On Shrove Tuesday 1270, the monks of Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest rewarded their lay manorial workers with pancakes, with the youngest employees also receiving a feast of beef, cheese and ale in the great hall of the abbey’s infirmary. This is the earliest known evidence of Shrove Tuesday pancakes in England.
The general origins of this tradition are familiar: medieval Europeans used up their meat and dairy in anticipation of the Lenten fast and its many prohibitions, gradually developing a festival of joy and raucous play, known by various food-related names like Carnivale (leaving off meat), and Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday).
Yet the practices of medieval Beaulieu Abbey hint at another layer of meaning baked into the foods of Shrove Tuesday: a power to inform social relations, convey privileges to certain members of premodern society and even symbolise radical action.
Recalling his schoolboy days in Dornoch at the beginning of the 19th century, the Scottish minister Donald Sage wrote that cockfighting ‘took precedence over all…other amusements’ during the month of February. Students spent weeks preparing for the tournament, and on the appointed day the Highland town’s judicial courtroom became a battleground over the rights to a special throne:
Highest honours were awarded to the youth whose bird had gained the greatest victories; he was declared king, while he who came next to him, by the prowess of his feathered representative, was associated in the dignity under the title of queen. Any bird that would not fight when placed on the stage was called a “fugie,” and became the property of the master […] A day was appointed for the coronation, and the ladies in the town applied their elegant imaginations to devise […] crowns for the royal pair. When the coronation day arrived [and the king and queen of cocks crowned…] a procession then began at the door of the schoolhouse, where we were all ranged by the master in our several ranks, their majesties first, their life-guards next, and then the “Trojan throng,” two and two, and arm in arm. The town drummer and fifer marched before us and gave note of our advance, in strains which were intended to be both military and melodious. After the procession was ended, the proceedings were closed by a ball and supper in the evening.
According to the editor of Sage’s memoirs, such celebrations were pervasive in schools of eighteenth-century Scotland and usually happened on Fastern’s E’en (Shrove Tuesday), or Candlemas (2 February) in the Western Highlands.
All this calls into question a certain trope (both scholarly and popular), that pre-Lent Carnival was either absent or substantially weaker in premodern Britain, lacking the social inversion (i.e. the topsy-turvy), street pageantry and mock monarchs found elsewhere in Europe during that season. While I would argue against defining (premodern) Carnival in terms of inversion or particular customs in the first place (a little more on that here), such claims look downright spurious in light of Scotland’s extravagant cockfighting ceremonies.
Moreover, similar pre-Lent customs were widespread in Britain during the medieval and early modern periods. They featured two merry monarchs of February – the Candlemas King and Rex Gallorum (i.e. King of the Cocks/Roosters) – who have been rather overshadowed by other festive royals, like your Christmas Lords of Misrule or Queens of May.
In this post I’ll try to give these calendrical crowned-heads their due, reviewing their history, powers and prerogatives, and what it all can tell us about ‘social inversion’ – a concept often used to describe premodern festive customs, but one rarely explored beyond vague and potted gestures to ‘the world-turned-upside-down’.
Shrovetide Victors, Captains and Rex Gallorum
Shrove Tuesday cockfighting is attested in English schools as early as the 12th century, but evidence for the pageantry surrounding it first appears two centuries later. During the 14th and 15th centuries, Merton College, Oxford provided cocks for young students ad Carniprivium (during Shrovetide), with monetary reward going to ‘the victor’. As in Dornoch centuries later, it’s likely this champion was paraded around in a procession, like the below depiction from Flemish manuscript marginalia dating to c.1340. By the early Tudor period, these pageants were widespread enough for new school foundations in London and Manchester to specifically ban ‘Cock-fightinge [and] ridinge about of Victorye’.
Our first Scottish evidence dates to 1415, when St Andrews University permitted grammar school cockfighting to continue, but reduced the proceedings from ‘three or four weeks’ to the last two or three days of Shrovetide. Moreover, it was decreed that ‘students should no longer have a victor during Lent who could pardon the punishments of students’. This hints at just how extended the Carnival season could be and provides the earliest evidence of the cockfighting champion’s powers.
Despite such attempts to prohibit or reform Shrovetide excesses, many early modern grammar schools (new and old) preserved the privileges, incorporating the ‘cockpenny’ directly into the schoolmaster’s dues so he could facilitate the cockfighting match each year. In the late 17th-century West Country, antiquarian John Aubrey could still observe the Shrovetide Victor going ‘thro ye streetes in triumph’ and saving ‘what Boy he pleases from Whipping’ during Lent. Such customs endured in older grammar schools of the north, midlands and southwest of England until the 19th century, when cockfighting was finally made illegal.
North of the border the Victor was even more widespread and entrenched. At ‘Fastrensevin’ 1664, for example, the Laird of Glenorchy paid for his boys to set ‘down their coaks in the school’ in Perth, with a payment following ‘to the trumpeter that went abowt the towne with them’. In 1746, expenses for the education of Lord Lovat’s son Archibald in Inverness included ‘a guinea to the Schoolmaster when King at the Cockfight’. So ingrained was this custom that Robert Blau, a schoolmaster from Edinburgh, concluded his 1696 book of Latin and English orations with one on the subject, complete with a grandiose song and Latin inauguration for the ‘Rex Gallorum’.
