Johnston R.A. All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Holidays

340

superimposed on the family’s shield in an upper corner. The ﬁ rst son’s shield

had a horizontal stripe with three vertical bars hanging from it, but when he

inherited the estate on his father’s death, the difference was removed from

his arms. Younger sons retained their designated differences: a crescent for

the second son, a star called a mullet for the third, a bird called a martlet for

the fourth, a circle called an amulet for the ﬁ fth, and so on through a ninth

son, who bore an octofoil, an eight-lobed ﬂ ower. The second son of a second

son bore a shield with a crescent inside a crescent.

Heraldry was one part of the Middle Ages that developed more after its

initial importance on armor died out. After coats of arms were adopted by

commoners, towns, and corporations, registries had to keep track of them.

Rules governing the marshaling and creation of noble coats of arms pro-

liferated as kings created new titles and more families intermarried. Long

after heraldry had any practical purpose, heralds continued to maintain reg-

istries and publish treatises on the rules of blazon.

See also: Hunting, Knights, Monsters, Seals.

Further Reading

Coss, Peter. Heraldry, Pageantry, and Social Display in Medieval England. Wood-

bridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2008.

Dennys, Rodney. The Heraldic Imagination. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1975.

Fox-Davies, A. C. A Complete Guide to Heraldry. New York: Skyhorse Publishing,

2007.

Lovett, Patricia. Calligraphy and Illumination: A History and Practical Guide.

New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.

Neubecker, Ottfried. Heraldry: Sources, Symbols, and Meaning. New York: McGraw

Hill, 1976.

Norris, Herbert. Medieval Costume and Fashion. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,

1999.

Pastoureau, Michel. Heraldry: An Introduction to a Noble Tradition. New York:

Harry N. Abrams, 1997.

Woodcock, Thomas, and John Martin Robinson. The Oxford Guide to Heraldry.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Herbs. See Gardens

Holidays

Feast days, dictated by the church calendar, were the holidays of the Mid-

dle Ages. A few pre-Christian holidays lingered, such as Midsummer, Har-

vest, and Yule, but the church had absorbed the customs of these holidays

into days to honor saints or commemorate events in the Gospels. Feast

Holidays

341

days often paired with fast days, but fast days were solemn, not celebra-

tory, occasions. Feast days called for special food, days off work, traditional

games, and dances . The two big holidays of the Christian season were

Christmas and Easter. Easter, although it kept its pagan name in English, was

predominantly religious and solemn. Christmas, although it included a mass

for Christ’s birth, was predominantly secular and rowdy.

The year was a blur of feast days, averaging one per week, in addition to

Sunday. Medieval workers who worked on public projects such as cathe-

drals had these days off, as well as a half day before. If a holiday fell on a

Friday, the half day of work on Saturday was not worth beginning, and the

workers had a full, long weekend. In 14th-century England, the archbishop

of Canterbury declared 40 ofﬁ cial feast days when workers were off. Christ-

mas week was a cluster of feast days: Christmas, Saint Stephen, Saint John,

Holy Innocents, and Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Easter and Pentecost (or

Whitsun) included not only the original Sunday, but also three days after.

Although workers had feast days off, local parishes only celebrated the

day of their own patron saints. A special Mass was obligatory, and there

were other traditions such as carrying the saint’s image or relics in a proces-

sion through the town or around the church. Regional fairs and dramatic

festivals were scheduled according to these saints’ days. Corpus Christi Day,

which was very close to midsummer, the longest day of the year, was the

day when York, England, put on its cycle of plays that dramatized the Bible.

It was a new holiday beginning in the 14th century.

Autumn and Winter

Autumn had a cluster of saints’ days that marked points in the harvest

calendar. Saint Michael’s Day, September 29, was a saint’s day celebrated

widely in Europe. Many churches and monasteries honored Saint Michael.

