New Year’s Gifts were continued; and at court they seem to have been arranged according to rule, and were generally in money. The aggregate amount presented was about £3000, sent in purses, worth 30s. or 40s. each, the donors receiving gifts of gilt plate in return. Pepys mentions his going to the jewell office, on the 4th of January, 1661, to choose a piece of plate for Earl Sandwich, who had given twenty pieces of gold in a purse. His account will suffice to show the perfect matter of routine then existing, as well as the amount of recognised official peculation. He chose a gilt tankard, weighing thirty-one ounces and a half, but this was an ounce and a half more than the Earl, or the value of the Earl’s gift, was entitled to, this limit being thirty ounces; so Pepys was obliged to pay 12s. for the extra ounce and a half, so much was it a matter of calculation. He adds, “Strange it was for me to see what a company of small fees I was called upon by a great many to pay there, which, I perceive, is the manner that courtiers do get their estates.”
James Stephanoff, del.
Ashbee & Dangerfield, lith.
THE WASSAIL BOWL.
The spirit of Christmas, however, had received a check in the time of the Commonwealth, which it struggled in vain to overcome entirely. The hospitality and festivities in private houses recovered, and were prevalent in the eighteenth century, and exist in many parts, and to a certain extent, even in the present utilitarian age; but the pageants and masks, in the royal household, and at the Inns of Court, had received a death-blow; although they were not actually abolished until the latter end of the century. Evelyn mentions a riotous and revelling Christmas at the Inner Temple, according to custom, as late as 1697, and says that his brother, who appears to have been a worthy, as well as a wealthy, squire, in the previous year more veterum, kept a Christmas at Wotton, in which they had not fewer than 300 bumpkins every holyday.
In 1702, Poor Robin makes complaints of the falling off of Christmas festivities.
“But now landlords and tenants too
In making feasts are very slow;
One in an age, or near so far,
Or one perhaps each blazing star;
The cook now and the butler too,
Have little or nothing for to do;
And fidlers who used to get scraps,
Now cannot fill their hungry chaps;
Yet some true English blood still lives,
Who gifts to the poor at Christmas gives,
And to their neighbours make a feast,
I wish their number were increast,
And that their stock may never decay,
Christmas may come again in play,
And poor man keep it holyday.”
Many of the popular ballads, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, refer to the same falling off in Christmas feasting, complaining of the degeneracy of the times. Poets and ballad writers, however, from the earliest times, certainly as far back as Homer, have been noted for this species of grumbling. Praising the bygone times, in order to conceal the annoyance at having had so many of our would-be-original good things said by our ancestors before us.