December

Figure 3.3.24 December, Detail, Four Seasons Tapestries, Hatfield House, Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Courtesy of the Marquess of Salisbury.

Labors and Agricultural Tasks

Provide (good husbands) Brawne and Souse,

Fat Beefe and Mutton for the house:

With other Cates for Christmas cheere,

Because it comes but once a yeere. (Vaux 1622, A8v)

The primary labor for the month of December in both the late medieval and early modern English calendars is slaughtering livestock—usually hogs, sometimes cattle—which had been carefully fattened up with mast through September, October, and November. Usually, as in this detail from the Winter tapestry from Hatfield House (Figure 3.3.23) and the December thumbnail from Prid’s calendar (Figure 3.3.25), a woman assists the male butcher by catching blood in a vessel.

December was a relatively slow month on the early modern farm, a time (according to Tusser) for small jobs such as making kindling with “beetle and wedge,” sharpening tools with grindstones, feeding the bees, and watching out for cattle to make sure none become “myriad” (48). Care must be taken that the smaller calves get enough to eat; the fear is that they would be “lurched,” or deprived of food by wily older animals (Tusser, 49). St. Steven’s Day on December 28th was the traditional day to “let blood” from one’s horse (Tusser, 50). Other tasks include cutting down timber, digging out the garden, and caring for fruit trees.

The slaughtering of animals represented in the labor for December was often directly tied to the true obsession in December calendars: the Christmas season. Even Tusser, who for the other eleven months of the year

Figure 3.3.25 December, William Prid, The Glasse of Vaine-Glorie (1600), A9v. Photograph by Phebe Jensen, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 931.

harps incessantly on thrift, now emphasizes the importance of giving freely in this season. Christmas is the time to “Leave husbandry sleeping,” for “What ever is sent thee by labour and paine, / a time there is lent thee, to rend[e]r it againe” (51). The goal of housekeeping and the riches attained by thrift is to “use and bestow it, as Christ doth us bid” through hospitality to “The neighbor, the stranger, and all that have need” (Tusser, 53). The main activity at Christmas, then, is to “banket, the rich with the poor” (53), dispensing all the plenty that had been so scrupulously gathered all year:

Good bread and good drinke, a good fire in the hall, brawne, pudding, and souse, & good mustard withall:

Beefe, mutton, and porke, shread pies of the best,

pig, veale, goose, and capon, and turkey well drest, Cheese, apples, and nuts, iolly carols to heere,

As then in the countrye is counted good cheere.

What cost to good husband is any of this?

Good household provision onely it is. (Tusser, 55)

Tusser’s emphasis on feasting “thy needy poore neighbour” (54) at Christmas is reiterated in the almanac calendar poetry. “You that are rich,” Bailes encourages his readers in a 1631 almanac, “with love the poore remember / Be open-hearted in this cold December, I Shew forth your faith by workes of charity, / And you shall live with Christ eternally” (A8v). Frende notes that when “cold December is come in, / and poore mans back is cloathed thin,” it is the duty of the more fortunate to “Feed and cloath him, then as you may / for God threefold will it repay” (1616, A8v).

Zodiac, Astronomy, and Astrology

Capricorn, the goat, the Zodiac sign for December, is a sign “of the South, feminine, earthy, and melancholique”; it rules the knees (Alleyn 1606, C4r). The mythical halcyon days, a period of calm in the depth of Winter, are said (by Hopton, citing Cardanus and Stadius) to occur in the first half of December, near the Winter Solstice (approximately December 12th), though they are also sometimes calculated to begin a week or so earlier. The “South-windes” supposedly blow on the 26th, the result of “the faire starre Arcturus” setting “vespertine.” Hopton also recounts the lore that “if Christmas day come in the new Moone, it is a token of a good yeare, and so much the better, by how much it is nearer the new Moone: the contrary happeneth in the decrease” (Concordancy, 111).

The Ages of Man

The yere by Decembre taketh his ende

And so dooth man at threscore and twelve.

Nature with aege will hym on message sende The tyme is come that he must go hyms selve.

(This Prymer 1556, STC 16076, B5v)

December in the ages of man scheme inevitably shows a deathbed scene, often with a priest, a grieving wife, and children or other bystanders, and medical paraphernalia such as urine glasses (Figure 3.3.26).

The Catholic primer images often include candles, crosses, and ointment jars for extreme unction. By the age of seventy-two a man’s “heare” is “whyte and gray, and his body croked & feble, & then he leseth his perfyte understanding” (Kalender, A7v). If he lives any longer than this, it is a reflection of “his good gydynge and dyetynge in his youth” (A8r).