Unsurprisingly, details varied considerably across locales. In some places, students were divided into two camps, each headed by a ‘captain’. Whichever side fielded the victorious rooster, that captain led a grand parade back to their own house for a banquet. Elsewhere, in towns along the Anglo-Scottish border, the victorious captain might have to supply a football to their classmates. In others still, the schoolmaster provided the post-tournament football, feast, or punchbowl. This diversity was perhaps most pronounced in the Scottish Lowlands, where the Rex Gallorum of Fastern’s E’en shared jurisdiction with the separate but similar Candlemas King.
Candlemas Kings
The Statistical Account of St Andrews and its burgh school in 1795 gives some measure of this mock monarch:
The scholars, in general, pay at least 5 s. a-quarter, and a Candlemas gratuity, according to their rank and fortune, from 5 s. even as far as 5 guineas, when there is a keen competition for the Candlemas crown. The king, i. e. He who pays most, reigns for 6 weeks, during which period he is not only intitled to demand an afternoon’s play for the scholars once a-week, but he has also the royal privilege of remitting all punishments.
Similarities to the Rex Gallorum are obvious, and also extended to pageantry. In Jedburgh, for example, the teachers presented the king with a football which became ‘a source of amusement to the whole pupils for several weeks afterwards’, with students ‘marching in procession through the town with a gilded ball on the top of a pole’.
Our earliest known evidence of the custom dates to January 1634, when a young Alexander Campbell wrote from Dundee to his uncle, Laird of Glenorchy, asking for money ‘to make me king in the school at Candlemas’. Historians have tentatively traced such gratuities back to ‘bleeze [blaze] money’, a payment annually given to the school, on top of tuition, towards candle or fire provision. But at best we can say the King was a product of an idiosyncratic premodern education system where the teacher’s living was largely dependent on customary gifts, coupled with the unique Scottish quarter-days, of which Candlemas was one. There is no evidence of Candlemas Kings elsewhere in Britain, i.e. where Candlemas was not a quarter-day.
Given the similarities between the two, and the preponderance of cockfighting kings outside Lowland Scotland, it’s tempting to see the Candlemas King as a less controversial, and more lucrative adaptation of the Rex Gallorum. But evidence from the 17th century points to coexistence rather than outright replacement. Robert Blau’s publication, for example, contains an additional ‘Inaugural Oration of the Victor, at Candlemas’, alongside the aforementioned ‘Inauguratio Regis Gallorum’ at Shrove Tuesday. To avoid redundancy, perhaps the king was attached to one or the other occasion based on local custom. What we can say with more certainty is that the Candlemas King followed his Shrovetide co-ruler into oblivion over the course of the 19th century, gradually falling prey to educational reform.
Gallorum Rex Crown, from Dyke in Morayshire, Scotland (likely 19th century). Photo courtesy of Highland Folk Museum, High Life Highland.
Unpacking the Social Inversion of Festive Monarchs
Mock monarchs like the Victor or Candlemas King were common features of festive culture in medieval and early modern Europe and prime examples of social inversion – the temporary flattening or flipping of hierarchies in an otherwise very stratified society.
Scholars often use ‘social inversion’ to label a wide array of topsy-turvy motifs and practices which pervaded both everyday life and festive occasions in premodern Europe. But at best ‘social inversion’ is a theoretical grab-bag, stuffed with concepts that are not always clearly defined, distinguished, or contextualised (e.g. norm reversal, subversion, transgression, opposition, levelling, misrule, carnivalesque, licensed disorder, safety-valve, etc). Before it can be of much explanatory value, it needs unpacking. So what, specifically, was going on with this particular ‘inversion of norms’?
First, it’s worth looking at how the mock ruler came to power. Festive inversion is often associated with freedom and egalitarianism, with mock monarchs ostensibly elected through popular vote, lottery, or merit. For instance, you could say the cockfighting Victor got his crown through both merit and lottery: breeding and selecting gamecocks was a skill, while the match would have an element of chance. Yet, inevitably, a wealthy student would have better access to gamecocks than his poorer classmates. Such inequalities were also at play when students popularly elected their own ‘captain’, for this was invariably based on the ‘known ability of his father to furnish…a feast if required’. Bribes for the Candlemas crown, of course, did away with all egalitarian pretences.
Candlemas gratuities also point a big finger towards the motivations of authorities. Historians often discuss official attitudes to festive inversions in terms of ‘licensed disorder’, with authorities supposedly allowing them as a ‘safety-valve’ to ensure social control in the long run. But there’s little evidence that schoolmasters needed such a rationale for a custom that benefitted them financially and materially. Those justifications which do survive speak more to broader pedagogical and societal goals than to strategies for maintaining classroom order.
Robert Blau, for instance, surmised that Shrovetide cockfights ‘beget, in young Students, great Spirits; and drive them…on a vigorous prosecution of Learning, or to military Bravery’. Likewise, his oration for the ‘King, or Victor in the School’ extolled the ‘antiquity, usefulness and excellency’ of monarchy, claiming that the position would be a lesson in good and just rule. Such training in paternalism was, of course, intended specifically for ‘well disposed young Gentlemen’ via the ‘generous bounty of [their] Parents’. Alexander Campbell spoke directly to these underlying issues of status and hierarchy in 1634, when he told his uncle that £20 should suffice to make him king, ‘seing ther is no mor gentill men sonnes in ye school’.
