DECEMBER is rarely a time for big protests. The weather is poor and the pressures of a commercial festival are considerable, even more so in another year with Covid concerns.

Yet traditionally Christmas and new year have been times of revolt. When most worked on the land there was little that could be done in the few hours of daylight at this time of year. There was however plenty of time for festivities and revolt.

It was a time of the election of lords of misrule (these were mainly men although in France women also took the role). 

They were often officially approved jesters who turned the world upside down but only in a play-acting sense. That wasn’t always the case though.

In the 1640s Parliament attempted to ban Christmas — a law of June 10 1647 forbade its celebration. 

This was not entirely successful but there were reasons for the prohibition. 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 among 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 and at the grassroots there were a number of riots in defence of celebrating the day.

Mark Stoyle has written in History Today about some of those that were recorded. For example, on December 25 1647, there was trouble at Bury, while pro-Christmas riots also took place at Norwich and Ipswich. 

During the course of the Ipswich riot, a protester named “Christmas” was reported to have been killed — a fatality which might be seen as symbolic of the way that Parliament had “killed” Christmas itself.

In London, a crowd of apprentices assembled at Cornhill on Christmas Day, and there “in despite of authority, they set up holly and ivy” on the pinnacles of the public water conduit. 

When the lord mayor sent some officers “to pull down these gawds,” the apprentices resisted them, forcing the mayor to rush to the scene with a party of soldiers and to break up the demonstration by force.

The most significant disturbances of all took place at Canterbury, where a crowd of protesters first smashed up the shops which had been opened on Christmas Day and then went on to seize control of the entire city.

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.

The traditions of turning the world upside down and the lords of misrule have a much longer provenance. One of the genuine traditions of the charivari or rough music — noisy night-time protests outside the houses of the rich — was that it focused on scandals and unpopular figures in authority. Boris Johnson’s Christmas parties seems like an ideal place to start.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.