The united American : a magazine of good citizenchip., December 01, 1925, Page 8, Image 8

Page Eight
THE UNITED AMERICAN
DECEMBER 1925
Older and Newer Yule Customs of Pagan and Christian Times
'THE CUSTOMS of Yule in every land are the most
1 ancient and therefore the most interesting. The
general observance of the season may have become
too prosaic to allow any particular reference to the
earlier customs, but America, with her vast assembly
of people from every European country, in particular,
should preserve intact for her children these ancient
customs and relate them every year, for even the
pagan contribution to these customs contains so much
of wholesome mirth and sound philosophy of life, good
and evil, that we do well in placing them in the fore­
ground for the entertainment of the family circle and
of our immediate friends.
A new departure in the earlier Yule customs is
reported from England, where the Britishers are now
feasting on turkey, the American Thanksgiving sacri­
fice which originated with the Pilgrims from Albion
who offered God their thanks for all blessings of life
and showed their gratitude to providence by feasting
of the delicious meat of this well-known fowl from
the farmyard. And so it has come to pass that in the
baronial halls of Britony, where formerly the boar’s
head and the peacock were born aloft amid the Nobles
of the assembled retainers of the Lord of the Manor,
the American Thanksgiving fowl will from now on
assist in providing the festal joy of the Yuletide.
Though the boar, the tusked and bewhiskered
monarch of the forest, has been displaced by the
prosaic farmyard bird, the ancient recipes for the
preparation of the delicious viands which challenged
the appetites of mighty trencher-men of old will
probably not be replaced altogether, or the customs
of Yule, odd and half forgotten, which are told around
the Christmas boards in Merrie England, will not
survive.
Let us forget the present Britisher with his turkey
feast and go back into a little more ancient period and
take a place of vantage in the old baronial castle or
manor and live once more the observance of Yule
among generations who knew less of Christmas and
more of the pagan Yule with its mystical and myth­
ological customs.
The bringing in of the boar’s head was heralded
by trumpets and accompanied by strains of minstrelsy.
On a platter of gold or silver it was thus carried into
the banquet hall by the sewer, as the chief household
officers of those days were called, who had charge of
the table service. At the head of a stately procession
of nobles, knights and ladies, the sewer would chant:
Caput apri defero,
Reddens laudes Domino;
The boar’s head in hand bring I
With garlands gay and rosemary;
I pray you all sing merrily,
Qui estis in eonvivio.
The boar’s head, I understand,
Is the chief service in this land;
Look wherever it be found,
Servito cum cantico.
Be glad, both more and less,
For this hath ordained our steward
To cheer you all this Christmas —
The boar’s head and mustard!
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino.
Setting the head of the brawner — a boar fattened
for the table — before his lordship, this act would be
accompanied by a chant to the following text:
Sweet rosemary and bays around it spread,
His foaming tusks with some large pippin graced;
Or ’midst those thundering spears an orange placed;
Sauce, like himself, offensive to his foes,
The roguish mustard, dangerous to the nose.
Mustard was in those days an indispensible
requisite for the festal board. Proof of this is found
in the following reference from an old table etiquette
formula:
First set forth mustard with brawn: take your knife in
your hand and cut brawn in the dish as it lieth, and lay on
your sovereign’s trencher, and, above all, see there be mustard.
A slice of the boar or the swine after it had been
collared, boiled, pickled and pressed was called brawn.
In his story of “Christmas Day” in “The Sketch Book,”
Washington Irving makes the following reference to
the brawn:
After the dance was concluded the whole party was enter­
tained with brawn and beef and stout home brewed.
The Puritans of old England were opposed to
Christmas feasting and during the period when Oliver
Cromwell was Lord Protector, an act of Parliament
came so near being passed, forbidding the custom, that
had it not been for the tallow candlers of London
who rose in their might, protesting that there would
be no sale for their mustard, because of the diminished
sale of brawn, Christmas feasting would probably, for
a time, have been relegated to the scrap heep of anti­
quated customs.
Parliament failed to suppress the holiday celebra­
tion, but it succeeded in suppressing the boar’s head. |
The edict did not altogether make boar head prohibi­
tion stick for it is said that the bristling crest was
held in pleasant memory and cherished, not only in the
carols and songs of the people but in some of the nooks
and corners of Old England, long after it had
ceased to play the chief part at the festival tables.
Many people were, long after the custom had been
abolished by law, known to provide a boar’s head for
their guests at Yuletide. The lessee of the tithes of
Horn Church in Essex provided a boar’s head, dressed
and garnished with bay, to be wrestled for by the
parishioners in a field adjoining the church. Among
the Oxonians it is said that the members of Queen’s
College observed the custom of serving the boar’s
head with an ancient carol which has kept alive in
a song the memory of a valorous deed, a legend of
which Queen’s College is justly proud.
The following is the version of a popular ditty from
those days of which the students still are very fond.
It tells of a Queen’s College student who was walking
through Shotover Forest studying Aristotle. Suddenly
he came into the presence of a wild boar which, with
gnashing tusks, rushed madly at him. The scholar was
so frightened that he stood transfixed, while the boar
came closer and closer. Suddenly recovering the power
of action and shouting: “Graecum est, graecum est”,
he thrust the philosopher’s book of ethics down the
throat of the boar and thereby choked it to death.
(Continued on Page Twenty-Five)