For those in power, these Carnival privileges did not merely establish some vague control over lower orders through temporary festive release, but pointedly promoted genteel paternalism, militaristic bravado, and leadership skills – particularly in the wealthy classes – all the while desensitizing future leaders to acts of cruelty. All this seems especially significant in the context of burgeoning empire from the 17th to 19th centuries.
But what of the other side of the coin? Did students gain any real power for themselves through this festive inversion of norms? Unlike some of the more well-known mock rulers of premodern Europe (e.g. Lords of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason), our School Kings were children, rather than adults. This did not necessarily cap their capacity for transgression – the related festive custom of ‘barring out’, for example, could see an armed and bloody takeover of the school during the Carnival season. But being children did limit the societal reach of their transgressive or subversive acts, more than those of adults or youths appointed to preside over festivities in some communities or households. The subversive potential of the latter festive lords sprang from their rowdy and sometimes violent antics, or their ability to speak truth to power through satire and comedy. Adolescent school kings obviously lacked that kind of reach, but in some ways their powers were far more potent to the parties involved.
For young boys, the king’s ability to command free-time, or the ‘liberty of playing’ would be no small matter. Nor should we ever underestimate the fact that kings could ‘rescue Delinquents from punishment’. To adults, corporal punishment was a largely accepted part of education in premodern Europe, but we should not assume children ‘accepted’ or were complicit in the physical and emotional abuse to which they were subjected. These high stakes come through vividly and poignantly in a letter from George Murray to his father, written in Perth, March 1710:
When I was in the School this forenoon there was a Grandsone of Ledy Rollo’s who was whipt, and I, by the privaledge I received at Candlemis, went to protect him, but the School M[aster] would not allow me, & when I asked him why I might not doe it as well as formour Kings, he answered that it was he gave the privaledg & he could take it away again, & I told him that it woud be an afront : he answered that he would not alow me to doe it, & ordred me to sit down […] After he had don me the afront I resined al the privaledges I had.
So anguished was young George by this ‘afront’, that he begged his father to ‘let me stay no longer at School’. His rather moving stand against perceived injustice (and dishonour) speaks not only to the limits of the School King’s powers, but also how meaningful these powers could be to students.
Historians have tended to measure the radical or conservative nature of festive inversion in terms of systemic change or even revolution. Not only is this an unrealistic expectation to place on any cultural phenomenon in isolation, but it can also obscure more subtle power dynamics. It’s unlikely that George Murray harboured any revolutionary designs, but I doubt that mattered much to his beleaguered classmate, who in other circumstances might have been spared the pain of corporal punishment by his Carnival King.
I suppose that he who would gather the best May-Deaw, for Medicine, should gather it from the Hills.
Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (1626)
Yesterday, I climbed Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh at daybreak to gather May-Dew – an old tradition that from what I could see has mostly fallen into abeyance. For those not in the know, May-Dew is the moisture that collects around dawn during the month of May, but especially on May Day. According to folklore, the dew can convey (variously) luck, beauty and health for the coming year, usually through direct contact with the skin.
These last two ideas about beauty and health first show up on record in the late medieval and early modern period, when, as Francis Bacon’s quote suggests, the medicinal properties of May-Dew were taken quite seriously. To give this old tradition a proper 21st century treatment, here’s a Top Ten List of the Medicinal Uses for May-Dew, pulled from sixteenth and seventeenth-century sources.
May Day morn atop Arthur’s Seat
Before beginning, we need to know the proper way to gather and prepare May-Dew so that it works effectively. Fortunately, the German surgeon, botanist and alchemistHieronymous Brunschwig lays this all out in detail in his Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, published in 1500 and translated into English in 1527 as The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner ofherbes.
Hieronymous Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, 1500 (Wikimedia)
According to Brunschwig, one must rise before the dawn on a night in the ‘myddest of maye’ when the moon is almost full and it has not rained. You should find a pasture or field ‘where as growe many flowres’. It should be far from ‘watery places’, but the nearerto ‘the montaynes the better’. Once there, ‘drawe a great linyn clothe’ over the field, wringing the dew out into a glass until you have enough for your purposes. Then, ‘strayne the dew thrughe a fayre lynyn clowte [cloth]’ before distilling it in a glass and setting it out for 30 days in the sun. Now it’s ready to cure what ails you.
TOP TEN MEDICINAL USES FOR MAY-DEW
1. Acne
May-Dew’s curative properties are most often associated with the face and head, and this is evident from the earliest references. Brunschwig explains that May-Dew is useful ‘whan a body hath an unclene hede & spottes in the face’. Wash the face with distilled May-Dew at morning and night, let air dry, and ‘than it wyll go awaye’.
2. Rosacea
According to Brunschwig, the same May-Dew treatment could also cure ‘Guttam roseam’ – a skin condition involving red discoloration of the face, which seems to describe the modern rosacea. He explains that the condition could come from overheating, but also ‘frome hote blode and frome the lyuer’. Since it was sometimes associated with the onset of leprosy, it was not something to write off.
3. Wrinkles
The final use Brunschwig suggests for May-Dew is more cosmetic than strictly medicinal – ridding the face of wrinkles. Washing with the distilled liquid at morning and night should ’causeth a fayre & clene face’.
‘Water of the Maye dewe’ in Hieronymous Brunschwig, The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner ofherbes, translated by Laurence Andrew, 1527 (Early English Books Online).
