Christmas Every Day

1647

Death of a Witch-Finder

The hunt for witches was seldom much of a concern in England, unlike Scotland or parts of Germany where a craze for persecuting those who had made a pact with the devil often broke out in the 16th and 17th centuries. The exception to this rule was the reign of terror provoked by self-styled “Witch-Finder General” Matthew Hopkins and his companion John Stearne.

In 1642 a civil war erupted in England between the supporters of King Charles I and those backing the claims of Parliament. The chaos produced by this conflict allowed all sorts of strange behaviours to bubble to the surface: people preached the approach of the End of Time; men proclaimed themselves the Messiah; some claimed that to sin grossly was a sign of divine election; and, is as usual in times of crisis, vegetarianism and unbridled sex were proclaimed to be virtues. In areas of Parliamentarian control, where strict Calvinist preachers held sway, the detection of witches became a preoccupation. Interestingly, witches were sought out not for any maleficium or harm they had done, but for having entered into a compact with the Evil One.

Enter Hopkins, a young ne’er-do-well and the older Stearnes, a land-owner, who claimed to have devised ways of detecting witchery and who went from town to town offering their services — for a fee — to root out these evil women. Their efforts secured the arrest and trial of hundreds of alleged witches. The accused were subject to the “swimming test” in which they were bound to a chair and thrown into the water — if they floated they were guilty. They might be “pricked” for the devil’s mark — a sport of insensitive skin where their animal familiars or “imps” (see illustration above) suckled. Sleep-deprivation and other torture, illegal in England, were said to be used to force confessions. Estimates vary, but at least 300 women were hanged as a result of the 15-month campaign by Hopkins and Stearne — 60% of all witch executions in English history.

The witch hunt was opposed by a number of ministers and politicians who doubted their techniques and who suspected their motives. By 1647 the two decided it was prudent to retire from the game. Hopkins died of tuberculosis on this date in 1647 but Stearne lived to write A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft. Though end of the Civil War saw a drastic decline in witch prosecutions, the work of Hopkins and Stearne seems to have influenced the Puritan colonies in New England where tragic outbreaks, such as in Salem Massachusetts, continued.

378

The Battle of Adrianople

One of the most consequential battles in human history took place on this date in 378 on a field outside what was then the Roman city of Adrianople and is now Edirne, Turkey. The forces of the Emperor Valens were overcome by Gothic tribesman, triggering the collapse of the Roman empire and the end of civilization in the West.

For centuries Rome had held a border stretching from the North Sea to the Black Sea, a line of fortifications that held back hordes of barbarian tribes. Many times this line was pierced, allowing these Germanic invaders to rampage for a time before being driven back. The Roman empire took to allowing some of these tribes to settle in underpopulated border areas to keep their more hostile cousins out; the Roman army also recruited heavily from warlike peoples outside the boundary.

In the 370s the Huns arrived in Europe after decades of migration westward. These fearsome folk disrupted the Germanic kingdoms in eastern Europe and caused some of the Gothic tribes to beg Rome to be allowed inside the empire. This was permitted but almost immediately the Goths began to complain of ill-treatment by Roman officials and conflict erupted inside the borders. In 378 the eastern emperor Valens marched out against the barbarians north of the capital Constantinople. He found that their army had fortified their wives, children and possessions inside a wagon circle and had deployed their fighting men around it. In the battle that followed the Romans were outflanked and comprehensively defeated with the Valens himself being killed.

Roman armies had been wiped out before; Roman emperors had died in battle before. What made Adrianople different was that these victorious barbarians were never expelled. The Goths stayed inside the empire and wandered for two generations inside its borders, sometimes being bought off, sometimes pillaging where they travelled. In 410 they sacked Rome causing a shiver of horror in the civilized world before they wandered off again to invade Gaul and finally settle in Spain. Their example encouraged the onslaught of more tribes — Alans, Ostrogoths, Alamanni, Vandals, Burgundians, Angles, Saxons, Picts, Jutes, Suevi and Huns — and by 476 the Roman Empire in the West had ceased to exist.