In England, the day was called Michaelmas and was celebrated with a tra-

ditional feast of roast goose. Many country fairs were held at Michaelmas.

The shoemakers’ patron saint, Saint Crispin, had his day in late October,

so festivals honoring him were often put on by cordwainers’ (shoemakers’)

guilds.

Some autumn holidays blurred the line between pagan and Christian. No-

vember 1 was All Saints’ Day, and November 2 was All Souls’ Day, to honor

all saints and pray for all deceased souls to be freed from purgatory. But the

pagan holiday of Samhain, the death of summer, was a tradition that per-

sisted. When the Anglo-Saxons and Franks were converted to the Chris-

tian religion, the Pope’s policy was to incorporate their customs into some

kind of Christian practice. The Christian saints’ days encouraged people to

think not of the death of summer or of a god but of saints and of sinners

like themselves. In some regions, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, also called

Holidays

342

All Hallows’ Day, children wore masks and went door-to-door, begging

cakes for the souls of the dead. The Celts had built huge bonﬁ res for Sam-

hain, and medieval peasants continued to make bonﬁ res. They often made

a corn-shock king of the harvest. Regional customs differ; some harvest

kings were burned in a bonﬁ re, while others were kept until spring, when

the dummy’s head could be used as a football.

Saint Martin’s Day was on November 11. Martinmas was the day to pay

an annual rent, and it was the start of the fall butchering and meat-smoking

season. In some places, children went door-to-door asking for alms. Beef or

pork slaughtered on Martinmas could be salted and smoked and preserved

until the feast of Easter. November 25 was Saint Catherine’s Day. Saint

Catherine had died in the fourth century under torture, on a wheel. The

theme of wheels dominated the holiday. Any kind of wheel game or show

was popular, and, over time, the burning “Catherine’s Wheel” ﬁ rework was

developed.

The Christmas season began at Advent, four Sundays before Christmas,

and concluded with the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. Advent was a

fast season, a time of prayer and repentance before the holy feast days. Saint

Nicholas’s Day occurred early in Advent, on December 6, but it was not

directly connected with the nativity during the Middle Ages. Children re-

ceived gifts on Saint Nicholas’s Day, since, in legend, Saint Nicholas had

raised three children from the dead and had secretly given gifts to the poor.

It was a rare feast day during the fast season.

Christmas lasted 12 days in medieval tradition. The Germanic tribes of

the North had always celebrated a mid-winter holiday; pagan Yule became

the festival of the birth of Jesus. The pagan traditions continued so that the

holiday was always a strange blend. Yule had centered around burning a very

large log that would take many days to be consumed, and it required a feast

of roast boar. The Feast of the Nativity, as Christmas was ofﬁ cially called,

expanded to include the same things, but the log was often still called the

yule log. The log was doused with alcohol and carefully kept burning for

12 days; its ashes were considered lucky. Castles and houses were deco-

rated with greenery such as holly, ivy, and mistletoe, as they had been in

pagan times. There were no evergreen trees indoors; the German tradition

of the Christmas tree is postmedieval.

Feasting and drinking were the main events, to make up for the Advent

fast. Royal Christmas feasts in the Middle Ages could be unbelievably vast,

such as King Richard II’s feast of 2,000 oxen. But Christmas had special

foods not seen on other feast days. In England, one was the mince pie, a pie

made with ﬁ nely chopped meats left from several butcherings, spiced and

mixed with dried fruit. Some Christmas pies had pastry models of the baby

Jesus on top. Another English tradition was the roast boar, or perhaps just

the boar’s head. Plum pudding was a treat of the 13th and 14th centuries,

Holidays

343

when increased trade brought dried plums from Spain and Portugal. It was

made with dried plums, breadcrumbs, beef broth, wine, and spices and

boiled until thick. This early plum pudding was probably the beginning of

Christmas fruitcake, with the addition of more ﬂ our. Put into a bladder, it

could be steamed or baked. Wassail was a special English Christmas drink,

a frothy brew of ale, apples, and spices.

