Episode 008 - Christmas celebrations in Tudor England
Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors
Heather Teysko
4.6 • 624 Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2010
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History podcast. I'm your host, Heather Tusco. Today is the 12th day of Christmas, and if I were actually living 500 |
| 0:23.1 | years ago in England, I'd hopefully be at the biggest party of the year right now. In Renaissance, |
| 0:29.8 | England, the entire period from Christmas Day to the Epiphany was celebrated as Christmas |
| 0:35.6 | tide. Many people in our more secular culture today don't realize that the 12 days of Christmas |
| 0:42.4 | actually starts on December 25th, and all 12 days were a time of merry-making and revelry |
| 0:49.0 | in the Tudor court, and it culminated in the largest party of all on 12th night. |
| 0:55.1 | But let's go back a couple of weeks earlier. |
| 0:58.2 | Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, was a time of fasting and meditation. |
| 1:03.4 | People did not decorate their houses until Christmas Eve. |
| 1:06.9 | Modern marketers hadn't begun encouraging them to shop for Christmas gifts in October yet. |
| 1:12.1 | The celebrations actually began on Christmas Day when there were three masses said, |
| 1:17.6 | everyone dressed in sumptuous new clothing, and the king especially wore his most beautiful |
| 1:22.8 | coronation robes of scarlet or royal purple. His obligations on Christmas Day itself were mainly to attend the |
| 1:30.1 | three masses where the genealogy and life of Jesus Christ was sung and everyone held lit candles. |
| 1:37.5 | As it is today, music was an important part of Christmas. Not just the music sung in church with the |
| 1:44.0 | masses, either. The earliest recorded collection of Christmas. Not just the music sung in church with the masses, either. The earliest |
| 1:46.2 | recorded collection of Christmas carols dates from 1521, and it includes the Boershead Carol. Other |
| 1:53.3 | medieval Christmas songs that the Tudors would have known were the Coventry Carol and the First |
| 1:58.3 | Noel. As far as decorations go, the Tudors did not have Christmas |
| 2:03.5 | trees, although they were around in the 16th century. It's a Baltic and northern German tradition, |
| 2:10.1 | and even then it's not recorded until around the 1520s. The first known record of a Christmas tree |
| 2:16.9 | was in Latvia in 1510, and Latvia was part of the German territory at that point. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Heather Teysko, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Heather Teysko and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.