British Popular Customs, Present and Past / Illustrating the Social and Domestic Manners of the People. Arranged According to the Calendar of the Year.

by T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

Dec. 5.] ST. NICHOLAS’ EVE.

Dec. 5.]

ST. NICHOLAS’ EVE.

Strype, in his Ecclesiastical Memorials (1822, vol. iii. part. i. p. 326), says:—“On the 5th December [1554], the which was St. Nicholas’ Eve, at evensong time, came a commandment that St. Nicholas should not go abroad nor about. But, notwithstanding, it seems, so much were the citizens taken with the mock St. Nicholas, that is, a boy-bishop, that there went about three St. Nicholases in divers parishes, as in St. Andrew’s Holborn and St. Nicolas Olave’s in Bread Street. The reason the procession of St. Nicholas was forbid was because the Cardinal had this St. Nicholas’ Day sent for all the convocation, bishops, and inferior clergy, to come to him to Lambeth, there to be absolved from all their prejudices, schisms, and heresies.”

Dec. 6.] ST. NICHOLAS’ DAY.

Dec. 6.]

ST. NICHOLAS’ DAY.

The Boy-Bishop.

St. Nicholas was deemed the patron of children in general, but much more particularly of all schoolboys, amongst whom the 6th of December (the saint’s festival) used to be a very great holiday for more than one reason. In those bygone times all little boys either sang or served about the altar at church; and the first thing they did upon the eve of their patron’s festival was to elect from among themselves, in every parish church, cathedral, and nobleman’s chapel, a bishop and his officials, or, as they were then called, “a Nicholas and his clerks.” This boy-bishop and his ministers afterwards sang the first vespers of their saint, and, in the evening, arrayed in their appropriate vestments, walked all about the parish; all were glad to see them, and those who could afford it asked them into their houses to bestow a gift of money, sweetmeats, or food upon them. In the year 1299 we find Edward I., on his way to Scotland, permitting one of these boy-bishops to say vespers before him in his chapel at Heton, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and making a considerable present to the said bishop and certain other boys that came and sang with him on the occasion, on the 7th of December, the day after St. Nicholas’ Day. What was the custom in the houses of our nobles we may learn from the Northumberland Household Book, which tells us that “My lord useth and accustomyth to gyfe yerly, upon Saynt Nicolas-Even, if he kepe chapell for Saynt Nicolas, to the master of his childeren of his chapell, for one of the childeren of his chapell, yerely, vi^s. viii^d.; and if Saynt Nicolas com owt of the towne wher my lord lyeth, and my lord kepe no chapell, than to have yerely iii^s. iiij^d.” At Eton College, it was on St. Nicholas’ Day, and not on Childermas, that the boy-bishop officiated, which he did not only at evensong, but at mass, which he began and went on with up to the more solemn part at the offertory: “In festo Sancti Nicholai, in quo, et nullatenus in festo Sanctorum Innocentium, divina officia præter missæ secreta exequi et dici permittimus per episcopum puerorum scholiarium ad hoc de eisdem annis singulis eligendum.”