“Christmas goes out in fine style,—with Twelfth Night. It is a finish worthy of the time. Christmas Day was the morning of the season; New Year's Day the middle of it, or noon; Twelfth Night is the night, brilliant with innumerable planets of Twelfth-cakes. The whole island keeps court; nay, all Christendom. All the world are [338]kings and queens. Everybody is somebody else, and learns at once to laugh at, and to tolerate, characters different from his own, by enacting them. Cakes, characters, forfeits, lights, theatres, merry rooms, little holiday-faces, and, last not least, the painted sugar on the cakes, so bad to eat but so fine to look at, useful because it is perfectly useless except for a sight and a moral—all conspire to throw a giddy splendour over the last night of the season, and to send it to bed in pomp and colours, like a Prince.”[{2}]
For seventeenth-century banqueting customs and the connection of the cake with the “King of the Bean” Herrick may be quoted:—
“Now, now the mirth comes
With the cake full of plums,
Where bean's the king of the sport here;
Besides we must know,
The pea also
Must revel as queen in the court here.
Begin then to choose
This night as ye use,
Who shall for the present delight here
Be a king by the lot,
And who shall not
Be Twelfth-day queen for the night here
Which known, let us make
Joy-sops with the cake;
And let not a man then be seen here,
Who unurg'd will not drink,
To the base from the brink,
A health to the king and the queen here.”[{3}]
There are many English references to the custom of electing a Twelfth Day monarch by means of a bean or pea, and this “king” is mentioned in royal accounts as early as the reign of Edward II.[{4}] He appears, however, to have been even more popular in France than in England.
[339]The method of choosing the Epiphany king is thus described by the sixteenth-century writer, Étienne Pasquier:—
“When the cake has been cut into as many portions as there are guests, a small child is put under the table, and is interrogated by the master under the name of Phebé [Phoebus], as if he were a child who in the innocence of his age represented a kind of Apollo's oracle. To this questioning the child answers with a Latin word: Domine. Thereupon the master calls on him to say to whom he shall give the piece of cake which he has in his hand: the child names whoever comes into his head, without respect of persons, until the portion where the bean is given out. He who gets it is reckoned king of the company, although he may be a person of the least importance. This done, everyone eats, drinks, and dances heartily.”[{5}]
In Berry at the end of the festive repast a cake is brought before the head of the household, and divided into as many portions as there are guests, plus one. The youngest member of the family distributes them. The portion remaining is called la part du bon Dieu and is given to the first person who asks for it. A band of children generally come to claim it, with a leader who sings a little song.[{6}] There was formerly a custom of dressing up a king in full robes. He had a fool to amuse him during the feast, and shots were fired when he drank.[{7}]
Here is a nineteenth-century account from Lorraine:—