Why was the Partridge in the Pear Tree? Read Online Free PDF Page A

struck on 2 September 1642, when the largely Puritan Parliament outlawed the performance of plays, including Christmas pageants. Eventually, all stage players would be declared ‘rogues’ and be ‘publically whipped’ should they be caught.
    A bill was passed entitled ‘An Act for the suppression of diverse innovations in churches and chapels in and about the worship of God and for the due observation of the Lord’s Day, and the better advancement of preaching God’s Holy Word in all parts of the kingdom.’ The bill required:

    That all alters [ sic ] and rails be taken away out of churches and chapels before April 18, 1643, and that the communion-table be fixed in some convenient place in the body of the church. That all tapers, candlesticks, basins, crucifixes, crosses, images, pictures of saints, and superstitious inscriptions in churches or churchyards, be taken away or defaced.

    Parliament enlisted the help of religious ministers to create a ‘Directory of Public Worship’, eventually making it the only legal form of worship. Easter, Pentecost and Saints’ Days were all banned or the celebrations were drastically reduced, and the stricter observance of Sunday was called for. Puritans demanded that ‘The Lord’s Day’ should remain only as a day of fasting and prayer.
    There was a ‘deep attachment to Christmas’ as Historian Chris Durston commented in the magazine History Today , writing that:

    [The Catholic people] seem to have retained a deep attachment to Christmas during Elizabeth I’s reign and the early part of the seventeenth century. The staunchly Catholic gentlewoman, Dorothy Lawson, celebrated Christmas ‘in both kinds… corporally and spiritually’, indulging in Christmas pies, dancing and gambling. In 1594 imprisoned Catholic priests at Wisbech kept a traditional Christmas which included a hobby horse and Morris Dancing, and throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Benedictine school at Douai retained the traditional festivities, complete with an elected ‘Christmas King’. The Elizabethan Jesuit, John Gerard, relates in his autobiography how their vigorous celebration of Christmas and other feasts made Catholics particularly conspicuous at those times and, writing on the eve of the Civil War Richard Carpenter, a convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, observed that the recusant gentry were noted for their ‘great Christmasses’. As a result, by the 1640s many English Protestants viewed Christmas festivities as the trappings of popery, anti-Christian ‘rags of the Beast’.

    Shortly after, on 10 September 1643, the Puritans abolished the previous liturgy and its musical accompaniment, especially in cathedrals and college chapels. At the same time, the Act abolished all archbishops, bishops, their chancellors and commissaries, and the vicar choral and chorister. Church organs were also moved from many churches.

    A Puritan Christmas.
    Mr Edmund Calamy, who lived at the rectory of St Mary, Aldermanbury, preached the following on Christmas Day 1644, before the House of Lords:

    This day is commonly called The Feast of Christ’s nativity, or, Christmas-day; a day that has formerly been much abused to superstition, and profaneness. It is not easy to say, whether the superstition has been greater, or the profaneness … And truly I think that the superstition and profanation of this day is so rooted into it, as that there is no way to reform it, but by dealing with it as Hezekiah did with the brazen serpent. This year God, by his Providence, has buried this Feast in a Fast, and I hope it will never rise again.

    The excesses of the Tudor era had been replaced by severe intolerance and a desire to remove any celebration of Christmas. There was even a belief that giving presents to children would be damaging for them, people who continued to do so found themselves on the wrong side of the law. One minister declared that children might become ‘so addicted to their