Tea at Trianon: The Bury St Edmunds Christmas Riots of the 1640s

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 25, 2020

The Bury St Edmunds Christmas Riots of the 1640s

We should never take Christmas for granted, since there have been times and places where it was banned. Puritan England was one such place. Charles I may have asked for fasting, but he would never have banned Christmas. From Dr. Francis Young:

As far as most Puritans were concerned, Christmas was a superstitious observance of times and seasons that belonged in the dark Catholic past (although it was not until 1647 that Parliament formally ‘banned Christmas’ by statute). One way in which Parliament wanted to send the message that Christmas was an ordinary day like any other was by compelling shops to open on Christmas Day. This became the focus of the unrest in Bury St Edmunds, where on 25 December 1644 apprentice boys ran riot, smashing the open wooden shutters of any shop that dared open on Christmas Day (this was in the days when most shops literally ‘opened’ by lowering a suspended wooden shutter into the street, where shopkeepers would display their wares). Apprentice boys were traditionally associated with festive misrule such as mummers’ plays, so it is not especially surprising that they were leaders of the riot – not to mention the fact that the abolition of Christmas meant that they got no day off!

In response to the imposition of the Puritan ‘Directory of Public Worship’ to replace The Book of Common Prayer in 1646, there was a further riot in Bury. Apprentice boys assembled to force shops to close, and when ordered to disperse by a magistrate and constables, scuffles broke out. However, the authorities managed to put down the disorder. A pamphlet of the time reported that the ‘bloody designs’ of the ‘malignant party … against the people of God, and the members of Jesus Christ … were frustrated, [and] their mischievous design, in case that any one of them should presume to open their shops on Christmas Day, and to that end had prepared divers weapons for the execution of the same’. But a further riot broke out the next year, in 1647.

In retrospect, these later riots had more ominous overtones, since May 1648 would see the eruption of an actual armed rebellion against Parliamentarian rule in the town focussed on May Day, another traditional holiday. As the initial enthusiasm for Parliamentarian rule waned, Royalist sympathisers among the West Suffolk gentry were getting bolder in subverting the new order; perhaps the only reason serious violence did not erupt at Christmas 1646 was that the middle of winter is not the best time to launch a rebellion…

Bury St Edmunds was not the only town where pro-Christmas riots occurred in the 1640, but its unrest was among the most prominent in the country. These incidents are historically important because they illustrate the extent to which towns like Bury – apparently deep in solidly Parliamentarian territory – remained bitterly divided right the way through the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. (Read more.)