Both Valens and the Goths who killed him were Christian, and both were of the Arian (non-Trinitarian) variety. Valens would be the last of the Arian emperors; Theodosius who succeeded him would make Trinitarian Christianity the official religion of the empire. This means that the barbarians who overran the West would be either heretics or pagans and would rule over peoples of what one could call a Catholic belief. The Church in the West faced enormous challenges in surviving and eventually converting the conquerors. The methods, political compromises, and language that the popes use to accomplish this would create a distinct form of Christianity and encourage the split that developed between the Eastern and Western Churches. Had Valens triumphed at Adrianople the world might have looked very different than it came to.

St Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers

Dominic Guzman was born in Castile in 1170 and after his college studies entered the Church as a monk. During a diplomatic mission to Denmark in 1203, Dominic encountered Cathar heretics in southern France. The Cathars (the “Pure Ones”) or Albigensians, were a deeply-entrenched sect with Gnostic and dualist theology. Appearing to the casual eye to be ordinary Christians, they held that the God of the Old Testament was evil, that the life of the flesh was to be shunned (they were vegetarians who avoided sex) and followed the teachings of an elite group of perfecti who at life’s end would starve themselves to death. Their moral example and the corruption of the official Church had led to Cathars becoming very popular in parts of France and Italy, with support from some political leaders.

Dominic noticed that few Catholic priests or monks were equipped to intellectually handle the challenge of heresy, so he began in 1215 a new community dedicated to effective exposition of the Catholic message. Within two years he had received sanction for the Order of Preachers, who came to be known as Dominicans. These were itinerant friars with permission to preach in public; they soon came to staff the Inquisition (though Dominic himself had nothing to do with that tribunal) and the new universities that were springing up around Europe. Among the great minds that the Order produced were Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Heinrich Suso, Bartolomé de las Casas, Fra Angelico, and Girolamo Savonarola. Among the black sheep of the order were heretic Giordano Bruno and witch-hunter Heinrich Kramer.

Dominic died in 1221. His name gave rise to the Latin pun for his black and white clad followers Domini canes, “hounds of the Lord”.

John Mason Neale

Lovers of traditional Christmas carols, ecumenicism and church history are much in debt to this Anglican clergyman.

Neale was born in 1818 to a clerical family and was educated at Cambridge. He was ordained a priest in the Church of England but his career suffered because of  his high church sympathies at a time when the Oxford Movement and the defection of prominent clerics to Roman Catholicism were causing turmoil in Anglicanism. He was removed from his parish by his bishop and became warden of an almshouse. Neale founded a religious nursing order for Anglican women, the Society of St Margaret, which provoked yet more controversy, and fostered connections between the Church of England and Eastern Orthodoxy. He was also an ecclesiastical historian of some note, producing a number of volumes on liturgy, the medieval church and Orthodoxy. However, it is as a hymn writer, collector and translator that he is best known.

In the early 19th century the singing of Christmas carols was dying and many of the old songs were long forgotten or sung only in remote parishes. Neale and a small group of musicologists helped to rescue many classics from oblivion. To him we owe translations of “Good Christian Men Rejoice”, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and (though not to everyone’s taste) “Good King Wenceslas”. The latter song has irritated music critics for over a century with its awkward combination of words and music, but this St Stephen’s Day song has proven to be an enduring favourite. Neale’s words, written in 1853, about the tenth-century Bohemian Duke Wenceslas were matched to a spring carol from the sixteenth-century collection Piae Cantiones with an 1871 arrangement by John Stainer. Why Neale should have chosen Wenceslas to embody the call to Christmas charity remains a mystery. Some claim that there was a long-standing legend about his generosity which English soldiers who fought during the Thirty Years War in Bohemia brought home, but, if there was, no trace of it remains. Neale would most likely have used “the feast of Stephen” because December 26 (St Stephen’s Day) was Boxing Day in England, a customary time for seasonal charity.

Neale died on August 6, 1868 but is honoured by Anglicans on August 7 because of the observance of the Transfiguration the day before.

