Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network.

I'm your host, Heather Tesco, and I'm a storyteller who makes history accessible

because I believe it's a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe,

and being so much more deeply in touch with our own humanity.

It's Christmas Eve as I'm recording this, Christmas Eve, and I know it's such a weird time.

It's for many of you, you're lonely, you're by yourselves.

Maybe some of you have lost people this year, and I know that it's not like other Christmases. One of the things that has

gotten me through times that were weird or sad or, you know, just having me off-kilter was

coming back to music. And, you know, music, the carols of Christmas are these familiar traditions that we come back to every year that ground us in whatever faith we have, whatever traditions we have, to come back to that and wrap ourselves up in the warm familiarity, especially for me of music. It makes things a little bit brighter.

Makes things a little brighter. So today we're going to listen to a couple of Christmas carols

that our tutor friends would have known and loved. So one thing about Christmas carols is a lot of people think that they're more

Victorian and they are quite Victorian, many of them, but that's because Christmas carols were

banned during the Puritan period. Those gosh darn nasty Puritans, you know, closing theaters and banning singing and all of that kind of

stuff. So our Tudor friends actually celebrated Christmas in a really big way, and they had lots of

music and lots of singing, and then Carols went away for 200 years or so, thanks to those pesky Puritans. And then during the Victorian

period, they came back when people started looking back and kind of romanticizing Christmas

past. And that's when we start to get the rebirth of a number of the more famous carols that we know. And a lot of these

carols people think that that they originated in the Victorian period, but that's just because

they came back during the Victorian period. So they were carols that our friends in the 16th century

would have known. I'm going to start with one of the oldest Christmas carols, which is the boar's head carol.

The boarshead carol actually first appeared in a book of Christmas carols printed in London

by Winkin de Word in 1521. It actually describes a very ancient tradition of sacrificing a boar and then presenting its head at the Yule feast.

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