Churches had Mass three times on Christmas: midnight on Christmas

Eve (the Angels’ Mass), at dawn (the Shepherds’ Mass), and at midday. It

was, in this sense, a religious holiday. But in Northern Europe, the season

was not primarily devout or solemn. In addition to the feasting and drink-

ing, there were traditional parties and games. People played blind man’s

bluff or tug of war and danced to carols sung by the group. Indoors in lim-

ited space, these were mostly ring dances in the center of the hall. Some halls

elected a temporary king, the lord of misrule. This mock sovereign gave

entertaining orders for games, dance, and drama.

English tradition had included mummery, simple folk drama with masks,

since pagan times. Mumming plays were primitive and often included mock

sword ﬁ ghts and dances. Men dressed as women for certain stock charac-

ters, and eventually Christmas plays became a time for both men and women

to dress as the opposite sex. Mummery led to other uses of disguises, and,

by the 15th and 16th centuries, aristocrats were putting on “disguising”

parties. Since Christmas was a time of rowdy behavior and heavy drinking,

some use of masks was illicit. Town patrols had to be on the lookout for

masked men using their anonymity to break into houses.

By the 13th century, many places in England and France had developed

a custom of electing a boy to be temporary bishop. He was usually a boy

from the cathedral choir school, so he knew the songs and prayers. He was

elected boy bishop on Saint Nicholas’s Day, since Nicholas was the patron

saint of children. He continued in this parody ofﬁ ce until he presided over

the Mass of the Holy Innocents, which commemorated Herod’s slaugh-

ter of the baby boys around Bethlehem. In some regions, churches limited

the custom to Holy Innocents’ Day and the day before. Some boy bish-

ops preached a sermon for the Holy Innocents’ Mass, and the boy bishop

might give a benediction or lead a procession at other services during his

reign. He wore a mitre, gloves, and robes, and he impersonated the bishop

at mock visitations at other churches and manors in the area. These visi-

tations were parties and were often occasions for gifts and entertainment.

The boy bishop might give orders for certain games to be played.

In Italy, Christmas lacked the Germanic Yule tradition and was always a

more religious feast day. Francis of Assisi, who may have had professional

music training, wrote devotional poems set to music. They may have been

the ﬁ rst true Christmas carols, although they were not technically carols.

Francis wanted to emphasize the humanity and divinity of Christ to combat

Medieval Christmas music had two forms: the secular carol and the religious hymn.

Carols were traditional dance music; they were played and sung at feasts and parties

so that people could join hands and dance in circles. Early written music for a

Christmas carol dance is shown in this picture. Saint Francis of Assisi began the

practice of writing special devotional music, in the common language rather than

Latin, for Christmas. Songs associated with Christmas maintained this dual nature

from medieval into modern times. (Art Resource, NY)

Holidays

345

Manichean teachings in 13th-century Italy. He taught his disciples to write

folk music to teach doctrinal and devotional ideas to the common people,

and part of the Franciscan mission throughout France and England was to

write Christmas songs. Francis also enjoyed staging a nativity play for the

villagers, complete with manger, animals, and a real baby.

During the 15th century, more devotional Christmas songs were written

in many languages. The early English ones often meditated on the personal

feelings of Mary when the angel announced the coming birth of her baby.

Other early songs talked about the exotic riches of the Magi whose feast

was celebrated at the end of the season. By the end of the Middle Ages,

Christmas songs were a major part of the holiday’s traditions.

December 26 was Saint Stephen’s Day, to commemorate the ﬁ rst Chris-

tian martyr. Because legend said a wren had given away Stephen’s hiding

place and led to his death, in some places, boys caught and killed wrens.

Farmers bled their horses and other draft animals on this day. December 28

was Holy Innocents’ Day, a fast day. In some places, children were whipped

to commemorate the slaughter of babies in Bethlehem. Other places gave

children more freedom or special prayers.

