mystical spirit—that sense of the Infinite
in the finite without which the highest human life is impossible.

157The feeling for Christmas varies from mere delight in the
Christ Child as a representative symbol on which to lavish
affection, as a child delights in a doll, to the mystical philosophy of
Eckhart, in whose Christmas sermons the Nativity is viewed as a
type of the Birth of God in the depths of man’s being. Yet
even the least spiritual forms of the cult of the Child are seldom
without some hint of the supersensual, the Infinite, and even in
Eckhart there is a love of concrete symbolism. Christmas
stands peculiarly for the sacramental principle that the outward
and visible is a sign and shadow of the inward and spiritual. It
means the seeing of common, earthly things shot through by the
glory of the Infinite. “Its note,” as has been said of a stage of
the mystic consciousness, the Illuminative Way, “is sacramental
not ascetic. It entails … the discovery of the Perfect One
ablaze in the Many, not the forsaking of the Many in order
to find the One … an ineffable radiance, a beauty and a reality
never before suspected, are perceived by a sort of clairvoyance
shining in the meanest things.”{1}
Christmas is the festival of the
Divine Immanence, and it is natural that it should have been
beloved by the saint and mystic whose life was the supreme
manifestation of the Via Illuminativa, Francis of Assisi.

Christmas is the most human and lovable of the Church’s
feasts. Easter and Ascensiontide speak of the rising and
exaltation of a glorious being, clothed in a spiritual body refined
beyond all comparison with our natural flesh; Whitsuntide tells
of the coming of a mysterious, intangible Power—like the wind,
we cannot tell whence It cometh and whither It goeth;
Trinity offers for contemplation an ineffable paradox of Pure
Being. But the God of Christmas is no ethereal form, no mere
spiritual essence, but a very human child, feeling the cold and the
roughness of the straw, needing to be warmed and fed and
cherished. Christmas is the festival of the natural body, of this
world; it means the consecration of the ordinary things of life,
affection and comradeship, eating and drinking and merrymaking;
and in some degree the memory of the Incarnation
has been able to blend with the pagan joyance of the New
Year.

158159

Part II—Pagan Survivals

160161

CHAPTER VI

PRE-CHRISTIAN WINTER FESTIVALS

The Church and Superstition—Nature of Pagan Survivals—Racial Origins—Roman
Festivals of the Saturnalia and Kalends—Was there a Teutonic Midwinter
Festival?—The Teutonic, Celtic, and Slav New Year—Customs attracted to
Christmas or January 1—The Winter Cycle of Festivals—Rationale of Festival
Ritual: (a) Sacrifice and Sacrament, (b) the Cult of the Dead, (c) Omens and
Charms for the New Year—Compromise in the Later Middle Ages—The Puritans
and Christmas—Decay of Old Traditions.

NEW YEAR MUMMERS IN MANCHURIA.

An Asiatic example of animal masks.

We have now to leave the commemoration of the Nativity of
Christ, and to turn to the other side of Christmas—its many
traditional observances which, though sometimes coloured by
Christianity, have nothing to do with the Birth of the Redeemer.
This class of customs has often, especially in the first millennium
of our era, been the object of condemnations by ecclesiastics, and
represents the old paganism which Christianity failed to extinguish.
The Church has played a double part, a part of sheer
antagonism, forcing heathen customs into the shade, into a more
or less surreptitious and unprogressive life, and a part of adaptation,
baptizing them into Christ, giving them a Christian name and
interpretation, and often modifying their form. The general
effect of Christianity upon pagan usages is well suggested by
Dr. Karl Pearson:—

“What the missionary could he repressed, the more as his church
grew in strength; what he could not repress he adopted or simply
left unregarded…. What the missionary tried to repress became
mediaeval witchcraft; what he judiciously disregarded survives to this
162day in peasant weddings and in the folk-festivals at the great changes
of season.”{1}

We find then many pagan practices concealed beneath a
superficial Christianity—often under the mantle of some saint—but
side by side with these are many usages never Christianized
even in appearance, and obviously identical with heathen customs
against which the Church thundered in the days of her youth.
Grown old and tolerant—except of novelties—she has long since
ceased to attack them, and they have themselves mostly lost all
definite religious meaning. As the old pagan faith decayed, they
tended to become in a literal sense “superstition,” something
standing over, like shells from which the living occupant has
gone. They are now often mere “survivals” in the technical
folk-lore sense, pieces of custom separated from the beliefs that
once gave them meaning, performed only because in a vague sort
of way they are supposed to bring good luck. In many cases
those who practise them would be quite unable to explain how or
why they work for good.

Mental inertia, the instinct to do and believe what has always
been done and believed, has sometimes preserved the animating
faith as well as the external form of these practices, but often all
serious significance has departed. What was once religious or
magical ritual, upon the due observance of which the welfare
of the community was believed to depend, has become mere
pageantry and amusement, often a mere children’s game.{2}

Sometimes the spirit of a later age has worked upon these
pagan customs, revivifying and transforming them, giving them
charm. Often, however, one does not find in them the poetry,
the warm humanity, the humour, which mark the creations of
popular Catholicism. They are fossils and their interest is that
of the fossil: they are records of a vanished world and help us to
an imaginative reconstruction of it. But further, just as on
a stratum of rock rich in fossils there may be fair meadows and
gardens and groves, depending for their life on the denudation
of the rock beneath, so have these ancient religious products
largely supplied the soil in which more spiritual and more
163beautiful things have flourished. Amid these, as has been well
said, “they still emerge, unchanged and unchanging, like the
quaint outcrops of some ancient rock formation amid rich
vegetation and fragrant flowers.”{3}

The survivals of pagan religion at Christian festivals relate not
so much to the worship of definite divinities—against this the
missionaries made their most determined efforts, and the names
of the old gods have practically disappeared—as to cults which
preceded the development of anthropomorphic gods with names
and attributes. These cults, paid to less personally conceived
spirits, were of older standing and no doubt had deeper roots in
the popular mind. Fundamentally associated with agricultural
and pastoral life, they have in many cases been preserved by the
most conservative element in the population, the peasantry.

