The Twelve Days of Christmas, Medieval Style
The medieval Twelve Days of Christmas, running from 25 December to 6 January (Epiphany), was a genuinely continuous stretch of celebration rather than the modern song’s countdown of escalating gifts — though the underlying spirit of extravagant, slightly exhausting festivity translates surprisingly well across the centuries.
Christmas Day itself opened with Mass and the reciting of Christ’s genealogy by candlelight, followed by feasting that formally ended the four-week Advent fast — a beginning rather than a climax, since the celebrations properly built from there. Subsequent days carried their own dedicated meanings: St Stephen (26 December), St John the Evangelist (27th), Holy Innocents’ Day (28th, commemorating the children killed by Herod), and New Year’s Day, reframed by the Church as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision specifically to distance it from older midwinter customs — Archbishop Wulfstan was condemning “heathen rites” associated with the date as early as 1008. Villeins were excused from working the lord’s land throughout the Twelve Days, and lords traditionally provided a feast for their tenants, though on plenty of manors this was more a genuine bring-and-share affair, with villeins expected to contribute food themselves.
Holy Innocents’ Day developed one of the period’s most charming customs: the election of a “Boy Bishop,” a choirboy given the honour (and, at cathedrals like Winchester and York, the actual duty) of leading Mass for the day — first recorded at Salisbury in 1222, with a small ceremonial mitre purchased for the role by 1225. Households and royal courts also chose a “Lord of Misrule” (sometimes a “Bean King,” selected by whoever found a hidden bean baked into a cake) to preside over a day of deliberate role-reversal and licensed chaos — a tradition that lasted at the royal court right up until 1553, when the accession of the more austerely Catholic Mary Tudor quietly ended it, more for its association with the previous regime than for any real theological objection.
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