THE FIRST MEDIEVAL CHRISTMAS

This year marks eight centuries since the first-ever Nativity scene was laid out in a cave by St Francis of Assisi

Thanks to everyone who submitted even more questions for the December video Q&A this weekend. I will release the second part of that video later this week… for now, here’s something Christmassy….

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Even in our secular age, few children in the UK will get through their early years without taking part in a nativity play at Christmas. My own kids have appeared in several, performing roles as varied as the Virgin Mary, the second Shepherd and… an alien.

One of my own first memories of school in the mid-1980s is appearing in a nativity play as an ass. (This may have been prophetic.) I had to sing a little ditty, which went:

‘I’m the ass, that’s what they say, but I saw Jesus born today.’

From behind my cardboard donkey mask, it was probably rather muffled. But I did it. A rite of passage was completed. And an image of Christmas that dated back to the Middle Ages was imprinted on another young mind.

Many Christmas rituals and traditions have either murky or depressingly modern roots. But the Nativity scene is a bona fide relic of the medieval world.

In fact, we can date its origin precisely, thanks to an account written by an Italian friar called Thomas of Celano in the year 1230.

The first nativity, according to Caravaggio, in a painting of 1609 (now missing, having been stolen in Sicily in 1969)

Thomas was an early follower of the very first friar - St Francis of Assisi. And it was St Francis who arranged the first Nativity scene, a live-action ensemble featuring most of the characters we recognise from it today. The ass, certainly. Although not the aliens.

That first nativity took place exactly 800 years ago this month, in 1223, in an Italian cave at Greccio, around 100km north of Rome.

But why did St Francis do it? And why has it proven so enduring? For that, we can turn to the words of Thomas of Celano, and the story of St Francis’s extraordinary life.

Francis of Assisi was born to a wealthy family of merchants in 1181. He was a careless, spendthrift, overindulged and somewhat violent youth. He loved fine clothes. He larked around. He found work as both a merchant and a soldier.

Between 1203 and 1205, however, Francis experienced a religious awakening, inspired by a vision he experienced of Christ speaking to him from a crucifix. As Thomas of Celano told it:

The crucifix moved its lips and began to speak. "Francis," it said, calling him by name, "go and repair my house, which, as you see, is completely destroyed."

From this point on Francis began to devote himself to a life of humility, poverty and good works. He threw away his fine clothes, dressed himself in rags and wandered around giving away his money, nursing lepers and performing other Christ-like deeds of charity and self-abnegation.

He had a special affinity with animals and fish, which he treated with distinctly un-medieval kindness, so that even timid critters like wild rabbits would sit on his lap to be petted.

In 1208-9 Francis turned his lifestyle into a movement. He recruited 11 followers, and secured papal approval for a rule, a uniform (a coarse robe bound with a knotted rope) and a mission. Francis and his brothers wandered the countryside, preaching and imploring others to do good deeds.

Not everyone was happy with this, but the Franciscans - as they would become known - got on with the job.

Many times when they were insulted, ridiculed, stripped naked, beaten, bound or imprisoned, they trusted in no one's patronage but rather bore all so manfully that only praise and thanksgiving echoed in their mouths. Scarcely or never did they cease their prayers and praise of God.

Little by little, Francis started to turn the heat up.

During the fifth crusade to Egypt (1217-1221) Francis wandered all the way to the crusader camp in Damietta. Having impressed the Christian soldiers there with his holy mien, he decided to have a go at converting the Ayyubid sultan, al-Kamil. He found his way to the sultan’s court and made some attempts to persuade him to welcome Christ into his life.

Thomas of Celano gives a very picturesque account of this meeting:

Trying to bend Francis' spirit toward the wealth of this world, he honoured him as much as he could and gave him many presents; yet when he saw that Francis despised such things as if they were dung, he was filled with the greatest admiration and regarded Francis as different from all others. He was moved by Francis' words and listened to him willingly.

This may be Thomas putting an over-eager spin on things. But in any case, al-Kamil seems to have found this wild-looking beggar-preacher more amusing than insulting, and sent St Francis back to the crusaders unharmed.

But what, you ask, does this have to do with Christmas?

The earliest known depiction of St Francis

During Francis’s excursion to crusader country, he seems also to have visited the Holy Land proper. The city of Jerusalem was in Ayyubid hands, but it was not impossible to visit the holy sites around it, and it may well be that Francis took himself to Bethlehem to visit the Church of the Nativity.

That is unknown. But what happened in 1223 is well recorded by Thomas of Celano. Around December 10th Francis was visiting the town of Greccio. When he was there he called to his presence a pious fellow named John, and gave him some instructions.

"If you wish to celebrate the approaching feast of the Lord at Greccio, hurry and do what I tell you. I want to do something that will recall the memory of that child who was born in Bethlehem, to see with bodily eyes the inconveniences of his infancy, how he lay in the manger, and how the ox and ass stood by."

In other words, Francis wanted his pal John to construct a visual tableau that would directly recall Bethlehem and thereby convey the story of the Nativity. Why? Well, first there was a convention in the Middle Ages that one could conjure holy places far from their real, geographical position, given the right attitude and building materials.

(Think: the Temple Church in London, designed to represent/evoke the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; or the Holy House at Walsingham in Norfolk, modelled exactly on the home of Joseph and Mary in Nazereth.)

But more importantly, I think this is the oldest rule of Hollywood at play: ‘show, don’t tell’.

It is always worth having this in mind when we think about religious observation in societies where most people don’t read and write. How would you communicate the story of the Nativity to a bunch of peasants who understood no Latin and were not blessed with the time to study Scripture?