Many of the customs we shall meet with are magical, rather
than religious in the proper sense; they are not directed to the
conciliation of spiritual beings, but spring from primitive man’s
belief “that in order to produce the great phenomena of nature
on which his life depended he had only to imitate them.”{4}
Even
when they have a definitely religious character, and are connected
with some spirit, magical elements are often found in them.

Before we consider these customs in detail it will be necessary
to survey the pagan festivals briefly alluded to in Chapter I., to
note the various ideas and practices that characterized them,
and to study the attitude of the Church towards survivals of such
practices while the conversion of Europe was in progress, and also
during the Middle Ages.

The development of religious custom and belief in Europe is
a matter of such vast complexity that I cannot in a book of this
kind attempt more than the roughest outline of the probable
origins of the observances, purely pagan or half-Christianized,
clustering round Christmas. It is difficult, in the present state
of knowledge, to discern clearly the contributions of different
peoples to the traditional customs of Europe, and even, in many
cases, to say whether a given custom is “Aryan” or pre-Aryan.
The proportion of the Aryan military aristocracy to the peoples
whom they conquered was not uniform in all countries, and
164probably was often small. While the families of the conquerors
succeeded in imposing their languages, it by no means
necessarily follows that the folk-practices of countries now
Aryan in speech came entirely or even chiefly from Aryan
sources. Religious tradition has a marvellous power of
persistence, and it must be remembered that the lands conquered
by men of Aryan speech had been previously occupied for
immense periods.{5}
Similarly, in countries like our own, which
have been successively invaded by Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons,
Danes, and Normans, it is often extraordinarily hard to say even
to what national source a given custom should be assigned.

It is but tentatively and with uncertain hands that scholars are
trying to separate the racial strains in the folk-traditions of
Europe, and here I can hardly do more than point out three
formative elements in Christian customs: the ecclesiastical, the
classical (Greek and Roman), and the barbarian, taking the last
broadly and without a minute racial analysis. So far, indeed, as
ritual, apart from mythology, is concerned, there seems to be
a broad common ground of tradition among the Aryan-speaking
peoples. How far this is due to a common derivation we need
not here attempt to decide. The folk-lore of the whole world,
it is to be noted, “reveals for the same stages of civilization
a wonderful uniformity and homogeneity…. This uniformity
is not, however, due to necessary uniformity of origin, but to
a great extent to the fact that it represents the state of
equilibrium arrived at between minds at a certain level and
their environment.”{6}

The scientific study of primitive religion is still almost in its
infancy, and a large amount of conjecture must necessarily enter
into any explanations of popular ritual that can be offered. In
attempting to account for Christmas customs we must be mindful,
therefore, of the tentative nature of the theories put forward.
Again, it is important to remember that ritual practices are far
more enduring than the explanations given to them. “The
antique religions,” to quote the words of Robertson Smith, “had
for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions
and practices … as a rule we find that while the practice was
165rigorously fixed, the meaning attached to it was extremely
vague, and the same rite was explained by different people in
different ways.”{7}

Thus if we can arrive at the significance of a rite at a
given period, it by no means follows that those who began it
meant the same thing. At the time of the conflict of the
heathen religions with Christianity elaborate structures of
mythology had grown up around their traditional ceremonial,
assigning to it meanings that had often little to do with its
original purpose. Often, too, when the purpose was changed,
new ceremonies were added, so that a rite may look very unlike
what it was at first.

With these cautions and reservations we must now try to trace
the connection between present-day or recent goings-on about
Christmas-time and the festival practices of pre-Christian Europe.

Christmas, as we saw in Chapter I., has taken the date of the
Natalis Invicti. We need not linger over this feast, for it was
not attended by folk-customs, and there is nothing to connect it
with modern survivals. The Roman festivals that really count
for our present purpose are the Kalends of January and, probably,
the Saturnalia. The influence of the Kalends is strongest
naturally in the Latin countries, but is found also all over Europe.
The influence of the Saturnalia is less certain; the festival is not
mentioned in ecclesiastical condemnations after the institution
of Christmas, and possibly its popularity was not so widespread
as that of the Kalends. There are, however, some curiously
interesting Christmas parallels to its usages.

The strictly religious feast of the Saturnalia{8}
was held on
December 17, but the festal customs were kept up for seven days,
thus lasting until the day before our Christmas Eve. Among
them was a fair called the sigillariorum celebritas, for the sale
of little images of clay or paste which were given away as
presents.[81] Candles seem also to have been given away, perhaps
166as symbols of, or even charms to ensure, the return of the sun’s
power after the solstice. The most remarkable and typical
feature, however, of the Saturnalia was the mingling of all
classes in a common jollity. Something of the character of
the celebration (in a Hellenized form) may be gathered from
the “Cronia” or “Saturnalia” of Lucian, a dialogue between
Cronus or Saturn and his priest. We learn from it that the
festivities were marked by “drinking and being drunk, noise
and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves,
singing naked, clapping of tremulous hands, an occasional ducking
of corked faces in icy water,” and that slaves had licence to revile
their lords.{9}

The spirit of the season may be judged from the legislation
which Lucian attributes to Cronosolon, priest and prophet of
Cronus, much as a modern writer might make Father Christmas
or Santa Klaus lay down rules for the due observance of Yule.
Here are some of the laws:—

“All business, be it public or private, is forbidden during the feast days,
save such as tends to sport and solace and delight. Let none follow their
avocations saving cooks and bakers.

