Christmas 1800

With the festive season almost upon us, time for a reminder of what Christmas was like for a minor gentry family in Martha's time.  Here is an extract from Martha Morgan's Little World:


Christmas and New Year

The traditions associated with Christmas and New Year were probably the most important of all in the rural community of North Pembrokeshire. It was the only opportunity that people of all classes had for relaxation and feasting over a period of at least a week.  True, animals still had to be fed and watered, eggs had to be collected, and cows had to be milked, but at that time of uncertain winter weather it was possible to leave the fields to themselves for a few days without worrying too much about to the consequences.
So this was the time for the gentry to demonstrate their generosity to friends, neighbours, tenants, and labourers and their families, and thereby to enhance their reputations.  Of course, that generosity would vary from year to year depending upon the success or failure of the previous year’s harvesting and trading activities.  As I have tried to demonstrate in the pages of Martha’s diaries, there were fat years and lean years, and if things were desperate financially Christmas would almost literally be cancelled.  It also happened that if there was a death in a gentry family, or some other tragedy, that family would not  be expected to lay on lavish feasts and other ceremonials for the sake of others.  On such occasions some of the less affluent families of the neighbourhood would organize Christmas on a less lavish scale, thereby spreading the load.
But if times were good, much was expected of a squire and mistress of a respectable estate, and everybody involved could look forward to the festive season for many weeks.  The necessary advance planning tested the skill and resolve of even the most efficient housekeeper, and the quantities of food and drink required were impressive indeed.  I have tried to indicate this in the descriptions of the festive season in various parts of Martha’s story.  The catering details varied from one estate to another, but I have built into the Plas Ingli Christmas just some of the conventions gleaned from contemporary descriptions from real gentry houses.
There is no point in repeating the detail here, but we must also note that Christmas and New Year were the times when complicated payments and repayments came into play between landlord and tenant, master and servant, and even between the members of extended families.  As explained in the pages of the novels, there was little cash moving about in the North Pembrokeshire farming community,  and “in kind” payments were routine instead of (or as part of) rental payments.  So at Christmas time geese, ducks, eggs, chickens, butter, cheese, and all sorts of other products would be contributed by labourers and tenants to the mountain of food being assembled by the housekeeper of a well-run estate.  And the hospitality provided by the host and hostess was not simply a matter of benevolence either, for they paid very little in the way of wages to those who worked for them.  The Christmas extravaganza was actually owed to servants, labourers and tenants in exchange for their loyalty and hard work during the course of the year that was now coming to an end.  The Christmas feast, wildly excessive though it often was, was actually present in every unwritten contract, and everybody knew it.