Feast of the Transfiguration

And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering. And, behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias: Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men that stood with him. And it came to pass, as they departed from him, Peter said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not knowing what he said. While he thus spake, there came a cloud, and overshadowed them: and they feared as they entered into the cloud. And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear him. And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone. And they kept it close, and told no man in those days any of those things which they had seen. (Luke 28-36)

The Feast seems to have originated in the churches of the East with the Latin Church being slow to adopt it. It is not mentioned before 850 and was not mandated for the whole Catholic Church until 1456 when Pope  Callixtus III used it to mark the victory gained by John Hunyady at Belgrade over the Turks. On this day the pope at Mass uses new wine or presses a bunch of ripe grapes into the chalice; raisins are also blessed at Rome. The Greeks and Russians bless grapes and other fruit.

Though the name of the mountain is not given in the Gospels, the Transfiguration has become associated with Mount Tabor.

1578

Alcazar, the Battle of Three Kings

Christian crusades against Islamic powers were not confined to the Holy Land. An example of this is the expedition launched by the doomed Portuguese king Sebastian against the sultanate of Morocco, a sortie that had profound repercussions in a number of countries.

Sebastian I (1554-78) acceded to the throne of Portugal at the age of three. This was a time of great national prosperity brought by the wealth of Asian, African and Brazilian trade outposts; the Portuguese had developed a commercial empire that stretched around the world. Sebastian, despite his youth, proved to be a competent and charitable king, reforming laws, establishing hospitals and shelters and encouraging the fair treatment of colonial natives. He was also a very pious Christian, the product of a Jesuit education; he is said to have carried a copy of the writings of Thomas Aquinas with him at all times.

Was it this piety that led him to fear contact with women? Was it the fact that his mother abandoned him shortly after his birth to return to Spain to become Regent, never to see him again? Or was it the result of sexual abuse at the hands of a paedophile as a recent history of the king has suggested?* Whatever the cause, Sebastian assiduously avoided his royal duty to marry and continue his dynastic line. He channeled his energy into dreams of martial success and when presented with a chance to invade the land of Islam and battle the enemies of Christendom he seized the chance.

It was in the national interests of Portugal that the sultanate of Morocco not be too powerful or fall under the control of the Turkish empire which was expanding its influence along the coast of North Africa. In 1576 the sultan Abdallah Mohammed II was deposed in a palace coup. He fled to the Iberian peninsula where he sought the aid of the kings of Spain and Portugal to regain his throne in return for promises of good relations. Spain sent only a battalion of volunteers but Sebastian mounted an expensive expedition containing the cream of Portuguese nobility, mercenaries, and a curious group of English Catholics who had intended to invade Ireland at the behest of the pope.

Sebastian’s force landed in Morocco where he was joined by the troops of Abdallah and together they marched inland. At Alcazar (aka Alcacer Quibir, aka Alcazarquivir) these forces met the much larger army of Abd al-Malik I who had summoned a jihad to confront the invader. Outnumbered by 3 to 1, Sebastian’s forces were overwhelmed. He was killed as were Abdallah and Abd al-Malik. Thousands of Portuguese were taken prisoner and were either enslaved (if poor) or were subject to costly ransom. Sebastian’s body (or what was purported to be his corpse) was also ransomed but there were many doubts expressed as to whether it really was the king.

Before the expedition, Philip of Spain remarked, “if he succeeds, we shall have a fine nephew, if he fails, a fine kingdom.” The throne of Portugal passed from the childless Sebastian to an aged uncle who was a Catholic cardinal, resulting in a succession crisis that saw Philip within a few years seizing the country and its empire. Portugal was devastated financially by the cost of the ransoms as well as the Spanish takeover. Moreover, imposter after imposter appeared, each claiming to be the young king and setting off more political turmoil.

* Harold B. Johnson in “A Pedophile in the Palace: or The Sexual Abuse of King Sebastian of Portugal (1554-1578) and its Consequences” says that the king’s Jesuit confessor, Padre Luis Gonçalves da Câmara, was most probably the child molester who infected the boy with gonorrhea.