On New Year’s Eve, some places had a disruptive custom called the Feast

of Fools. It may have developed within the church as early as the 11th cen-

tury. A blasphemous party began after the Latin service said, “He has put

down the mighty from their seats and exalted the humble.” With even the

priests joining in, they sang discordant songs, played dice in church, and ate

food on the altar. Monks and priests wore masks or turned their vestments

inside out and joined in the unruly singing and dancing. In France, a donkey

was brought into the church to commemorate the ﬂ ight of Mary and Joseph

into Egypt, and the donkey became part of the songs and mayhem.

In some places, people gave gifts for January 1, the New Year. Since dif-

ferent regions of Europe recognized different beginnings of a year, there

was no uniﬁ ed, traditional way to mark the day. As international business

grew and merchants needed a ﬁ rm dating system, the Roman tradition of

beginning the year on January 1 was revived. It was not part of the liturgi-

cal or folk customs calendar.

The Feast of the Epiphany closed the Christmas season for most, although

some considered the season not to be over until Candlemas. Epiphany com-

memorated the arrival of the Magi to visit the infant Jesus, and churches

sometimes put on a miracle pageant to act out the event. In England, it was

also called Twelfth Night and was the gift-giving occasion. In some places,

peasants lit 12 bonﬁ res or 12 small ﬁ res and one large bonﬁ re. In halls,

12 candles substituted for bonﬁ res. A traditional cake for the Twelfth Night

feast had a pea and a bean baked into it, and the man and woman who re-

ceived them became the king and queen for the evening. A master of ceremo-

nies led games and mumming plays in which people were masked as animals.

Holidays

346

On February 2, medieval churches commemorated “the puriﬁ cation of

the Virgin,” when the infant Jesus was presented at the temple. The day

was informally called Candlemas. Villagers in a procession brought a penny

and a candle as gifts to the church, and the priest blessed candles for them

to take home and use in times of need.

Spring and Summer

The Easter season began with Shrove Tuesday and a three-day festival

called Shrovetide or Carnival. In French, it became Fat Tuesday, Mardi

Gros (or Gras ). The 40 days before Easter were the great fast season of Lent,

and, on Fat Tuesday, there was a feast to precede the fast and consume meat

that might spoil. The three days of Shrovetide were for revels and play of all

kinds, including masked dramas. Schoolboys staged cockﬁ ghts.

In England, Shrovetide was the other season when mummery, a primitive

drama using costumes and masks, was traditional. In Germany, too, it was

traditional to act out a drama of killing a man. The story as adapted to Chris-

tian times varied; sometimes it was a wild man, sometimes an enemy, who

was killed by a group of swordsmen, and then a doctor brought the man

back to life. It may have begun as a pagan custom symbolizing the death and

rebirth of summer.

Ash Wednesday began the season of Lent. It was a day of repentance after

the license of the festival. At church, after confession, the priest marked the

penitent’s forehead with holy oil and ashes. Lent was the fast season. No

meat, eggs, or dairy products were permitted, although toward the end

of the Middle Ages some dairy-dependent regions bought indulgences to

permit the use of butter in cooking. Fish and legume-based pottages were

the foods of Lent.

The main focus of Easter week was its church services. It was a more sol-

emn holiday than Christmas; there was no tradition of revelry or games. The

church focused on using dramatization of the historical events outlined in

the gospels to teach the illiterate people the story. A week before Easter was

Palm Sunday, and priests uses broad palm leaves in a procession in church.

In places without palm trees, they used local substitutes. On Thursday, most

ﬁ res and lights were put out, except for one left burning at the altar.

