The money thus collected was put into a great bag, already sprinkled with a small quantity of salt and at the end of the day this bag was handed over to the captain. It was used to pay his expenses when he left Eton for some one of the great universities. Not infrequently it mounted up to hundreds of dollars and sometimes even to a thousand or more.
Up to the middle of the eighteenth century it was customary for the chaplain to read prayers on Salt Hill. He was assisted by a clerk whom he kicked down hill at their conclusion. The irreverence of this part of the ceremony shocked Queen Caroline and at her request it was ever afterwards omitted. In 1847 the entire ceremony was abolished by act of Parliament, the last celebration having taken place on June 28th, 1844.
And thus the last vestige of Saint Nicholas passed out of the ceremonial life of England.
CHAPTER XIV
FATHER CHRISTMAS AND HIS FAMILY
The English, as I have said, have no Saint Nicholas, no Santa Klaus, no Chris-kinkle to act as a distributor of gifts on Christmas eve. They hail as the patron of the season a vague allegorical being, usually called Father Christmas, though he has, sometimes, been known also as Old Christmas, Captain Christmas, and by other titles.
He appears only in picture, in poetry, and in dramatic pieces specially got up for the holidays. In the latter he has played an important part from a very early period. The most famous of such pieces was a “masque” written by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend and rival, and produced at the court of King James I in the year 1616. That, by the way, is the very year of Shakespeare’s death.
Christmas festivities at that time were frowned down upon by many of the more zealous Protestants—just then beginning to earn the name of “Puritans”—who fancied that these mummeries and rejoicings smacked too strongly of “Papist” or Roman Catholic tendencies. Indeed many fanatics had striven to abolish Christmas altogether, and had partly succeeded in doing so, at least among the people who believed as they did. But James I, though a foolish person in some respects, was a learned man and a great lover of the traditions of the past.
It is in allusion to the Puritan attempt to suppress him altogether that Ben Jonson’s Father Christmas utters these words as he makes his entrance upon the stage:
“Why, gentlemen, do you know what you do? Ha! would you have kept me out? Christmas!—Old Christmas—Christmas of London, and Captain Christmas! Pray you let me be brought before my Lord Chamberlain; I’ll not be answered else. ‘’Tis merry in hall, when beards wag all.’ I have seen the time you have wished for me, for a merry Christmas, and now you have me, they would not let me in: I must come another time! A good jest—as if I could come more than once a year. Why, I am no dangerous person, and so I told my friends of the guard. I am old Gregory Christmas, still, and, though I come out of the Pope’s Head-alley, as good a Protestant as any in my parish.”
He must have been a quaint looking figure, this same Father Christmas, for we are told that his costume consisted of