In London, soldiers were ordered to go round the streets and take, by force if necessary, food being cooked for a Christmas celebration. In the closing verse of a contemporary ballad, a gloomy royalist writer suggested that the collapse of the king’s cause had sealed the fate of Christmas itself, remarking: “To conclude, I’ll tell you news that’s right, Christmas was killed at Naseby fight.”. They renamed Christmas ‘Christ tide’, to avoid any reference to the Roman Catholic ‘Mass’ and deemed it an ordinary working day. Edmund Calamy preached a sermon in the House of Lords saying: "This day is commonly called Christmas-day, a day that has heretofore been much abused in superstition and profaneness. It is a common myth that Cromwell personally ‘banned’ Christmas during the mid seventeenth century. And as political tensions between Charles I and his opponents in parliament rose during 1641 so a handful of Puritan extremists took it upon themselves to abandon the celebration of Christmas. Here’s a Reformation indeed!”. The Law Commission said none of the 11 laws that remained on the statute books after Cromwell’s reign related to mince pies. In London, the Puritan heartland, zealots such as John Barkstead, Governor of the Tower, prohibited festivities with such severity that some wondered whether ‘they shall be suffered to be Christians any longer or no’. When the lord mayor despatched 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. There was unrest and flashes of violence in other regions, too, with troops enacting the measures by force. On June 1647 Parliament passed an Ordinance that abolished Christmas Day as a feast day and holiday. Many tried to resist the directive at first, and groups of young men staged pro-Christmas riots in London and Canterbury, smashing the windows of shopkeepers who continued to trade on Christmas Day. The Puritans ordered all shops to open as usual on Christmas Day. In a satirical pamphlet published in January 1643 – a pamphlet which was clearly intended to appeal to a wide popular audience – Taylor provided his readers with the text of A Tub Lecture, which, he claimed, had been preached by a godly joiner to a group of Puritans at Watford “on the 25 of December last, being Christmas day”. Eight months later, that threat was to become all too real. Learning objectives: To understand why Christmas was banned in England. The smell of a goose being cooked could bri… The legislation was deeply unpopular and was enforced only sporadically. Oliver Cromwell wanted to tackle gluttony in England and he also thought that Christmas contained too many superstitions of the Roman Catholic Church, which he was not keen on … The Battle to Keep Christmas. Oliver Cromwell In 1647, Christmas was banned in England. Christmas celebrations in New England were illegal during parts of the 17th century, and were culturally taboo or rare in former Puritan colonies from foundation until the mid-18th century. Puritans viewed with consternation eating and drinking on Christmas day. But it wasn’t only the partying that was the reason for the ban. In 1644, MPs passed an ordinance which confirmed the abolition of Easter, Whitsun, and Christmas as feasts of the Church of England. As early as December 1643, the apprentice boys of London rose up in violent protest against the shop-keepers who had opened on Christmas Day, and, in the words of a delighted royalist, “forced these money-changers to shut up their shops again”. On 25 December 1647, there was further trouble at Bury, while pro-Christmas riots also took place at Norwich and Ipswich. Cromwell ended up having to send 3,000 soldiers from The Westgate Towers to break down the city gates and enforce the ban. Oliver Cromwell wanted to tackle gluttony in England and he also thought that Christmas contained too many superstitions of the Roman Catholic Church, which he was not keen on of course. Cromwell saw Christmas and its celebrations as very Catholic. This riot helped to pave the way for a major insurrection in Kent in 1648 that itself formed part of the ‘Second Civil War’ – a scattered series of risings against the parliament and in favour of the king, which Fairfax and Cromwell only managed to suppress with great difficulty. A few months earlier, parliament’s New Model Army, led by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, had routed the forces of Charles I at the battle of Naseby. So strong was the popular attachment to the old festivities, indeed, that during the postwar period a number of pro-Christmas riots occurred. Yet, for those who lived in the extensive territories which were controlled by the king’s enemies, there was to be no Christmas this year at all – because the traditional festivities had been abolished by order of the two Houses of Parliament sitting at Westminster. This article was first published in the Christmas 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine, Save a huge 50% off a subscription to your favourite history magazine. Eating a mince pie or singing carols was made illegal. There seems to be a problem, please try again. During the course of the Ipswich riot, a protestor named ‘Christmas’ was reported to have been slain – a fatality which could be regarded as richly symbolic, of course, of the way that parliament had ‘killed’ Christmas itself. It has been claimed that eating the snack is still illegal in England, if undertaken on Christmas Day. 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