Christmas riots 1647 & the Freeborn Englishman
As is (hopefully) fairly well known Parliament attempted to ban Christmas, a law of June 1647 forbade its celebration. This was not entirely successful but there were reasons. Christmas was associated with Catholicism, and in effect the ‘old’ ruling orders, while the Parliamentary majority now represented the Puritan ascendancy that disliked the traditions and ideas of the Catholic church.
The Puritans were also concerned, at an official level and certainly amongst local ‘activists’ that Christmas was a time of dissolute behaviour which they felt was ungodly.
Parliament was certainly not totally successful in banning Christmas activities, partly because the less well off in society liked to mark the occasion, if and where they could, their lives being quite tough enough at other times, and also because celebration was associated with the Royalist cause and in the 1650s a symbol of attempts to overthrow the Commonwealth.
At Christmas 1647 a number of Church Ministers were jailed for attempting to mark the occasion.
Down below Christmas 1647 saw a number of riots in defence of celebrating the day.
The most significant disturbances of all took place at Canterbury, where a crowd of protestors first smashed up the shops which had been opened on Christmas Day and then went on to seize control of the entire city.
There is some interesting new-ish research on this here:
http://roy25booth.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/riotous-christmas-at-canterbury-1647.html
As with the Gordon Riots in London in the 1780s we need to be careful in applying modern labels of ‘reactionary’ or ‘progressive’ to such events. They may well have been Royalist influenced, and hence in the context of the 1640s counter-revolutionary, but once they were in progress they became a force that could challenge the existing order, whoever was in charge of it. They were in effect protesting in defence of their own December customs and of being left alone by Government to mark them as they would. It was a defining feature of what was known in the early nineteenth century as the Freeborn Englishman, someone likely to resist overbearing interference by the State in their lives, whichever quarter it came from. It can be seen that depending on the issue or the context that might fall in modern terms on either the right or the left.
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