All men shall be equal, slave and free, rich and poor, one with another.

Anger, resentment, threats, are contrary to law.

No discourse shall be either composed or delivered, except it be witty and
lusty, conducing to mirth and jollity. ”

There follow directions as to the sending of presents of money,
clothing, or vessels, by rich men to poor friends, and as to poor
men’s gifts in return. If the poor man have learning, his return
gift is to be “an ancient book, but of good omen and festive
humour, or a writing of his own after his ability…. For the
unlearned, let him send a garland or grains of frankincense.”
The “Cronosolon” closes with “Laws of the Board,” of which
the following are a few:—

“Every man shall take place as chance may direct; dignities and birth and
wealth shall give no precedence.167

All shall be served with the same wine…. Every man’s portion of meat
shall be alike.

When the rich man shall feast his slaves, let his friends serve
with him. ”{11}

Over the whole festival brooded the thought of a golden age in
the distant past, when Saturn ruled, a just and kindly monarch,
when all men were good and all men were happy.

A striking feature of the Saturnalia was the choosing by lot of a
mock king, to preside over the revels. His word was law, and he
was able to lay ridiculous commands upon the guests; “one,”
says Lucian, “must shout out a libel on himself, another dance
naked, or pick up the flute-girl and carry her thrice round the
house.”{12}
This king may have been originally the representative
of the god Saturn himself. In the days of the classical writers
he is a mere “Lord of Misrule,” but Dr. Frazer has propounded
the very interesting theory that this time of privilege and gaiety
was once but the prelude to a grim sacrifice in which he had
to die in the character of the god, giving his life for the world.{13}

Dr. Frazer’s theory, dependent for its evidence upon the narrative
of the martyrdom of a fourth-century saint, Dasius by name,
has been keenly criticized by Dr. Warde Fowler. He holds
that there is nothing whatever to show that the “Saturn” who
in the fourth century, according to the story, was sacrificed by
soldiers on the Danube, had anything to do with the customs of
ancient Rome.{14}
Still, in whatever way the king of the Saturnalia
may be explained, it is interesting to note his existence and compare
him with the merry monarchs whom we shall meet at
Christmas and Twelfth Night.

How far the Saturnalian customs in general were of old Latin
origin it is difficult to say; the name Saturnus (connected with
the root of serere, to sow) and the date point to a real Roman
festival of the sowing of the crops, but this was heavily overlaid
with Greek ideas and practice.{15}
It is especially important to
bear this in mind in considering Lucian’s statements.

The same is true of the festival of the January Kalends, a few
days after the Saturnalia. On January 1, the Roman New
168Year’s Day, the new consuls were inducted into office, and for
at least three days high festival was kept. The houses were
decorated with lights and greenery—these, we shall find, may be
partly responsible for the modern Christmas-tree. As at the
Saturnalia masters drank and gambled with slaves. Vota, or
solemn wishes of prosperity for the Emperor during the New
Year, were customary, and the people and the Senate were even
expected to present gifts of money to him. The Emperor
Caligula excited much disgust by publishing an edict requiring
these gifts and by standing in the porch of his palace to receive
them in person. Such gifts, not only presented to the Emperor,
but frequently exchanged between private persons, were called
strenae, a name still surviving in the French étrennes (New
Year’s presents).{16}

An interesting and very full account of the Kalends celebrations
is given in two discourses of Libanius, the famous Greek
sophist of the fourth century:—

“The festival of the Kalends,” he says, “is celebrated everywhere
as far as the limits of the Roman Empire extend…. Everywhere
may be seen carousals and well-laden tables; luxurious abundance is
found in the houses of the rich, but also in the houses of the poor
better food than usual is put upon the table. The impulse to spend
seizes everyone. He who the whole year through has taken pleasure
in saving and piling up his pence, becomes suddenly extravagant. He
who erstwhile was accustomed and preferred to live poorly, now at
this feast enjoys himself as much as his means will allow…. People
are not only generous towards themselves, but also towards their
fellow-men. A stream of presents pours itself out on all sides….
The highroads and footpaths are covered with whole processions of
laden men and beasts…. As the thousand flowers which burst
forth everywhere are the adornment of Spring, so are the thousand
presents poured out on all sides, the decoration of the Kalends feast.
It may justly be said that it is the fairest time of the year…. The
Kalends festival banishes all that is connected with toil, and allows
men to give themselves up to undisturbed enjoyment. From the
minds of young people it removes two kinds of dread: the dread of the
schoolmaster and the dread of the stern pedagogue. The slave also
it allows, so far as possible, to breathe the air of freedom….
169Another great quality of the festival is that it teaches men not to hold
too fast to their money, but to part with it and let it pass into other
hands.”{17}