4. Small Pox Scars and Redness
Similar to the cures above, Simon Kellwaye wrote in A Short treatise of the small pockes (1593), that May-Dew could help with the ‘rednes of the face and hands after the pockes are gone’.
5. Sore Eyes
Hugh Plat’s Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, printed in 1602, recommends May-Dew for a variety of cosmetic and medicinal treatments. In a section on ‘How to gather and clarifie May-dewe’, which broadly repeats Brunschwig’s advice, he adds:
‘Some commend May-dew gathered from Fennell and Celandine, to be most excellent for sore-eyes’.
‘How to Gather and Clarifie May-dewe’ in Hugh Plat, Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories with beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters, 1602 (Early English Books Online)
6. Lesions
Printed in 1659, The Queens closet purportedly contains ‘incomparable secrets in physick, chyrurgery, preserving, and candying &c. which were presented unto the queen’, including a method ‘To take away Freckles or Morphew’. A morphew was a skin lesion, but it was nothing that a little May-Dew and tartar couldn’t fix!
Take four spoonfuls of May dew, and one spoonfull of the Oyl of Tartar, mingle them together, and wash the places where the freckles be, and let it dry of it self, it will clear the skin, and take away all foul spots.
7. Gout
In his Natural History of Wiltshire,published in 1691, antiquarian John Aubrey extolled the virtues of May-Dew for relief of gout, something corroborated in contemporary medical treatises.
Maydewe is a very great dissolvent of many things with the sunne that will not be dissolved any other way: which putts me in mind of the rationality of the method used by Wm. Gore, of Clapton, Esq., for his gout, which was to walke in the dewe with his shoes pounced; he found benefit by it.
Aubrey sought further confirmation by telling this story to a surgeon in Shoe Lane, London, who replied that it was indeed ‘the very method and way of curing’ used on Oliver Cromwell for the same ailment.
8. Tooth Ache
May-Dew was also an essential ingredient in Robert Boyle’s remedy ‘for the tooth ach’. Printed in hisMedicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies (1693), it involved sprinkling the dew over a mixture of herbs before putting a few drops of the solution into the afflicted’s ear whilst they chewed some bread.
‘For the Tooth-ach’ in Robert Boyle, Medicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies for the most part simple and easily prepared, useful in families, and very serviceable to country people, 1693 (Early English Books Online).
9. Weak Back
Although there aren’t known records of this for the early modern period, by the nineteenth century some believed May Dew could strengthen weak backs, particularly those of sickly children. Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published 1808, put it this way:
Great virtue is ascribed to May-dew. Some, who have tender children, particularly on Rude-day [3 May], spread out a cloth to catch the dew, and wet them in it.
10. Pretty Much Anything
Beyond specific ailments, May-Dew was a key ingredient in many recipes, both medicinal and alchemical. For example, the Thesaurus & armamentarium medico-chymicum – written by Adrian von Mynsicht in the early seventeenth century and translated into English in 1682 – called for ‘water made of May-dew gathered from the standing Wheat’ to facilitate his recipe for ‘Pearls Trochiscated’. Apparently, this powerful concoction could cure just about any problem, psychological or physical:
It is a most excellent Comfortative in all affects of the Heart, as Pain, Sorrow, Trembling, Pulsation, Palpitation, defects of the Mind, &c. Also in pains of the Head, Vertigo, Epilepsie, Apoplexy, Palsie, Contractures, resolution of the Nerves, Convulsion, Phrensie, Melancholy, Madness, Gout, and Gouty pains in the Joynts, Consumption, Blasting, the numbness and decay by Age, Stone, Dropsie, Scurvy, French Pox, and Feavers, &c. It purifies the Blood; it comforts all the Senses, Brain, Memory, and Heart, and preserves the whole body sound….
Etc., etc., etc.
And there you have it. If you’ve got a problem, May-Dew’s probably got you covered.
MAY-DEW AND MANNA FROM HEAVEN
Early moderns clearly respected this liquid’s efficacy, and the power the festive year could give them to influence their own lives. It wasn’t just a superstitious practice of the ‘folk’, either. Hieronymous Brunschwig, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle – these were leading thinkers and experts of their respective days. Even the Royal Society commissioned Some observations and experiments upon May-dewin the 1660s. While the division between folklore and learned knowledge certainly increased in the eighteenth century, such a divide was not necessarily so pronounced before this: folk practices could often be grounded – at least in part – in the prevailing learned theories of the day.
Francis Bacon’s own theory about May-Dew, quoted at the top, connected the substance to contemporary discussions on ‘manna’, the Biblical food which nourished the Israelites during their forty years in the desert. At the end of the seventeenth century, Thomas Pope Blount compiled some of these theories, including Bacon’s, into a section called ‘Observations concerning manna’ in his Natural History (1693). Since manna was described in the Bible as arriving with the dew in the night, it was often called the ‘Dew of Heaven’. According to Blount, the substance still collected and congealed on plants and trees. It could be (and was) harvested and used for ‘physick’. Though more plentiful in hotter climes – where dew collected thick throughout the year – it could be found in England too: ‘In those hot Countries it Coagulates, with us it is liquid’.
