Volunteers were in the museum today, getting things ready for Tudor Christmas.
Thank you to all those Volunteers who came along and worked wonders!
Saturday 10 December
Set in the beautiful medieval King’s House, for one day only, the museum takes you back to Yule tide in Tudor times. Step inside and experience the sights, sounds and fun festivities familiar to Henry VIII and his court.
The building will be decorated for Christmas as it may have been hundreds of years ago, and there will be a full day of entertainment for all ages with Tudor activities including:
Feeling unwell? Meet the surgeon with his array of gruesome tools who might offer leeches or perhaps a light trepanning.
Feeling peckish? Meet the Tudor cook who will show you how to make marzipan treats to impress, for the Tudor table.
Set in the sumptuous King’s Room, an ostentatious replica feast will be displayed, containing some very strange delicacies.
A team of crafty crafters will be with us throughout the day to help all your family make a Tudor souvenir to take home.
Our storyteller with tales from the distant past to entertain
The cutler will be here, showing off his skill in making the finest knives in the land
After all this you’ll need refreshments in the Museum Cafe!
Christmas with a historic twist? Come to the museum! A fun and fascinating day for all the family.
A group from the museum walked from the Close to St Thomas’ Church this morning, towing a trailer (Cuthbert to some!) containing several packages…and a Christmas tree.
Housekeeper Val led the way, being most familiar with Cuthbert’s temperament, Volunteers Mary and Jane in attendance and Sally waiting at the church. The annual St Thomas Christmas tree Festival begins tomorrow and the church was buzzing in a convivial way with others, also flocking in with trees.
Some weeks ago Mary set things rolling and Volunteers were asked to make tree decorations with a Tudor Christmas flavour. As always, it happened. Lucy had written this in our blog in October
“Following the successful production of felt Tudor roses (2019) and, last year, the hanging banners, our ‘volunteer make’ this year is to produce small decorations to hang on a Christmas tree. These will decorate the Museum’s tree at the St. Thomas’s Christmas Tree Festival (Tuesday 29th November to Sunday 4th December)“
Thank you to makers Sally, Mary, Elizabeth, Maggs, and so many others whose names we don’t know. I hope you will see your contributions in the following images, go along and see them at St Thomas’ and come to the Volunteer Christmas Party to see the tree displayed there.
Don’t miss:
Volunteers’ Christmas Party
Wednesday 14 December at Salisbury Museum 2pm – 4pmThere will be mince pies, mulled wine and music
We are back with a Christmas Tree at St Thomas’ Church this year and we need Volunteer help to make it happen.
Lucy (Volunteer co-ordinator) writes this:
St Thomas’s Church Christmas Tree Volunteer Make
“Following the successful production of felt Tudor roses (2019) and, last year, the hanging banners, our ‘volunteer make’ this year is to produce small decorations to hang on a Christmas tree. These will decorate the Museum’s tree at the St. Thomas’s Christmas Tree Festival (Tuesday 29th November to Sunday 4th December) and in the Museum for Tudor Christmas on 10th December.
For those of you who sew there are some ideas (and materials for you to use) in the volunteer locker room, but don’t let this stop you from producing your own in any suitable materials, to fit in with the theme. Please return completed decorations to myself (Lucy) at the Museum by Friday 25th November. Thank you!”
Volunteer Mary Crane has, as always at moments like this, applied her inventive creativity and produced these lovely examples of what can made, using the materials available to us all in the Volunteer locker room:
There are no templates or patterns this year as it is hoped the simple shapes are easy enough to replicate, but felt, gold cord and ‘stuffing’ are available. Size? About 10/12cms or 4/5inches. Or try your own ideas. But please remember, keep Tudor and Christmas as your themes…
Visitors were in their hundreds each day over the weekend. A Tudor Christmas was apparently a decent break from preparing for our own!
The recent renewed uncertainty around Covid may have disrupted things a little, and on top of that the outbreak of bird flu meant our favourite falcons couldn’t make the journey. The Albion team were with us however, so Tudor combat sessions, and some interesting talks on Tudor clothing made up for the lack of feathered friends.
Well done all concerned.
Master of Ceremonies?
