Shrovetide – a feast too far

Shrovetide is a peculiarly English term for the short season of feasting before Lent known these days as carnival. The origins of carnival are obscure – although Dionysian rites may well have played their part.  Some authorities have it the carne-navale refers to the burning boat with an effigy of Dionysus that is burned on beeches in southern Europe and may have been the descendant of the Temple rites of the god; others maintain carne-levare refers to removing meat from the diet which traditionally followed on from Shrovetide. Today our concept of Shrovetide has shrunk to Shrove Tuesday (also known as Mardi Gras) the day before  Ash Wednesday, the first day of the penitential season of Lent.

This important painting above is by Hals dating from about 1615. The subject is Vastenavond (Shrovetide or Mardi Gras), the pre-Lenten season devoted to fools, foolery and all sorts of high-jinx. Two of the figures are recognisable as stock characters from early modern European comic theatre: Peeckelhaering (Pickled Herring) with the garland of eggs and sausages; Hans Wurst sports sausages on his cap. The young woman ( almost certainly a male actor) is surrounded by food, objects such as the bagpipe, and an obscene gesture, all of which comprise a chorus of sexual references. The painting inspired copies and versions by Haarlem artists and in its coarse humor brings to mind Adriaen Brouwer, Hals’s famous Flemish pupil of the 1620’s. It reminds one that while in England puritanism frowned upon Shrovetide and such revelry in protestant Europe old ways were still accommodated into the new religious dispensation.

As Shrovetide is itself part of the moveable feasts in the church calendar that turn upon the date of Easter (unlike Christmas which is a fixed date) it could over-lap with the end of the Greater Christmas festival brought to its own close on Candlemas ( 2nd February). This year is a perfect example. My birthday 13th February is Ash Wednesday. Therefore Shrovetide begins with Septuagesima (seventy days before Easter) on 27th January. The brief season feasting and making mad and merry lasts through two further Sundays – Sexagesima – sixty days before Easter and Quinquagesima fifty days before Easter. It ends as we’ve seen on Shrove Tuesday. The Lenten season being one of fast and abstinence was a time in monasteries when no meat or eggs were consumed by the monks. Hence the tradition of using up all remaining eggs by making pancakes.

In the renaissance Shrovetide court was probably the longest of all the festivals. It was a time for revels; plays; dances; games and entertainments. The mask and later opera are both art forms which come out of the elaborate staged entertainments which were associated with Shrovetide from the Middle Ages. Football and games with pig’s bladders arose from the custom of killing pigs and roasting them in common fairs. Mummers pranced and danced about villages wearing masks. This was a time of year when strolling players performed. In the inns of court there were differing traditions of plays and singing in the different inns. The ones in Temple most closely followed the practices of the royal court. In Temple a Fool was elected ‘master’ in the ‘parliament’ to preside over mock sessions of the court and he called all sorts of men to speak at the ‘bar’ for the entertainment of the Inn. There were always plays after the feasts and dancing and singing in masks before and during the feast – between courses. Sometimes High Table waited on the commons – particularly on the Thursday before Mardi Gras and on Mardi Gras itself. And of course all the sumptuary laws were suspended and all classes could dress as they wished. Hence the later habit of maskers was to wear a simple black over-gown (rather like that of a modern graduate) together with a white mask on his or her face.

In the Middle Ages Shrovetide was also the traditional time to have confession. To be shriven is to confess ones sins and receive absolution.  However it became the practice to carry out your penance in the Lenten fast that followed-on. No one really knows why being ‘shriven’ is associated with the preparations for Lent given that the obligation of the church on the laity was to have confession and to receive communion in the fifty days between Easter Sunday & Pentecost. This may, however, have been a popular descendant of monastic practice and adopted and adapted by the friars as part of  their cultural reinvention of the popular Christian calendar. And taking things to every extreme was soon part and parcel of the conviviality of the season. Excess of food; wine; beer and if you were lucky probably sex.

In time the church tried to restrain the general madness. Priests wore penitential vestments of violet or purple (as during Lent and Advent) for the mass and other services. The church also invented both the ceremony of Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament to take place over the last three days of Shrovetide and the so called Forty Hours which ran from the Thursday before Shrove Tuesday to attempt to keep the laity in the churches and off the streets and off each other. It even offered plenary indulgences to those who took part in these devotions. However, the old for whom the madness was too much went to devotions and the young went on their merry way. Nothing much has changed since those times. ‘Devotions’ – as these services were known colloquially in Ireland – still attract an elderly following in most churches.

The nearer we get to life’s end the more we seem to wish to reacquaint ourselves with the possibility of the Eternal. In its time heedless youth owns its own eternity and with youth’s liberality it’s wasted on eating; dancing; and making merry – or as they have it in the Benidorm beloved of the twentieth-century British holidaymakers – sun; sex and sangria