Blount was building on the ideas of Bacon, who argued that the best manna could be found in Calabria, at the tip of Italy’s boot. Based on the harvesting practices there, where manna was gathered from trees in the mountains but not the valleys, Bacon thought that, in its descent from heaven, manna collected first in the highland areas, and dissipated before it could reach the plants of the valley. He drew the conclusion that it would ‘not be amiss to observe a little better the Dews that fall upon Trees, or Herbs, growing on Mountains’.
Echoing Brunschwig’s advice about collecting ‘nearer…the montaynes’, Bacon suggested the best May-Dew for medicinal purposes would come from the hills, presumably because it mingled with manna from heaven, or was perhaps manna itself. This may also explain the importance of May in this equation, at least in the minds of these thinkers. Since May is the month in northern climes when weather turns warm and dews increase (but do not evaporate too quickly), it would be the best opportunity to soak up powerful manna.
Theorizing aside, I can now say from experience that it was not easy to find and gather May-Dew at the top of Arthur’s Seat (there’s far more of it on the lowland Meadows). But perhaps this is really the point: the greater the challenge, the greater the reward, the more powerful the May-Dew.
Oh, I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet…
Irving Berlin, Easter Parade (1933)
Built around Irving Berlin’s song of the same name, the classic musical Easter Parade begins and ends with the famed titular event, as the who’s who of early twentieth-century New York City stroll down Fifth Avenue in new bonnets, top hats, suits and dresses. The movie actually has little to do with Easter or its parade (similarly, this post has little to do with the movie!), but it does convey the pageantry of the occasion in an unparalleled way, through Berlin’s music, Judy Garland’s singing, Fred Astaire’s dancing, and superb costuming. The last aspect in particular highlights the centrality of new clothing and fashion to this Easter tradition.
Judy Garland and Fred Astaire steppin’ out onto Fifth Avenue in their new threads. Easter Parade (1948).
According to Leigh Eric Schmidt (1994), the Fifth Avenue parade developed as a distinct event in the late nineteenth century, out of a ‘hybridized commingling of faith and fashion’. By the time the movie musical was released in 1948, the event had become a major cultural touchstone for American celebrations of Easter, but also a source of controversy. To some, it was both result and epitome of ‘schlokified’ Christianity – faith consumed by consumerism. Schmidt traces such criticisms, visible from the early days of the parade, but argues persuasively against these mono-causal (and cynical) views. Though certainly co-opted and perpetuated by NYC fashion retailers, the Easter parade was for many a ‘modern synthesis of piety and display’ – aided and abetted by churches and embraced by churchgoers as a material manifestation of spiritual and seasonal renewal. Not only this, it tapped into deep roots of European Christian tradition.
Easter cover from The Saturday Evening Post, 1912. Source.
Indeed, analogous and antecedent traditions of Easter finery aren’t hard to find, but they are especially well documented for the British Isles. Folklorists Peter Opie, Iona Opie and Moira Tatem (1964; 1996), have collected several examples illustrating the connection between Easter and clothes, ranging in date from present day to the Elizabethan era.
In the 1960s and 70s, newspapers in urban areas such as London and Bath ran advertisements like, ‘Only 2 weeks to Easter—It’s lucky to wear something new!’. In the 1950s, a boy from Dumfries, Scotland communicated a similar idea, with the twist that new Easter clothes were not so much good luck as they were a ward against ill fortune:
On Easter Monday if you do not have on something new it is supposed to be bad luck for you.
According to various nineteenth and twentieth-century accounts, this bad luck could take bizarre forms: crows pecking out your eyes, bird droppings splattering you, dogs spitting in your face, and other pleasantries. This description of Norwich in the 1850s is prototypical:
Rustics returning from Tombland fair … carry new hats, not on their heads, but in boxes, &c. They are worn for the first time on Easter Day; and by so doing, the bearer is secured from any bird’s dropping its ‘card’ upon him during the ensuing year. Indeed, it is very unlucky not to wear some new … clothing on Easter Day.
These localized and oddly specific warnings were variations on a theme equating Easter attire with good or bad fortune, first expressed in the eighteenth century, in an edition of the parody almanac PoorRobin: ‘At Easter let your clothes be new Or else be sure you will it rue’. This in turn seems to have grown out of an even more general social imperative. Direct allusions to this idea can be traced back as far as the 1590s, and they proliferated in the seventeenth century. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, Mercutio teases Benvolio: ‘Did’st thou not fall out with a Tailor for wearing his new Doublet before Easter?’ (Opie and Tatem, 1994).
Although the old imperative (and certainly the luck component) are no longer commonplace, other aspects of the Easter finery tradition still survive in the modern world. Today, many individuals and families switch to their summer wardrobes around Easter season, especially in northern climes where temperatures are only just starting to become reliably warm. For devout Christians, Easter Sunday service remains a perfect occasion to debut nicer items from this wardrobe, some of which may have been given as Easter gifts. From a religious point of view, Easter clothes make sense as the epitome of one’s ‘Sunday best’. Since Christ’s death and resurrection are the defining events of the Christian faith, their commemoration represents the height of the ecclesiastical year – the Sunday of Sundays.
Attempts to trace the origins or rationale behind Easter finery have usually alighted upon this second (religious) explanation. Leigh Schmidt, for example, offers that distinctive clothes for Easter – as for other sacred occasions like baptisms, weddings, and funerals – had long served as ‘material markers of holiness and celebration’. Turning to early modern sources, we find some evidence for this general practice, but slightly less evidence for pious motives behind it.