The resemblances here to modern Christmas customs are very
striking. In another discourse Libanius speaks of processions on
the Eve of the festival. Few people, he says, go to bed; most
go about the streets with singing and leaping and all sorts of
mockery. The severest moralist utters no blame on this occasion.
When morning begins to dawn they decorate their houses with
laurels and other greenery, and at daybreak may go to bed to
sleep off their intoxication, for many deem it necessary at this
feast to follow the flowing bowl. On the 1st of January money
is distributed to the populace; on the 2nd no more presents are
given: it is customary to stay at home playing dice, masters and
slaves together. On the 3rd there is racing; on the 4th the
festivities begin to decline, but they are not altogether over on
the 5th.{18}

Another feature of the Kalends, recorded not in the pages
of classical writers but in ecclesiastical condemnations, was the
custom of dressing up in the hides of animals, in women’s clothes,
and in masks of various kinds.{19}
Dr. Tille{20}
regards this as
Italian in origin, but it seems likely that it was a native custom in
Greece, Gaul, Germany, and other countries conquered by the
Romans. In Greece the skin-clad mummers may have belonged
to the winter festivals of Dionysus supplanted by the Kalendae.{21}

The Church’s denunciations of pagan festal practices in the
winter season are mainly directed against the Kalends celebrations,
and show into how many regions the keeping of the
feast had spread. Complaints of its continued observance abound
in the writings of churchmen and the decrees of councils. In
the second volume of his “Mediaeval Stage”{22}
Mr. Chambers
has made an interesting collection of forty excerpts from such
denunciations, ranging in date from the fourth century to the
eleventh, and coming from Spain, Italy, Antioch, northern Africa,
Constantinople, Germany, England, and various districts of what
is now France.

170As a specimen I may translate a passage describing at some
length the practices condemned. It is from a sermon often
ascribed to St. Augustine of Hippo, but probably composed in
the sixth century, very likely by Caesarius of Arles in southern
Gaul:—

“On those days,” says the preacher, speaking of the Kalends of
January, “the heathen, reversing the order of all things, dress themselves
up in indecent deformities…. These miserable men, and
what is worse, some who have been baptized, put on counterfeit forms
and monstrous faces, at which one should rather be ashamed and sad.
For what reasonable man would believe that any men in their senses
would by making a stag (cervulum) turn themselves into the appearance
of animals? Some are clothed in the hides of cattle; others put on
the heads of beasts, rejoicing and exulting that they have so transformed
themselves into the shapes of animals that they no longer
appear to be men…. How vile, further, it is that those who have
been born men are clothed in women’s dresses, and by the vilest change
effeminate their manly strength by taking on the forms of girls,
blushing not to clothe their warlike arms in women’s garments; they
have bearded faces, and yet they wish to appear women…. There
are some who on the Kalends of January practise auguries, and do not
allow fire out of their houses or any other favour to anyone who asks.
Also they both receive and give diabolical presents (strenas). Some
country people, moreover, lay tables with plenty of things necessary
for eating … thinking that thus the Kalends of January will be a
warranty that all through the year their feasting will be in like measure
abundant. Now as for them who on those days observe any heathen
customs, it is to be feared that the name of Christian will avail them
nought. And therefore our holy fathers of old, considering that the
majority of men on those days became slaves to gluttony and riotous
living and raved in drunkenness and impious dancing, determined for
the whole world that throughout the Churches a public fast should be
proclaimed…. Let us therefore fast, beloved brethren, on those
days…. For he who on the Kalends shows any civility to foolish
men who are wantonly sporting, is undoubtedly a partaker of
their sin.”{23}

There are several points to be noted here. First, the zeal of
the Church against the Kalends celebrations as impious relics of
171heathenism: to root them out she even made the first three days
of the year a solemn fast with litanies.{24}
Next, the particular
offences should be observed. These are: first, the dressing up of
men in the hides of animals and the clothes of women; next, the
New Year auguries and the superstition about fire, the giving of
presents, and the laying of tables with good things; and last,
drunkenness and riot in general. All these we shall find fully
represented in modern Christmas customs.

That Roman customs either spread to Germany, or were
paralleled there, is shown by a curious letter written in 742 by St.
Boniface to Pope Zacharias. The saint complained that certain
Alamanni, Bavarians, and Franks refused to give up various
heathen practices because they had seen such things done in the
sacred city of Rome, close to St. Peter’s, and, as they deemed,
with the sanction of the clergy. On New Year’s Eve, it was
alleged, processions went through the streets of Rome, with
impious songs and heathen cries; tables of fortune were set up,
and at that time no one would lend fire or iron or any other
article to his neighbour. The Pope replied that these things were
odious to him, and should be so to all Christians; and next year
all such practices at the January Kalends were formally forbidden
by the Council of Rome.{25}

So much for Roman customs; if indeed such practices as
beast-masking are Roman, and not derived from the religion of
peoples conquered by the imperial legions. We must now turn
to the winter festivals of the barbarians with whom the Church
began to come into contact soon after the establishment of
Christmas.

