A survey of the rituals of the year in Victorian England, showing the
influence of the Middle Ages.
What does a maypole represent? Why eat hot cross buns? Did Dick
Whittington have a cat? All these questions are related to a larger one
that nineteenth-century Britons asked themselves: which was more fun:
living in their own time, or living in the Middle Ages? While Britain
was becoming the most industrially-advanced nation in the world, many
vaunted the superiority of the present to the past-yet others felt that
if shadows of past ways of life haunted the present, they were friendly
ghosts.
This book explores such ghosts and how real or imagined remnants of
medieval celebration in a variety of forms created a cultural idea of
the Middle Ages. As Britons found, or thought that they found, traces of
the medieval in traditions tied to times of the year, medievalism became
not only the justification but also the inspiration for community
festivity, from Christmas and Boxing Day through Maytime rituals to
Hallowe'en, as show in the writings of amongst many others Keats,
Browning and Dickens.