Festive Feasting and Merrymaking at the Tudor Court

Make we merry, both more and less

For now is the time of Christëmas

‘Make We Merry’, English carol (1536)

In the Tudor period, Christmastide was a period of great feasting, drinking, and wall-to-wall merriment. While we think of the modern Christmas as a largely Victorian-inspired affair with Christmas trees, Christmas cards, and Father Christmas himself, there are still many features of the Tudor Christmas that will still be familiar to us today. Indeed, Christmastide was a time of hospitality and spending with family, Tudor halls were ‘dressed’ in ivy and holly, and even mistletoe (known as the Tudor ‘Kissing Bough’), there was a Christmas Day feast, a Yule log (albeit not of the chocolatey variety), plum puddings and mince pies, lots of gingerbread, and the list goes on!

It’s Christmas eve. As a Tudor, you are probably rather hungry. Why? Well, preceding the twelve days of Christmas, were forty days and forty nights of Advent. This was a period of relative austerity, fasting, and sobriety. If you were a wealthy Tudor, you might have subbed your usual indulgences of say, beef and venison, in favour of the less-refined options of fish, porpoise, and beaver’s tails. But regardless of your social standing, Advent was considered a period of abstinence and religious observance, with meat, cheese and eggs strictly off the table. So, come Christmas Day, there was a feeling of great anticipation and excitement as people of all social standings could expect to eat, drink and ‘make we merry’.

If you were a Tudor belonging to one of the great houses, Christmastide entailed very lavish feasting, banqueting, and pageantry. In the first year of Henry VIIII’s reign, the King spent £7,000 on Christmas, mainly on an inordinate amount of food, gifts, and entertainment. That’s a staggering £13.5 million in today’s money and, to put that into context, Henry VIII spent £15.5 million that year in total. Indeed, The Tudor court was at its most splendid during Christmas.

For the wealthy classes, Christmas feasting was very much a meaty affair. Think stuffed peacock, swan, marinated pig’s ears, capons, beef, and a boar’s head to top it all. Pig was also a very big feature at Christmas, with every bit of it put to use, even the blood. Fatty cuts of boar and pork meat were, indeed, extremely popular. You may also even have seen turkey on the banqueting table as the meat was introduced to Britain as early as the 1520s.

Food at Christmas was seasonal, and it was common to have both sweet and savoury flavour combinations within the same dish. Even the sweet mince pies, Christmas puddings, plum puddings and frumenty (a popular seasonal Tudor dessert) all had surprisingly savoury and meaty ingredients. Spices were also very popular, and even a status symbol at the time, with Christmas dishes likely to be spiced with nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, cloves, and saffron.

The crowning glory of the Christmas feast was the boar’s head, baked and garnished with rosemary. It was incredibly laborious and time-intensive to prepare, marinating in wine and salt for at least two weeks before you could even begin to bone and cook it. The dish was also highly sought after as overhunting had almost entirely wiped-out boars in Britain. It was therefore a very rare and expensive dish, even for the wealthiest classes. When it came to the Christmas Day feast, the boar’s head was always presented first, with great fanfare and ceremony, as well as carol singing.

Below is an excerpt of ‘The Boar’s Head Carol’, printed in Wynkyn de Worde’s Christmasse Carolles newley enprinted, (1521):

The boar’s head in hand bear I,

Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary,

And I pray you, my masters, be merry,

Lo, behold the head I bring,

Giving praise to God we sing,

- ‘The Boar’s Head Carol’ (1521)

While your average Tudor certainly would not have been privilege to such lavish dining, they still would have welcomed Christmastide as a very welcome break to Advent fasting with better-than-usual food options. You might have sat down to some beef stew or pie, perhaps some pork or variety of bird. Add to this, a lot of bread, cheese, as well as gingerbread (since the spice was a more widely available and cheaper option at the time). And of course, don’t forget to wash all that down with copious amounts of ale and wine.

No matter what kind of Tudor you were, food was king at Christmas time.