Old Money at Christmas

Auditors and compliance officers listen up as Oxford University’s Dr Dan Wakelin takes us through some of the requirements of their forebears over the Christmas period. 

Transcript

Beverly Chandler

Hello, and welcome to our Christmas special outing of Off the Record podcast. My name is Beverly Chandler, Managing Editor of ETF Express and Institutional Asset Manager, and we're going back in time - a long way back - to medieval England in the company of Dr. Daniel Wakelin, the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Paleography at Oxford University. Welcome Dan, and let's open with a little recap of your title. You're a Professor of Medieval English Paleography, could you explain exactly what that is?

Daniel Wakelin

First, thank you for inviting me back to talk again, Beverly. You're probably busy making your Christmas pudding, I suppose. Paleography simply means old writing, so I teach the students at Oxford how to read medieval literature from the original manuscript sources, to go back to the source, that's the key thing.

Beverly Chandler

And we're going to take a peek at Christmas in medieval times. Can you tell me sort of traditions that surrounded Christmas from the past that you've come across in manuscripts you're reading?

Daniel Wakelin

Obviously lots of our traditions which we think of as very ancient turn out to be often Victorian, our Christmas tradition. So the Christmas tree is popularised by Queen Victoria's husband and so on and so forth. But Christmas was a big feast back in the Middle Ages, in the sort of the millennium between the end of the Romans and the Renaissance. Most people, of course, were working very hard on the land or working in jobs with little electric light and it was the dark point in the year. So it was the perfect time for a holiday because you couldn't do as much work as you would normally. So why not balance that time with a little bit more partying, which they did very much. Some of the beautiful illustrated calendars that we have in medieval prayer books, they depict the labours of all the works for each month and then they get to December and they just show a big feast. So they were very much in spirit with our tendency to take some time off at this time of year. I think partying was the key. Perhaps the longest surviving element of medieval tradition is the Christmas carol. We have about 500 from medieval England in the manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and elsewhere, and some of them are still performed. There's a couple of wonderful ones that were rediscovered in the Appalachian Mountains about 100 years ago. Folk song collectors went round the mountains and found that people were still singing some of the medieval Christmas carols in the mountains. So that's a rather wonderful kind of survival. And when palaeographers such as my predecessors discovered the original manuscripts about a hundred years ago, then composers such as Benjamin Britten set them to music. I understand that in Cambridge at St John's College this Christmas, Errollyn Wallen, who's the Master of the King's Music, the sort of, as it were, poet laureate of musicians, has set a medieval English Christmas carol to music for performance this Christmas season. So they still have a kind of living life in performance in churches and elsewhere in classical music today which is quite touching. I should just say, though, they weren't all quite so festive. Some had very much an ETF Express theme. There were some carols that advised you on your financial matters. So “penny, penny, penny, penny, guard your pennies” - good advice. And “don't trust the executors of your will” is another Christmas carol with a not very festive theme, you might think, but those ones strangely haven't survived, but perhaps they would be more useful than some of the ones which have.

Beverly Chandler

This is great. Firstly, you're making living in the medieval times a little bit more attractive than I ever thought it was. I might want to go back just for December, but also these themes of money that have come through. I was going to ask you about what evidence there was that Christmas has involved cold hard cash and spending it since medieval times.

Daniel Wakelin

Well, it did in two ways. The first was that it wasn't all fun because although they were doing less work, they could do some work and less cheerily perhaps, Christmas Day was a very common day for financial transactions, almost the opposite of a bank holiday. So your debts for your sheep, or your rents through your land might often be due that day. Or in the parish, everyone would pay their parish dues or their sort of membership subscriptions for the guilds of craftspeople and tradespeople, because they all had to gather in church that day for the religious service, so it was a great day to get everybody together to exchange money, rather oddly. They used to also audit the public bodies that day. They would read the accounts in the church, but happily with a lot of wine and roasting of animals to eat at the same time, which I'm sure was also duly audited as well. So actually it was a financial day as well. But yes, expenditure was common. The account books of households and of civic organisations record lots of payments for expenditure. For instance, a Buckinghamshire family, the Stoners in 1482, wrote out what they called their expenses for Christmas. And they had geese, capons, larks, plovers and woodcocks in astonishing numbers but very small birds for eating on Christmas Day because of course turkey had not yet arrived in Europe from North America. They also pay minstrels and travelling actors  who they called the Players. So the same family in 1478 hired the Players of Leighton Buzzard which I don't think is now known for its theatrical excellence, but they hired them to come round to the house and perform on Christmas Day. They also paid for the torches to light the scene, because it was very dark of course, and lots of wine to drink, lots of tuns of wine. And so if you're going to a nativity play this season, I recommend to get through it, you take some tuns of wine. It's quite a good idea. And there were gifts too, but the funny thing was you had to give gifts to your social superiors. I think we would probably call them bribes, and you should probably not tell your financial officers about that. But you would give your social superior a gift and then he, as it usually was, would do you a good turn throughout the year, would pass you some sort of pecuniary benefit or a duty or whatnot. So it's that kind of thing. But social superiors would give out gifts of meat from their estate. So you'd send a letter saying “Give this man one deer from my land so that he could roast it”. It's actually a very valuable gift, very useful, but lots of expenditure just as now really.

Beverly Chandler

That's really interesting because, of course, I think the corporate year end for paying your tax is still the end of December, I think. So things haven't really shifted so I suppose that's the new year coming in. Do we have any evidence of non-Christian celebrations in the deep midwinter? Do I hear of a festive beheading?

Daniel Wakelin

Indeed. So some non-Christian celebrations are quite hard to track. Because the church was doing most of the writing we often only get the slightest echoes of things, usually disapproving. But we do have echoes, obviously, of dancing in ways that suggest sort of a more kind of a bacchanalian celebration. But also one thing that survives now is the bringing of greenery into the house. So while the Christmas tree is a Victorian invention in England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland, other kinds of greenery were brought in. Mistletoe perhaps, but holly and ivy definitely. They actually have songs and poems about it as well. And there's an idea of rebirth and regeneration; and you can understand in any agricultural-based society, this is the darkest, coldest point of the year when everything is shrivelled and dead, and so you're waiting for new life. They would bring greenery into the house as a sort of token of that hope for spring to return. There's some of that hope for rebirth, in fact in as you mentioned, a story about a beheading. It's a great book. If you want to read one festive book from the Middle Ages, I recommend this. It's called 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', and Sir Gawain's a knight at King Arthur's Court. And at a Christmas feast, a green knight bursts in and Gawain beheads him and then strange consequences ensue. I won't spoil it all for you because I do recommend it as a good spooky and enjoyable Christmas read. There's a great translation by Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate.

Beverly Chandler

And I think it's quite a slim volume from memory.

Daniel Wakelin

It is, you could read it in an hour or two.

Beverly Chandler

Exactly, while those mince pies settle, it's quite nice. Look, thank you so much for your time today with this, Dan, and for this fascinating conversation. And finally, we're just going to wish all our listeners to our podcast series a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. And here's to 2026. And let me wish you Merry Christmas, Dan.

Daniel Wakelin

And Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you, Beverly.

Beverly Chandler

Thank you very much.

Daniel Wakelin

Thank you.

Beverly Chandler

Off the Record is brought to you by Chandler Publishing. Production by Imogen Rostron, music by Otto Balfour, and hosted by me, Beverley Chandler. Thank you to our guests on this episode of Off the Record, and to you for listening. We look forward to you joining us next time.