Much attention has been bestowed upon a supposed midwinter
festival of the ancient Germans. In the mid-nineteenth century
it was customary to speak of Christmas and the Twelve Nights
as a continuation of the holy season kept by our forefathers at the
winter solstice. The festive fires of Christmas were regarded as
symbols of the sun, who then began his upward journey in the
heavens, while the name Yule was traced back to the Anglo-Saxon
word hwéol (wheel), and connected with the circular
172course of the sun through the wheeling-points of the solstices and
equinoxes. More recent research, however, has thrown the
gravest doubts upon the existence of any Teutonic festival at the
winter solstice.[82] It appears from philology and the study of
surviving customs that the Teutonic peoples had no knowledge of
the solstices and equinoxes, and until the introduction of the
Roman Calendar divided their year not into four parts but into
two, three, and six, holding their New Year’s Day with its
attendant festivities not at the end of December or beginning of
January, but towards the middle of November. At that time in
Central Europe the first snowfall usually occurred and the pastures
were closed to the flocks. A great slaughter of cattle would then
take place, it being impossible to keep the beasts in stall throughout
the winter, and this time of slaughter would naturally be
a season of feasting and sacrifice and religious observances.[83]{26}

The Celtic year, like the Teutonic, appears to have begun in
November with the feast of Samhain—a name that may mean
either “summer-end” or “assembly.” It appears to have been
in origin a “pastoral and agricultural festival, which in time came
to be looked upon as affording assistance to the powers of growth
in their conflict with the powers of blight,” and to have had many
features in common with the Teutonic feast at the same season,
for instance animal sacrifice, commemoration of the dead, and
omens and charms for the New Year.{27}

There is some reason also to believe that the New Year
173festival of the Slavs took place in the autumn and that its
usages have been transferred to the feast of the Nativity.{29}
A
description based on contemporary documents cannot be given
of these barbarian festivals; we have, rather, to reconstruct them
from survivals in popular custom. At the close of this book, when
such relics have been studied, we may have gained some idea
of what went on upon these pre-Christian holy-days. It is the
Teutonic customs that have been most fully recorded and discussed
by scholars, and these will loom largest in our review; at
the same time Celtic and Slav practices will be considered, and
we shall find that they often closely resemble those current in
Teutonic lands.

The customs of the old New Year feasts have frequently
wandered from their original November date, and to this fact we
owe whatever elements of northern paganism are to be found in
Christmas. Some practices seem to have been put forward to
Michaelmas; one side of the festivals, the cult of the dead, is
represented especially by All Saints’ and All Souls’ days (November
1 and 2). St. Martin’s Day (November 11) probably marks
as nearly as possible the old Teutonic date, and is still in Germany
an important folk-feast attended by many customs derived from
the beginning-of-winter festival. Other practices are found
strewn over various holy-days between Martinmas and Epiphany,
and concentrated above all on the Church’s feast of the Nativity
and the Roman New Year’s Day, January 1, both of which had
naturally great power of attraction.{30}

The progress of agriculture, as Dr. Tille points out,{31}
tended to
destroy the mid-November celebration. In the Carolingian
period an improvement took place in the cultivation of meadows,
and the increased quantity of hay made it possible to keep the
animals fattening in stall, instead of slaughtering them as soon as
the pastures were closed. Thus the killing-time, with its festivities,
became later and later. St. Andrew’s Day (November 30)
and St. Nicholas’s (December 6) may mark stages in its progress
into the winter. In St. Nicholas’s Day, indeed, we find a feast
that closely resembles Martinmas, and seems to be the same folk-festival
transferred to a later date. Again, as regards England we
174must remember the difference between its climate and that of
Central Europe. Mid-November would here not be a date
beyond which pasturing was impossible, and thus the slaughter
and feast held then by Angles and Saxons in their old German
home would tend to be delayed.{32}

Christmas, as will be gathered from the foregoing, cannot on its
pagan side be separated from the folk-feasts of November and
December. The meaning of the term will therefore here be so
extended as to cover the whole period between All Saints’ Day
and Epiphany. That this is not too violent a proceeding will
be seen later on.

For the purposes of this book it seems best to treat the winter
festivals calendarially, so to speak: to start at the beginning of
November, and show them in procession, suggesting, as far as
may be, the probable origins of the customs observed. Thus we
may avoid the dismemberment caused by taking out certain
practices from various festivals and grouping them under their
probable origins, a method which would, moreover, be perilous in
view of the very conjectural nature of the theories offered.

Before we pass to our procession of festivals, something must be
said about the general nature and rationale of the customs associated
with them. For convenience these customs may be divided
into three groups:—

Though these three classes overlap and it is sometimes difficult to
place a given practice exclusively in one of them, they will form
a useful framework for a brief account of the primitive ritual
which survives at the winter festivals.

I. Sacrificial and Sacramental Practices.

To most people, probably, the word “sacrifice” suggests an
offering, something presented to a divinity in order to obtain his
favour. Such seems to have been the meaning generally given to
175sacrificial rites in Europe when Christianity came into conflict
with paganism. It is, however, held by many scholars that the
original purpose of sacrifice was sacramental—the partaking by
the worshipper of the divine life, conceived of as present in the
victim, rather than the offering of a gift to a divinity.{33}

The whole subject of sacred animals is obscure, and in regard,
especially, to totemism—defined by Dr. Frazer{34}
as “belief in
the kinship of certain families with certain species of animals”
and practices based upon that belief—the most divergent views
are held by scholars. The religious significance which some have
seen in totemistic customs is denied by others, while there is
much disagreement as to the probability of their having been
widespread in Europe. Still, whatever may be the truth about
totemism, there is much that points to the sometime existence
in Europe of sacrifices that were not offerings, but solemn feasts
of communion in the flesh and blood of a worshipful animal.{35}

That the idea of sacrificial communion preceded the sacrifice-gift
is suggested by the fact that in many customs which appear to be
sacrificial survivals the body of the victim has some kind of
sacramental efficacy; it conveys a blessing to that which is brought
into contact with it. The actual eating and drinking of the
flesh and blood is the most perfect mode of contact, but the same
end seems to have been aimed at in such customs as the sprinkling
of worshippers with blood, the carrying of the victim in procession
from house to house, the burying of flesh in furrows to make the
crops grow, and the wearing of hides, heads, or horns of sacrificed
beasts.{36}
We shall meet, during the Christmas season, with
various practices that seem to have originated either in a sacrificial
feast or in some such sacramental rites as have just been
described. So peculiarly prominent are animal masks, apparently
derived from hide-, head-, and horn-wearing, that we may dwell
upon them a little at this point.

