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| It's that time, again!!! It's Tudor Trivia Tuesday!!! |
1) The day of St. Catherine, (November 25), was anciently observed by young women, who assembled to make merry, parade through the streets, according to a custom which they called Catherining.
2) On St. Nicholas Day (December 6) a boy bishop, previously
elected, was consecrated to each diocese. He was outfitted with a complete set
of expensive episcopal regalia which he appears to have kept (as each new year
brought a new bill for the items). His consecration was celebrated with a great
feast.
3) In the Statutes of Salisbury Cathedral (1319), the feast
for the boy bishop was forbidden.
4) The Acts of York
Cathedral order that its boy bishop should be handsome and elegantly shaped or
else the election would be void.
5) King Henry VIII outlawed boy bishops on St. Nicholas Day and
St. Catherine Day festivities by solemn proclamation in 1541.
6) St. Catherine’s Day festivities were briefly reinstated
during the reign of Queen Mary I.
7) George Puttenham, in his Art of Poesie (1589),
indicates that Bishop Nicholas died in the church by Henry VIII’s proclamation only
to be resurrected as a scholar’s mock.
Methinks this fellow speaks like Bishop Nicholas: for on St
Nicholas’s night, commonly, the scholars of the country make them a Bishop,
who, like a foolish boy, goeth about blessing and preaching with such childish
terms as make the people laugh at his foolish counterfeit speeches.
8) The Merovingian Franks began the calendar year on Ladies
Day, March 25. The date was adopted by the English. After 1564 the French changed
to begin the year on January 1. They adopted the Gregorian Calendar together
with most of the countries of Europe in 1582.
9) Great Britain changed their first calendar day of the new
year to January 1, from Ladies Day, March 25, and from the Julian to the
Gregorian calendar in 1751.
10) In 1 Henry IV, II.iv.381-2, Falstaff, off on yet another
verbal riff asks:
Shal the blessed sunne of heaven
prove a micher, and eat black-berries?
A “micher” was term for a person who skulked around bushes
trying not to attract attention for wandering about unemployed during work or
school hours. Such truants were reputed to eat the berries off of blackberry
bushes.
Sources for these items come from Brand’s Observations on
Popular Antiquities (1900), the Medii Ævi Kalendarium (1841) and
elsewhere.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- More on Thomas North as Shakespeare and author of Arden of Feversham. June 14, 2021. “This is also the reason why the title pages included the address of the shop that was selling the book.”
- A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years. Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”
- Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare. May 26, 2020. “A less well known effect of the Reformation was that many young Catholic men who had taken religious orders in order to receive an education began to lead lives at large from monastic discipline. Like Erasmus and Rabelais they took up the pen.”
- Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats. May 13, 2020. “Famous as this has been since its discovery, it has been willfully misread more often than not. No mainstream scholar had any use for a reference to Hamlet years before it was supposed to have been written.”
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
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