In one fictitious dialogue penned by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1671), a knight complains of his wife’s expensive ‘Bravery’ (i.e. her finery), professing that if she would wear her ‘Silk-Gown’ only on ‘Sundays and Holy-days, (I mean, only at such Good-times as Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, or so)’, the garment would last them seven years and save much expense. The knight’s grumbling gives us enough to know what we might suspect, that it was customary to dress finely on sacred occasions. Writing a few decades later, however, the preacher Robert South expressed the opinion that ‘bravery’ had come to supplant, rather than honor, the original purpose of Easter (1694):
There is a great Festival now drawing on; a Festival, designed chiefly for the Acts of a joyfull Piety, but generally made only an occasion of Bravery. I shall say no more of it at present, but this; That God expects from Men something more than ordinary at such times, and that it were much to be wished, for the Credit of their Religion, as well as the Satisfaction of their Consciences; that their Easter Devotions would, in some measure, come up to their Easter Dress.
Richard Stafford similarly seized upon the custom as a timely metaphor for spiritual renewal in his Easter sermon, rather than an appropriate pious act in and of itself (1698):
There is an Old, Common and Proverbial Saying, That People should have somewhat new upon them at Easter. Which tho it be commonly understood of Cloaths and Garments, yet there is some Divine and Serious Truth contained therein, and to be gather’d from it…now at this time our Thoughts are taken up with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead, we should also examine and prove our selves, whither we be risen with him; and then question further, and look about, or rather from within our selves, whither we have any thing new on us, or rather within us.
Clergyman and poet Joseph Beaumont, on the other hand, had little trouble tying pious purpose and motivation directly to the custom, referencing it in his poem Psyche (1648) to describe the revelation of Jesus after his resurrection:
But chiefly at the Angels Presence They
Were seiz’d with their intoletable Fright:
His shining Roabs were glorious as the Day,
And partners with the driven Snow in white;
For ’twas his Easter Suit, the Suit he had
To honor this bright Feast on purpose made.
And yet the Lustre which kept Holiday
Rejoycing in his delicate attire,
Could not such wealthy floods of rays display
As streamed from his aspects fairer fire,
For in the Majesty of his sweet face
A spring of living lightning bubling was.
The analogy to the natural world found in the last line was taken further by other authors, some making a three-way connection between Easter clothes, resurrection, and spring’s awakening.
Christ dazzling all in his Easter Suit. Pieter Lastman, The Resurrection (1612). Source: Wikipedia Commons
Henry Grenfield wrote of spring as the time when Earth’s ‘Divers-colour’d Easter-Cloaths appear…with new Life they grow, / A Resurrection in Effigie show’ (1686). Nicholas Hookes used the spring metaphor for more secular reasons, in an ode to his sweetheart, Amanda (1653):
Look at yon flower yonder, how it growes
Sensibly! how it opes its leaves and blowes,
Puts its best Easter clothes on, neat and gay! Amanda’s presence makes it holy-day:
Clearly, preachers and poets could put Easter finery to work for the diverse purposes of their pens. It’s more difficult to get at what early moderns actually thought of the custom in day-to-day life. Thankfully, Londoner Samuel Pepys provides a helping hand here, giving several descriptions of the traditional practice in his diary(1660-1669).
In 1662 he wrote:
(Easter day). Having my old black suit new furbished, I was pretty neat in clothes to-day, and my boy, his old suit new trimmed, very handsome. To church in the morning, and so home…
And similarly the next year:
(Easter day). Up and this day put on my close-kneed coloured suit, which, with new stockings of the colour, with belt, and new gilt-handled sword, is very handsome.
Most of Pepys’s entries about Easter clothes, however, revolved around provisions for his wife, Elizabeth. In 1662, he spoke with Elizabeth as early as Shrove Sunday (9 February) about the £20 he ‘had long since promised her to lay out in clothes against Easter for herself’. Twenty pounds was a huge sum at the time, and in other years Pepys complained profusely and often about the cost of his wife’s Easter finery. When Elizabeth received her newly laced gown about two weeks before Easter in 1664, Samuel opined: ‘[it] is indeed very handsome, but will cost me a great deal of money, more than ever I intended, but it is but for once’. Apparently, this passive aggressive grace did not survive the next morning…
Lay long in bed wrangling with my wife about the charge she puts me to at this time for clothes more than I intended, and very angry we were…
Despite this, the couple were ‘quickly friends again’, so that Elizabeth later chatted happily ‘of her clothes against Easter’. The big day finally arrived a week later, though it did not go as planned:
(Lord’s day). Lay long in bed, and then up and my wife dressed herself, it being Easter day, but I not being so well as to go out, she, though much against her will, staid at home with me; for she had put on her new best gowns, which indeed is very fine now with the lace; and this morning her taylor brought home her other new laced silks gowns with a smaller lace, and new petticoats, I bought the other day both very pretty.
Due to Samuel’s bad bout of flatulence (no joke), the long-suffering Elizabeth had to wait until Easter Tuesday to make her debut.
The Pepys family were not exactly the seventeenth-century norm, being from what historians might term the upper crust of the ‘middling sort’. Nonetheless, the dynamics between husband and wife were true to form in many respects, especially concerning Easter clothes. One contemporary piece called The modern and genteel way of wooing and complementing (Phillips, 1699), described a fictional proposal where the doter promised his beloved to ‘come up every year after Easter to buy thee Pins, Gloves and Ribbands, and a new Gown’. Similarly, in a dialogue ‘between a proud Woman and her Husband about Apparrel’ (Parker, 1682), the wife complained that, though she’d received ‘a pair of hose & shooes at Easter’, she’d had nothing since, and it was almost Midsummer.