Through performance. Spectacle. Art.

And that is what Francis did. The Gospel of St Luke gives us the homeliest account of the Nativity - featuring the fully booked guesthouse, the manger and swaddling cloths, the visiting shepherds. (The wise men come from Matthew; Mark and John skip the whole scene.)

Extrapolating from Luke’s gospel, therefore, in 1223 Francis assembled a crowd to come to a cave in Greccio by night, bringing candles and torches, to witness the scene he had asked his mate John to assemble.

As Thomas of Celano puts it:

The manger is ready, hay is brought, the ox and ass are led in. Simplicity is honoured there, poverty is exalted, humility is commended and a new Bethlehem, as it were, is made from Greccio.

Night is illuminated like the day, delighting men and beasts. The people come and joyfully celebrate the new mystery. The forest resounds with voices and the rocks respond to their rejoicing.

The brothers sing, discharging their debt of praise to the Lord, and the whole night echoes with jubilation. The holy man of God stands before the manger full of sighs, consumed by devotion and filled with a marvelous joy.

The solemnities of the mass are performed over the manger and the priest experiences a new consolation.

The first Nativity play is now underway. And as the crowd get into it, St Francis decides to drop a few bars:

He preaches mellifluously to the people standing about, telling them about the birth of the poor king and the little city of Bethlehem. Often, too, when he wished to mention Jesus Christ, burning with love he called him "the child of Bethlehem," and speaking the word "Bethlehem" or "Jesus," he licked his lips with his tongue, seeming to taste the sweetness of these words.

Yummy.

The whole scene is completed when God joins in to give this all his stamp of approval. A certain holy man who is present (Thomas of Celano may actually mean St Francis, the sense isn’t totally clear) has a vision in which he sees a lifeless child lying in the manger. He scoops it up and, as if rising from a deep sleep, the child comes to life. Just like Jesus!

The vision is very pleasing to all present, as you might guess. They all go off home in good spirits. Christmas really has come to Greccio.

But wait. There’s more. And you surely have questions. Are Joseph and Mary there? What are the ox and ass doing there? (Luke doesn’t mention them.) Where are the shepherds? Where are Matthew’s magi? Did we skip the bit about Herod getting wrathy and trying to have Christ slaughtered along with all the other Holy Innocents?

Well, in short, and in turn:

It doesn’t seem like Joseph and Mary are there, no. But they’re implied? I think the ox and ass are probably a realistic extrapolation from the scene Luke gives us: a stable, a manger, etc. The shepherds could, if you squint, be the assembled faithful of Greccio, come to see the baby Jesus born. The magi are making things too complicated, cut them, this is already a tough production to pull off. Ditto Herod, also that feels like a buzzkill first time around. Save it for the sequel.

But put that aside, because in any case, this being a Francis of Assisi story, there’s another nice little miracle to finish it off. The hay that had been placed in the manger for the Nativity scene turned out, after the event, to be miraculous. Animals that ate it were cured. Women in labour found their pains eased if they touched it.

Eventually, says Thomas of Celano:

a temple of the Lord was consecrated where the manger stood, and over the manger an altar was constructed and a church dedicated in honour of the blessed father Francis, so that, where animals once had eaten hay, henceforth men could gain health in soul and body by eating the flesh of the Lamb without spot or blemish, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Nativity scene, featuring St Francis, at the Vatican, 2023

So I think, on balance, we have two people to thank for the Nativity plays which are such a big part of our modern Christmas traditions.

The first is St Francis, for inventing it in the first place.

The second, of course, is Thomas of Celano, for preserving this story in his First Life of St Francis, from which I have quoted extensively here. (You can read the full translation at Fordham.edu, here.)

There is also, is there not, a certain miraculous quality to the survival of the Nativity scene in the Franciscan form from 1223 to 2023? I think it’s worth reflecting on that, whether or not you’re a Christian.

During the later Middle Ages, and up to the Reformation, there was an enormous vogue in Europe for plays performing parts of Scripture. Not all of that tradition grew out of the Franciscan model, by any means. Nor was the Nativity play the only popular re-enactment of Biblical history, during an age in which there were very many more popular religious festivals than Christmas.

Yet this one has survived. Perhaps that is thanks to the connection of this particular play, with this particular saint, with this particular festival. But whatever the cause, the Nativity scene has been an enduring one over time, even if today it has probably been heavily overlaid with Victorian/Edwardian legacy sentimentality.

It is a direct link between our lives and those of people 800 years ago, and even allowing for the ways in which the Nativity play has evolved, it’s still one of the few things - other than singing, binge-eating, heavy drinking and the associated surge public and domestic violence - that would be recognisable between a medieval and modern Christmas.

I meant to leave things there, but now I think I have just one more point.

As I write this I notice that I feel something like nostalgia, or just plain sadness. I think that may be an awareness that although the Nativity scene/play has lasted 800 years exactly, it probably definitely does not have another 800 to go.

The Nativity is one of the very few Biblical stories that has survived the effective disestablishment and popular rejection of Christianity during my lifetime. But given the direction of travel in that regard, I would not bet on it as a long term prospect.

By the time my kids grow up, I have a suspicion that their memories of performing Nativity plays will be one of those things that seems normal to them, but utterly mad to their own offspring. Like using a landline, a VHS or an Ordnance Survey map, the Nativity play may seem like a relic of a forgotten, technologically benighted age.

Like, you know, the Middle Ages.

Okay, that really is enough. I don’t want to make Christmas sad. I’ll see you later in the week, with the final part of the December video Q&A.

dan x