Maundy Thursday was a traditional time for kings and other lords to per-

form rituals of humility. Some washed the feet of the poor; King Louis IX

washed the feet not only of beggars, but also speciﬁ cally of lepers. The

poor were brought into the house, and they were given a simple Lenten

meal of ﬁ sh and bread. Then they received money, traditionally one penny

for every year of the lord’s age, and a new shirt. The almoner who oversaw

alms then began to wash the feet of each one, followed by the lord himself

using rose water.

Holidays

347

On Good Friday, the Mass reenacted the story of the Cruciﬁ xion of Jesus.

The story was sung in Latin, and different monks or choirboys took the

roles of various actors. There was some limited dramatic action, although in

the Middle Ages they did not go as far as to play out the Cruciﬁ xion. For

example, when the choir chanted that the Roman soldiers divided up Jesus’s

clothing, some choirboys might be assigned to remove the altar cloths and

make off with them. The ﬁ re was put out to symbolize the death of Jesus.

Most churches had a sepulcher for use in dramatizing the burial of Jesus.

It could be a niche built into the wall, usually to the north but always near

the high altar. It could be a wooden frame, hung with curtains, placed in

the sanctuary during Easter. Sometimes there was a chest made of stone

or wood to represent a tomb. Other times, a curtain was drawn across the

niche to close it, or cords were drawn across it to represent its closure.

Wealthy donors began to endow tombs that were placed where the Easter

sepulcher would be, so their tomb niche could be used. When a church did

not have such a niche, the priests placed a chest at the front altar or, at the

very least, created a curtained space to its side. In some very old churches,

there was a crypt below the altar that was used as the Easter sepulcher.

In the Depositio ceremony, a cross, perhaps with a removable carved ﬁ g-

ure of Jesus, was placed into the sepulcher on Friday night after vespers.

No lay people were permitted to attend the ceremony; it was only acted out

by the priests and monks. Usually, a host—the bread used for the Mass—

was also symbolically buried. Churches with crosses that had a removable

corpus often reenacted the burial by washing the wooden ﬁ gure in water

and wine. In some regions, this reenactment could be very elaborate. The

wooden corpus could be covered with an expensive pall, carried in a hearse,

and buried in a cofﬁ n. In Germany, full-sized ﬁ gures were often used. Some

large churches kept a set of wooden ﬁ gures, decked in clothing and wearing

wigs, to set up a tableau of the action.

After the sepulcher was closed, candles were placed around it, and monks

and priests began a watch. This was in accordance with funeral customs,

when the body was kept company over night. The watch continued through

Saturday, when lay people could presumably visit the church and see the

solemn sight. A new ﬁ re was kindled with ﬁ re irons on Saturday night.

The priest blessed the ﬁ re, and people lit candles and lamps to take the

ﬂ ame home.

Early on Sunday morning, while it was dark, a sacristan removed the

cross and corpus from the sepulcher, leaving only the host. A procession of

priests then came at daybreak, carrying candles, and removed the host. In

some rituals, the host was displayed in the procession; in others, it was re-

turned quietly to the altar, and the cross alone was carried. Bells pealed, and

the lay public joined for the daybreak service. In some places, there were

superstitions among the people that if they could sneak in and see this

Holidays

348

Elevatio ritual, they would not die that year, but priests were careful to ex-

clude lay people to discourage the folk belief.

The Easter Mass was the high point of the church’s year. In some regions,

the service may have used joyful musical instruments, such as trumpets or

bagpipes. Bells rang at many points. The Easter Mass also included dramati-

zations for the people’s beneﬁ t. The choir sang and acted the Visitatio, the

story of the women who found the empty tomb. Monks or nuns, represent-

ing the women, went to the sepulcher with incense and found it empty, with

only a cloth left behind (in which the cross or corpus had been wrapped).

Two monks represented the angels by the empty sepulcher, and they sang

the news, “He is risen.” In some regional variations, the choir acted out the

release of souls from hell by having a sudden procession of monks or nuns

come out of a closed room, singing. It was all in Latin, but since the people

knew the general story, they could follow the dramatic action.