We have already seen how much trouble the Kalends custom
of beast-masking gave the ecclesiastics. Its probable origin is
thus suggested by Robertson Smith:—

“It is … appropriate that the worshipper should dress himself in
176the skin of a victim, and so, as it were, envelop himself in its sanctity.
To rude nations dress is not merely a physical comfort, but a fixed
part of social religion, a thing by which a man constantly bears on his
body the token of his religion, and which is itself a charm and a means
of divine protection…. When the dress of sacrificial skin, which at
once declared a man’s religion and his sacred kindred, ceased to be
used in ordinary life, it was still retained in holy and especially in
piacular functions; … examples are afforded by the Dionysiac
mysteries and other Greek rites, and by almost every rude religion;
while in later cults the old rite survives at least in the religious use of
animal masks.”[84]{37}

If we accept the animal-worship and sacrificial communion
theory, many a Christmas custom will carry us back in thought to
a stage of religion far earlier than the Greek and Roman classics
or the Celtic and Teutonic mythology of the conversion period:
we shall be taken back to a time before men had come to have
anthropomorphic gods, when they were not conscious of their
superiority to the beasts of the field, but regarded these beings,
mysterious in their actions, extraordinary in their powers, as
incarnations of potent spirits. At this stage of thought, it would
seem, there were as yet no definite divinities with personal names
and characters, but the world was full of spirits immanent in
animal or plant or chosen human being, and able to pass from
one incarnation to another. Or indeed it may be that animal
sacrifice originated at a stage of religion before the idea of definite
“spirits” had arisen, when man was conscious rather of a vague
force like the Melanesian mana, in himself and in almost everything,
and “constantly trembling on the verge of personality.”{38}

“Mana ” better than “god” or “spirit” may express that with
which the partaker in the communal feast originally sought
contact. “When you sacrifice,” to quote some words of Miss
Jane Harrison, “you build as it were a bridge between your
mana, your will, your desire, which is weak and impotent, and
177that unseen outside mana which you believe to be strong and
efficacious. In the fruits of the earth which grow by some
unseen power there is much mana; you want that mana. In
the loud-roaring bull and the thunder is much mana; you want
that mana. It would be well to get some, to eat a piece of that
bull raw, but it is dangerous, not a thing to do unawares alone;
so you consecrate the first-fruits, you sacrifice the bull and then
in safety you—communicate.”{39}
“Sanctity”—the quality of
awfulness and mystery—rather than divinity or personality, may
have been what primitive man saw in the beasts and birds which
he venerated in “their silent, aloof, goings, in the perfection of
their limited doings.”{40}
When we use the word “spirit” in
connection with the pagan sacramental practices of Christmastide,
it is well to bear in mind the possibility that at the origin of these
customs there may have been no notion of communion with
strictly personal beings, but rather some such mana idea as has
been suggested above.

It is probable that animal-cults had their origin at a stage of
human life preceding agriculture, when man lived not upon
cultivated plants or tamed beasts, but upon roots and fruits and
the products of the chase. Some scholars, indeed, hold that the
domestication of animals for practical use was an outcome of
the sacred, inviolable character of certain creatures: they may
originally have been spared not for reasons of convenience but
because it was deemed a crime to kill them—except upon certain
solemn occasions—and may have become friendly towards man
through living by his side.{41}
On the other hand it is possible
that totems were originally staple articles of food, that they were
sacred because they were eaten with satisfaction, and that the
very awe and respect attached to them because of their life-giving
powers tended to remove them from common use and limit
their consumption to rare ceremonial occasions.

Closely akin to the worship of animals is that of plants, and
especially trees, and there is much evidence pointing to sacramental
cults in connection with the plant-world.{42}
Some cakes
and special vegetable dishes eaten on festal days may be survivals
of sacramental feasts parallel to those upon the flesh and blood of
178an animal victim. Benediction by external contact, again, is
suggested by the widespread use in various ways of branches or
sprigs or whole trees. The Christmas-tree and evergreen decorations
are the most obvious examples; we shall see others in the
course of our survey, and in connection with plants as well as
with animals we shall meet with processions intended to convey
a blessing to every house by carrying about the sacred elements—to
borrow a term from Christian theology. Even the familiar
practice of going carol-singing may be a Christianized form of
some such perambulation.

It is possible that men and women had originally separate cults.
The cult of animals, according to a theory set forth by Mr.
Chambers, would at first belong to the men, who as hunters worshipped
the beasts they slew, apologizing to them, as some primitive
people do to-day, for the slaughter they were obliged to commit.
Other animals, apparently, were held too sacred to be slain,
except upon rare and solemn occasions, and hence, as we have
seen, may have arisen domestication and the pastoral life which,
with its religious rites, was the affair of the men. To women,
on the other hand, belonged agriculture; the cult of Mother
Earth and the vegetation-spirits seems to have been originally
theirs. Later the two cults would coalesce, but a hint of the
time when certain rites were practised only by women may be
found in that dressing up of men in female garments which
appears not merely in the old Kalends customs but in some
modern survivals.[85]{43}

Apart from any special theory of the origin of sacrifice, we
may note the association at Christmas of physical feasting with
religious rejoicing. In this the modern European is the heir of
an agelong tradition. “Everywhere,” says Robertson Smith,
179“we find that a sacrifice ordinarily involves a feast, and that a
feast cannot be provided without a sacrifice. For a feast is not
complete without flesh, and in early times the rule that all
slaughter is sacrifice was not confined to the Semites. The
identity of religious occasions and festal seasons may indeed be
taken as the determining characteristic of the type of ancient religion
generally; when men meet their god they feast and are
glad together, and whenever they feast and are glad they desire
that the god should be of the party.”{45}
To the paganism that
preceded Christianity we must look for the origin of that
Christmas feasting which has not seldom been a matter of
scandal for the severer type of churchman.