The Museum was decorated with banners, and of course our Tudor Roses, made and displayed by VolunteersThe table was laid – always impressiveAnd there was music, cooking and a blacksmith
Saturday, December 11, 2021 to Sunday, December 12, 2021
Booking: No booking required. Cost:
Entry by donation
Tudors are back for Christmas! Decked in Tudor splendour the King’s House will be filled with the sights, sounds and smells of a Christmas during Tudor times. A Tudor blacksmith will be outside greeting visitors. The sound of a strolling minstrel will draw you into our medieval building, and up into the magnificent Kings Room where costumed falconers will be displaying their birds. A replica feast will give you a hunger for Christmas dinners past. After a story from our Tudor lady, you can walk out onto the rear lawn of the museum and into a huge striped marquee where the tradition of Tudor warfare demonstrations at Christmas is continued, as well as our historic food expert showing how the Elizabethan sugar craze led to sculptural works of cooking in mid winter. Then it’s into the museum hall where we have kept the best till last – an indoor Bouncy Tudor Castle. The event is for one weekend only. Don’t miss it!
Volunteers continue to prepare for the now traditional Salisbury Museum Tudor Christmas event. This year it will be on Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th, with our friends who bring their wonderful falcons, and with music, story-telling, Tudor combat demonstrations, a Tudor blacksmith and historical cookery going on also.
Volunteer Mary Crane has been leading a team making ‘Tudor’ banners and the decorations are going up!
This delightful ’roundup’ of our Tudor Christmas day (14 December 2019) was produced by Ellen Molnar, a local student who is working towards her Gold Duke of Edinburgh Award.
A simple search of ‘Salisbury Museum You Tube’ will list all our videos from several years ago. Worth a look…
In connection with Salisbury Museum’s ‘Tudor Christmas’ activities I was intrigued, while watching ‘A Merry Tudor Christmas with Lucy Worsley’, on BBC2 TV, to note that they described the role of the ‘Lord of Misrule’. Also known as the Lord of the Revels, the Lord of Misrule was the ringleader of all the mayhem and revelry that constituted an enactment of the ‘12 Days of Christmas’ in court and in aristocratic households around the country, this being a high point of Tudor entertainment. Often the Lord of Misrule was appointed from among the courtiers but may also have been one of the servants as, during the festivities, the strict hierarchy of Tudor England was briefly turned upside down.
Regular readers of this blog site will be aware that I believe the astrological physician, Simon Forman, is a valid candidate to be the alchemist of St Thomas Church, mainly because he wrote in his Diary for 1584 that “The first of August I toke the house in St. Thomas Churchyerd, and entered there to dwell ther the 7. of September”. I was intrigued by Worsley’s description of the Lord of Misrule because Forman wrote in his Diary for December 1583 that, “This Christmas I was made lord of the revells…”. At first I was somewhat bewildered by this as the Master of the Revels headed the Revels Office – the department of the Royal Household responsible for the coordination of theatrical entertainment at court from Tudor times until the Licensing Act of 1737. The Master of the Revels between 1579 and 1610 was Sir Edmund Tilney and I could find no record of Simon Forman ever holding this position. However, as Dr Worsley explained in her programme, the Lord of Misrule was not just a ‘court thing’, there are records of Lords of Misrule from aristocratic houses in towns and villages around the country. In this context, Simon Forman was employed as schoolmaster to the children of John Penruddock MP1 from October 1582 to about Michelmas (September) 1584, and so it is probable that Forman was Lord of Misrule in this household.
In the TV programme, Lucy Worsley explained that the ‘Lord of Misrule’ was also sometimes referred to as Lord Christmas, the Christmas Prince or the King of Christmas. This has led some historians to speculate that the Lord of Misrule was a forerunner of our present day Father Christmas. It is certainly diverting to consider the colourful character of Simon Forman, known as the notorious astrological physician of London, in such a role.
Occasionally the activities of the Lord of Misrule got out of hand and there is a record of a Lord of Misrule accidentally killing somebody in 1523!
1 John Penruddock MP (1564-1614) was a Parliamentarian with constituencies in Wilton and Southampton. He had nine children, four sons and five daughters. A number of sources state that Forman’s employer, John Penruddock, was the father of the Cavalier Colonel Penruddock of the famous 1655 Penruddock Uprising against Cromwell. This however cannot be correct as Col. Penruddock’s father was Sir John Penruddock, who was not born until 1591. In fact, Forman’s John Penruddock was the grandson of Edward Penruddock of Arklebury (1500-1541) who was the great great grandfather of Col. John Penruddock through a different line.
John Penruddock MP had a house at Hale and two houses in Salisbury; one by the Close Gate and the other the Dolphin in New Street. It is interesting to note than in his Diary for 1582, Forman writes, “The 28th of December I toke a house in New Street”