In all of these examples, literary and literal, it was the responsibility – an expectation – of the husband as head of household to provide new clothes to wife and children at Easter. This particular aspect of the tradition points to its deeper origins in the medieval period.
From as early as the twelfth century, and probably reaching back further, members of great medieval households, be they servants or family, were typically entitled to the benefits of board, bed, and ‘livery’ – clothes or money/materials needed to make them. Livery was usually doled out only a few times a year. Just as now, winter, spring and summer warranted different attire, and the major festive occasions marking their turning points (e.g. All Saints, Christmas, Easter and Whitsun) were logical times for distribution (Woolgar, 1999; Wild, 2012) .
Social and religious aims were also interwoven into these material practicalities. For medieval lords and ladies, distributing festive livery was an act of largesse, a visible sign of their generosity to, and acceptance of, those within their household (their familia). The quality of the clothing likewise broadcasted the lord’s wealth and status, while its heraldry staked his ‘claim’ to that particular servant. In the words of Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybras (2000):
Livery was a form of incorporation, a material mnemonic that inscribed obligations and indebtedness upon the body. As cloth exchanged hands, it bound people in networks of obligation.
Clothing given at Christmas and Easter within households often came alongside other offerings such as feasts and monetary rewards – these were voluntary gifts nonetheless duly expected at such seasons (and which gradually became codified) in exchange for loyal service throughout the year (think of today’s Christmas bonus). Such markers of generosity and good house-keeping could also double as pious charity in these holy settings. One story connected to the tenth-century Saint Oswald of Worcester, for example, tells of his kind treatment of twelve poor men, to whom he ‘at Easter…gaue new cloathes, and retayned…in his hall as…principall guests for certaine daies’ (Porter, 1632). During the medieval period, then, Easter clothes could be at once a pious expression of charity, a reciprocal sign of the benefits and obligations of household membership, and a practical necessity for the onset of warmer weather.
Fourteenth-century German illumination of the resurrection in Walters Ms. W.148, Homilary, fol. 23v (The Walters Art Museum)
Over the course of the sixteenth century, some aspects of the medieval livery system – such as heraldic markings – began to decline, but its importance to household cohesion and patronage remained. In the royal household of James I of England (r.1603-1625), for example, the King’s Men (Shakespeare’s playing company) received every second Easter ‘a livery consisting of three yards of bastard scarlet for a cloak and a quarter yard of crimson velvet for a cape’ (Jones and Stallybras, 2000). Despite this continuity, a shift seems to have occurred in the early modern period which added to the social dynamics of the medieval custom and perhaps elevated Easter above other occasions (e.g. Christmas, Whitsun) in its symbolic significance to clothes. This shift is neatly suggested in the oldest known direct reference to Easter finery, from Thomas Lodge’s Wits Miserie, printed in 1596 (Opie and Tatem, 1994):
The farmer that was contented in times past with his Russet Frocke & Mockado sleeves, now sels a Cow against Easter to buy him silken geere for his credit.
Thus the old custom of changing to new clothes at times like Easter was no longer purely practical or solely an expression of piety and household economy and cohesion – it was an opportunity to flaunt an individual’s status (not just a lord’s) and even gain more of it in the eyes of peers. Fashion – something that had been largely the provenance of nobility and gentry for centuries – was becoming more accessible to the ‘lower orders’ (Currie, 2017).
By Pepys’s time, Easter was inextricably bound up with the yearly force of fashion. In 1667 his wife informed him of a London wedding which had been held in private because it was right before Lent, ‘and so in vain to make new clothes till Easter, that they might see the fashions as they are like to be this summer…’. In other words, Easter was for the debut of new summer clothes; it would be pointless to tailor them earlier for a wedding or other event because they would not then be in tune with the latest styles.
Multiple contemporary references from Poor Robin’s Almanac, like Lodge’s reference to farmers above, suggest that chasing trends and displaying them proudly come Easter was not limited to genteel and wealthy Londoners. Writing fondly of the tradition among young country folk outside London in 1670:
On Easter Munday after noon,
To Islington do walk up soon.
When Doll is drest up very neat
And full of love as Egg of meat
She casts a simpering look on Dick,
Then Richard he her lips must lick:
Writing less fondly in 1691:
Now shall a whole Shipful of new Fashions come out of the Isle Lunatick, wherewith many young Lasses shall so adorn themselves, that they shall be like to the Cinamon Tree, the bark more worth than all the whole body:
Writing downright snidely in 1685:
In this month against Easter-Holy-days many women shall fall very sick, but more of Modishness than any other Malady; the best remedy for their distemper is to have them to the shop and buy them a new Gown, and by such time as the Taylor hath made it, they will be perfectly recovered; or buy it ready made, and they are well in an instant.
Tangled up in its patronizing patriarchal tones, one can detect in this last quote the same critique of Easter consumerism and vanity visible in the contemporary sermons quoted earlier. Together, these all sound very similar to criticisms of New York’s Easter Parade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – flippant greed running amok over Christian tradition and piety. Looking at the larger history of Easter finery and clothing, however, shows us that the material, religious, and social were always intertwined in this tradition.