[Transcriber’s Note: The marker for note {44} was not present in
the page scan]

A letter addressed in 601 by Pope Gregory the Great to
Abbot Mellitus, giving him instructions to be handed on to
Augustine of Canterbury, throws a vivid light on the process
by which heathen sacrificial feasts were turned into Christian
festivals. “Because,” the Pope says of the Anglo-Saxons, “they
are wont to slay many oxen in sacrifices to demons, some
solemnity should be put in the place of this, so that on the day
of the dedication of the churches, or the nativities of the holy
martyrs whose relics are placed there, they may make for themselves
tabernacles of branches of trees around those churches
which have been changed from heathen temples, and may celebrate
the solemnity with religious feasting. Nor let them now
sacrifice animals to the Devil, but to the praise of God kill animals
for their own eating, and render thanks to the Giver of all for
their abundance; so that while some outward joys are retained
for them, they may more readily respond to inward joys. For
from obdurate minds it is undoubtedly impossible to cut off
everything at once, because he who strives to ascend to the
highest place rises by degrees or steps and not by leaps.”{46}

We see here very plainly the mind of the ecclesiastical compromiser.
Direct sacrifice to heathen gods the Church of
course could not dream of tolerating; it had been the very
centre of her attack since the days of St. Paul, and refusal to take
part in it had cost the martyrs their lives. Yet the festivity and
merrymaking to which it gave occasion were to be left to the
180people, for a time at all events. The policy had its advantages,
it made the Church festivals popular; but it had also its dangers,
it encouraged the intrusion of a pagan fleshly element into their
austere and chastened joys. A certain orgiastic licence crept in,
an unbridling of the physical appetites, which has ever been a
source of sorrow and anger to the most earnest Christians and
even led the Puritans of the seventeenth century to condemn all
festivals as diabolical.

Before we leave the subject of sacrificial survivals, it must be
added that certain Christmas customs may come, little as those
who practise them suspect it, from that darkest of religious rites,
human sacrifice. Reference has already been made to Dr. Frazer’s
view of the Saturnalian king and his awful origin. We shall
meet with various similar figures during the Christmas season—the
“King of the Bean,” for instance, and the “Bishop of Fools.”
If the theories about human sacrifice set forth in “The Golden
Bough” be accepted, we may regard these personages as having
once been mock kings chosen to suffer instead of the real kings,
who had at first to perish by a violent death in order to preserve
from the decay of age the divine life incarnate in them. Such
mock monarchs, according to Dr. Frazer, were exalted for a brief
season to the glory and luxury of kingship ere their doom fell
upon them;{47}
in the Christmas “kings” the splendour alone
has survived, the dark side is forgotten.

II. The Cult of the Dead and the Family Hearth.

Round the winter festival cluster certain customs apparently
connected with distinctively domestic religion, rather than with
such public and communal cults as we have considered under the
heading of Sacrifice and Sacrament. A festival of the family—that
is, perhaps, what Christmas most prominently is to-day:
it is the great season for gatherings “round the old fireside”; it
is a joyous time for the children of the house, and the memory of
the departed is vivid then, if unexpressed. Further, by the Yule
log customs and certain other ceremonies still practised in the
remoter corners of Europe, we are carried back to a stage of
thought at which the dead were conceived as hovering about or
181visiting the abodes of the living. Ancestral spirits, it seems,
were once believed to be immanent in the fire that burned on the
hearth, and had to be propitiated with libations, while elsewhere
the souls of the dead were thought to return to their old homes
at the New Year, and meat and drink had to be set out for them.
The Church’s establishment of All Souls’ Day did much to keep
practices of tendance of the departed to early November, but
sometimes these have wandered to later dates and especially to
Christmas. In folk-practices directed towards the dead two
tendencies are to be found: on the one hand affection or at all
events consideration for the departed persists, and efforts are
made to make them comfortable; on the other, they are
regarded with dread, and the sight of them is avoided by the
living.

In the passage quoted from Caesarius of Arles there was
mention of the laying of tables with abundance of food at the
Kalends. The same practice is condemned by St. Jerome in the
fifth century, and is by him specially connected with Egypt.{48}

He, like Caesarius and others, regards it as a kind of charm to
ensure abundance during the coming year, but it is very possible
that its real purpose was different, that the food was an offering
to supernatural beings, the guardians and representatives of the
dead.{49}
Burchardus of Worms in the early eleventh century
says definitely that in his time tables were laid with food and
drink and three knives for “those three Sisters whom the
ancients in their folly called Parcae.”{50}
The Parcae were
apparently identified with the three “weird” Sisters known in
England and in other Teutonic regions, and seem to have some
connection with the fairies. As we shall see later on, it is still
in some places the custom to lay out tables for supernatural
beings, whether, as at All Souls’ tide, explicitly for the dead, or
for Frau Perchta, or for the Virgin or some other Christian
figure. Possibly the name Modranicht (night of mothers), which
Bede gives to Christmas Eve,{51}
may be connected with this
practice.

