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

want to destroy Christmas are:

    A crew of Tatter-demallions amongst which the best could scarce ever attain to a calves-skin suit, or a piece of neckbeef and carrots on a Sunday, or scarce ever mounted (before these times) to any office above the degree of scavenger of Tithingman at the furthest.

    When New-Come suggests she should abandon her celebrations because they have been banned by the authority of Parliament, she replies:

    God deliver me from such authority; it is a Worser Authority than my husband’s, for though my husband beats me now and then, yet he gives my belly full and allows me money in my purse … Cannot I keep Christmas, eat good cheer and be merry without I go and get a licence from the Parliament. Marry gap, come up here, for my part I’ll be hanged by the neck first.

    Mistress New-Come then informs her that if she disregards Parliament, she will be tamed by ‘the honest Godly part of the army’, but Custom ignores this threat, dismissing her with the rhyme:

    For as long as I do live
    And have a jovial crew
    I’ll sit and rhat
    And be fat
    And give Christmas his due.

    These Royalist satires were recited in market places and pubs; they were even sometimes accompanied by songs and ballads which told tales of Christmas past. Eventually, the Royalists were forced to concede that the public mood would never be fully controlled and Christmas was here to stay, ‘grand festivals and lesser holy-days … are the main things which the more ignorant and common sort among them do fight for’.
    The banning of Christmas was one of the biggest mistakes, one that was based on several misconceptions about the roots of the Christmas festivities, the place of carols and hymns, and the need for communal celebrations. Eventually, the people spoke. Slowly carols and hymns returned to the churches and the market places, homes and pubs, although this process was very slow indeed. The Act of Toleration restored some civil rights to Dissenters in 1689.
    The Dissenter Isaac Watts’ book Hymns and Spiritual Songs was eventually published in 1707, but the widespread celebration of Christmas with carols and songs took more than a century to properly reappear, when we started to witness the advent of the great hymn and carol writers.
    At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, something is stirring in the imaginations of poets, artists, musicians and hymn writers.

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The Golden Age of Carols
    The Golden age of Christmas carols and songs began with the rediscovery of ‘The First Nowell’. It is uncertain when this carol was written. Some believe that it was written in the eighteenth century, but some music historians argue that it could have been written as early as the sixteenth century. A version of the carol was first published in 1823 in Carols Ancient and Modern . The book was one of many to be edited and arranged by William B. Sandys and Davies Gilbert. Sandys, a solicitor and antiquarian, and Gilbert, an engineer, author and politician, rediscovered many carols from different parts of Britain, adding them to collections, sometimes with extra verses and different settings.
    Davies Gilbert was born in St Erith, Cornwall, the only child of Revd Edward Giddy and Catherine Davies. His father was the curate of St Erith Church in the village. His great love of the history and culture of Cornwall led him to assemble and write many books, including A Parochial History of Cornwall , he was also passionate about old Cornish carols that had all but fallen from use. He met William Sandys when he was elected to the Society of Antiquaries in 1820. In the introduction to Carols Ancient and Modern , Gilbert wrote:

    The Editor is desirous of preserving them [the selected Christmas carols] in their actual forms, however distorted by false grammar or by obscurities, as specimens of times now passed away, and of religious feelings superseded by others of a different cast. He is anxious also to preserve them on account of the