Easter dinner was one of the major feasts of the year. Having eaten no

meat, eggs, or cheese for six weeks, people had saved up plenty of eggs and

cheese, and they were ready for a very good meal. Traditional feast foods

especially included roast lamb or mutton and tansy cake, a sharp, bitter cake

whose ﬂ avor was enjoyed in the Middle Ages. Many eggs had been hard-

boiled during the fasting weeks in order to preserve them. There was a long

folk tradition of decorating some of these eggs with vegetable dyes. They

were called pace eggs after the Hebrew word Pesach for Passover and Greek

Pascha for Easter. People gave them as gifts, paid performers in colored

eggs, tapped them together in greeting, and had egg-rolling games. Easter

was also a time for Morris dancing and miracle plays.

On the Monday and Tuesday after Easter, some parts of rural England

celebrated Hock, a holiday of doubtful origins. It may have celebrated a

victory over the Danes around 1002. On Monday, the women used ropes

to capture men and hold them for ransom, sometimes for a kiss and some-

times for pennies. On Tuesday, the men could do the same for the women.

On May Day, there were village festivals and games. The games were of

pagan origin, not Christian, and the church disapproved of them for most

of the period and in most places. Villagers raised a maypole, sometimes

crowned with ram’s horns or ﬂ ower, and chose a summer king and, in later

tradition, a May king or a May queen. They sang songs, and in England they

played out dramas with a Robin Hood theme. Maid Marian appears to have

been invented as a character for the May festival so Robin could have a ro-

mance, in parallel with the May king and May queen tradition. People set

up outdoor banquets and ﬂ ower arbors. The relaxation of rules of behavior,

which permitted young people to go into the woods to ﬁ nd branches and

ﬂ owers, sometimes led to pregnancies or ﬁ ghts.

Ascension Day was 40 days after Easter, and it marked the ascension of

Jesus into heaven. In Venice, it was the main civic holiday. Venice, built on

Holidays

349

the islands and lagoons of a sea marsh, was more closely tied to the sea than

most cities. On Ascension Day, the main ceremony was the Marriage to the

Sea. Venice viewed itself as the husband ruling over the obedient wife, the

sea. They kept a special red and gold barge in which the doge, the ruler of

Venice, was rowed into the harbor, where he dropped a gold ring into the

water. The seventh Sunday after Easter was Pentecost, also called Whitsun.

It was a three-day feast, and, since it occurred in the early summer, it was a

popular season for fairs.

June 24 was the day of Saint John the Baptist. He was the patron saint

of Florence, Italy, and this day was the biggest civic festival. Many Floren-

tines planned weddings for the day so they could make double use of the

feast day. Guilds in the city put up displays to honor their crafts, and all

shops closed. On the previous day, the priests led a mass procession of relics,

and the citizens came in a procession to the church of San Giovanni and

presented gifts of large wax candles. The day itself was celebrated with a dis-

play at the piazza, where neighboring cities presented tribute of rich cloth

robes. Each robe, called a palio, was hung in Saint John’s church for a year

and then auctioned to raise money. The day was devoted to weddings and

feasts and included a ceremonial release of 12 prisoners.

The main event was a horse race through the city streets, held in the later

afternoon when the banquets had ended. The prize was a very expensive

fur-lined palio, which was hung at the end of the course. The streets marked

for the race were decorated with all the banners, carpets, and ﬂ owers the

citizens could muster. The palio of Florence’s Saint John’s Day race became

May Day, a traditional celebration of

spring, always involved dances around a

tree or a ﬂ ower-decorated pole. May

Day, like Christmas, had its own set of

carols and folksongs. Additionally, most

parts of Europe had a tradition of folk

dramas in which a man was brought

back to life. In England, the dramas

included both mumming and plays

about Robin Hood. (Paul Lacroix,

Moeurs, Usage et Costumes au Moyen

Age et a l’Epoque de la Renaissance,

1878)