Not remote, probably, in origin from a belief in “ghosts” is
the driving away of spirits that sometimes takes place about
182Christmas-time. Many peoples, as Dr. Frazer has shown, have
an annual expulsion of goblins, ghosts, devils, witches, and evil
influences, commonly at the end of the Old or beginning of the
New Year. Sometimes the beings so driven away are definitely
the spirits of the departed. An appalling racket and a great flare
of torches are common features of these expulsions, and we shall
meet with similar customs during the Christmas season. Such
purifications, according to Dr. Frazer, are often preceded or
followed by periods of licence, for when the burden of evil is
about to be, or has just been, removed, it is felt that a little
temporary freedom from moral restraints may be allowed with
impunity.{52}
Hence possibly, in part, the licence which has often
attended the Christmas season.

III. Omens and Charms for the New Year.

Customs of augury are to be met with at various dates, which
may mark the gradual shifting of the New Year festival from
early November to January 1, while actual charms to secure
prosperity are commonest at Christmas itself or at the modern
New Year. Magical rather than religious in character, they are
attempts to discover or influence the future by a sort of crude
scientific method based on supposed analogies. Beneath the
charms lie the primitive ideas that like produces like and that
things which have once been in contact continue to act upon one
another after they are separated in space.{53}
The same ideas
obviously underlie many of the sacramental practices alluded to a
few pages back, and these are often of the nature of charms.
Probably, too, among New Year charms should be included such
institutions as the bonfires on Hallowe’en in Celtic countries, on
Guy Fawkes Day in England, and at Martinmas in Germany,
for it would seem that they are intended to secure by imitation
a due supply of sunshine.{54}
The principle that “well begun
is well ended”—or, as the Germans have it, “Anfang gut, alles
gut ”—is fundamental in New Year practices: hence the custom
of giving presents as auguries of wealth during the coming year;
hence perhaps partly the heavy eating and drinking—a kind of
charm to ensure abundance.

183Enough has already been said about the attitude of the early
Church towards traditional folk-customs. Of the position taken
up by the later mediaeval clergy we get an interesting glimpse in
the “Largum Sero” of a certain monk Alsso of Brĕvnov, an
account of Christmas practices in Bohemia written about the year
1400. It supplies a link between modern customs and the
Kalends prohibitions of the Dark Ages. Alsso tells of a number
of laudable Christmas Eve practices, gives elaborate Christian
interpretations of them, and contrasts them with things done by
bad Catholics with ungodly intention. Here are some of his
complaints:—

Presents, instead of being given, as they should be, in memory
of God’s great Gift to man, are sent because he who does
not give freely will be unlucky in the coming year. Money,
instead of being given to the poor, as is seemly, is laid on the
table to augur wealth, and people open their purses that luck may
enter. Instead of using fruit as a symbol of Christ the Precious
Fruit, men cut it open to predict the future [probably from
the pips]. It is a laudable custom to make great white loaves at
Christmas as symbols of the True Bread, but evil men set out
such loaves that the gods may eat of them.

Alsso’s assumption is that the bad Catholics are diabolically
perverting venerable Christmas customs, but there can be little
doubt that precisely the opposite was really the case—the
Christian symbolism was merely a gloss upon pagan practices.
In one instance Alsso admits that the Church had adopted and
transformed a heathen usage: the old calendisationes or processions
with an idol Bel had been changed into processions of
clergy and choir-boys with the crucifix. Round the villages on
the Eve and during the Octave of Christmas went these
messengers of God, robed in white raiment as befitted the
servants of the Lord of purity; they would chant joyful anthems
of the Nativity, and receive in return some money from the
people—they were, in fact, carol-singers. Moreover with their
incense they would drive out the Devil from every corner.{55}

Alsso’s attitude is one of compromise, or at least many of the
old heathen customs are allowed by him, when reinterpreted in a
184Christian sense. Such seems to have been the general tendency
of the later Catholic Church, and also of Anglicanism in so far as
it continued the Catholic tradition. It will be seen, however,
from what has already been said, that the English Puritans were
but following early Christian precedents when they attacked the
paganism that manifested itself at Christmas.

A strong Puritan onslaught is to be found in the “Anatomie
of Abuses” by the Calvinist, Philip Stubbes, first published in
1583. “Especially,” he says, “in Christmas tyme there is
nothing els vsed but cardes, dice, tables, maskyng, mumming,
bowling, and suche like fooleries; and the reason is, that they
think they haue a commission and prerogatiue that tyme to
doe what they list, and to followe what vanitie they will. But
(alas!) doe they thinke that they are preuiledged at that time to
doe euill? The holier the time is (if one time were holier than
an other, as it is not), the holier ought their exercises to bee. Can
any tyme dispence with them, or giue them libertie to sinne?
No, no; the soule which sinneth shall dye, at what tyme soeuer
it offendeth…. Notwithstandyng, who knoweth not that
more mischeef is that tyme committed than in all the yere
besides?”{56}

When the Puritans had gained the upper hand they proceeded
to the suppression not only of abuses, but of the festival itself.
An excellent opportunity for turning the feast into a fast—as the
early Church had done, it will be remembered, with the Kalends
festival—came in 1644. In that year Christmas Day happened
to fall upon the last Wednesday of the month, a day appointed by
the Lords and Commons for a Fast and Humiliation. In its
zeal against carnal pleasures Parliament published the following
“Ordinance for the better observation of the Feast of the
Nativity of Christ”:—