As long as it has been recorded, the giving, receiving and wearing of Easter clothes has served diverse purposes and held different meanings depending on context and circumstance. Despite this relativism, three strands appear continuously woven into the thread of the cultural practice, running through the medieval, early modern, and Victorian periods, down to the present day: people’s material and emotional need to respond to the advent of springtime, their desire to synchronise such practicality with religious devotion, and their drive to creatively embrace the rhythms of the festive year to their social advantage, even using something so simple as a new bonnet.
Edward Phillips, The beau’s academy, or, The modern and genteel way of wooing and complementing after the most courtly manner (London, 1699).
Henry Grenfield, God in the creature being a poem in three parts (London, 1686).
Jerome Porter, The flowers of the liues of the most renowned saincts of the three kingdoms England Scotland, and Ireland written and collected out of the best authours and manuscripts of our nation, and distributed according to their feasts in the calendar (Doway, 1632).
Joseph Beaumont, Psyche, or, Loves mysterie in XX canto’s, displaying the intercourse betwixt Christ and the soule (London, 1648).
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Natures picture drawn by fancies pencil to the life being several feigned stories, comical, tragical, tragi-comical, poetical, romanicical, philosophical, historical, and moral (London, 1671).
Martin Parker, A brief sum of certain worm-wood lectures Translated out of all languages into Billings-Gate dialogue (London, 1682).
Nicholas Hookes, Amanda, a sacrifice to an unknown goddesse, or, A free-will offering of a loving heart to a sweet-heart (London, 1653).
Poor Robin’s Almanac, various editions (London, 1670, 1685, 1691).
Richard Stafford, The observation of the three great festivals asserted in the Christian church and that objection answered, from Gal 4. 10, 11., and also the right manner of the observance of them made known, in a sermon, preach’d on Easter-Day (London, 1698). Robert South,Twelve sermons preached upon several occasions(London, 1694).
Samuel Pepys, Diary, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London: Bell and Sons, 1893), accessed in annotated form on The Diary of Samuel Pepyswebsite.
Secondary
Currie, Elizabeth, ‘Introduction’, in A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Renaissance, ed. Elizabeth Currie (London, 2017). Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybras, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge, 2000).
Opie, Iona, and Moira Tatem, ‘EASTER: new clothes’, in A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford University Press, 1996) Accessed Online.
Opie, Peter, ‘Proposals for a Dictionary, Arranged on Historical Principles, of English Traditional Lore’, Folklore, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Summer, 1964), 73-90. Schmidt, Leigh Eric, ‘The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display’, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), 135-164.
Wild, Benjamin, ‘Livery (uniform)’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles eds. Gale Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Maria Hayward (Brill, 2012) Accessed Online.
Woolgar, Christopher, The Great Householdin Late Medieval England (London, 1999).
The next day being Shroue-tuesday, a day of pleasure, and jollitie by custome, but farre more delightfull by reason of this magnificent mariage, which moued many occasions of mirth in his Highnes court…
The mariage of Prince Fredericke, and the Kings daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, vpon Shrouesunday last (1613)
Princess Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V, Elector Palatine married on 14th February 1613 (pictured above), staging their diplomatic pairing during the communal celebrations of St Valentine’s Day and Shrovetide. The choice of occasion was strategic, but also rooted in tradition, as Shrovetide and the ‘coupling month’ of February were strongly associated with love and marriage.
Indeed, Shrovetide was perhaps the most popular festival for weddings during the early modern period. It was the last chance before Lent, when marriage was strictly forbidden, and the season’s competing themes of lust and chastity could be resolved in a ceremony of mutual love.
Technically, however, marriage was forbidden during Shrovetide as well. Without special ecclesiastical dispensation, weddings could not be celebrated from Septuagesima Sunday, the ninth Sunday before Easter, until eight days after Easter. This did not seem to stop the eager betrothed: statistical evidence from marriage registers shows that the Shrovetide ban was frequently ignored or circumvented, while the Lenten ban was closely observed. Princess Elizabeth Stuart’s grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, hosted court weddings during four out of the six Shrovetides of her short personal rule (1561-1567). A letter written by Sir W. Knox in 1685 likewise conveys the association with acerbic wit:
Thy dear Sister is to be Married on Shrove-Tuesday, and at Night to be laid upon her back as flat as a Pancake, and no doubt will give and receive a curious time on’t.
With births and weddings abounding, Valentines exchanged, and the Lenten ban on marriage and conjugal relations looming, fertility stood front and center during the Shrovetide season. But this went beyond simple association, or vague fertility rites. Many early moderns believed they could pair festive time and custom to actively influence their own lives. This verse from Poor Robin’s Almanac (1682), although comical in tone, illustrates the medicinal purposes to which Shrovetide foods were put to use:
The Month with Shrove-tide out doth go,
When as the Boys at Cocks do throw,
The Broth of whom (the flesh being boild)
For them can’t get their wives with Child,
Physicians say is very good
To raise new viogour in their blood,
And so by using of this trade
Keep them from being Cuckolds made
Read more on Shrovetide customs here, and stay tuned for more anecdotes of Mardi Gras history.
Carnival Countdown is a series of brief blog posts sharing stories from the medieval and early history of Carnival, as we count down the final days of the season.
