Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Paganism & Festive Traditions

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

The darkest nights of the year have long been the time for celebrations, from Yule and Mother Night, to Christmas and New Year's Eve. But where did these traditions come from? Who started kissing under the mistletoe? Why are trees decorated and brought into homes around this time of year? And how did the Romans bring in the New Year?Today Kate is joined Betwixt the Sheets by Ronald Hutton to find out how these celebrations originated and developed, and just what has stayed the same.Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Charlotte Long. Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It's dark, it's cold. You're surrounded by your friends and possibly some family relatives as well. There's a fair amount of booze going around. Is this Christmas? Or is it Yule? Or Mother Night?

Or Saturnalia? The darkest nights of the year have a long been a time for celebrations. And today, but twixt the sheets, we are going to find out how these celebrations have changed and just what has stayed the same. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister.

What have you been up to this? festive period. Have you been sipping mulled wine, sharing gifts with friends and family or patiently shoving mistletoe down your pants? If so, have you ever wondered where some of these customs come from? From Dickens to Coca-Cola, winter celebrations have grown and developed for centuries. And in this episode, I'm only joined by Professor Ronald Button, who's going to tell us how Christmas and New Year have changed, developed, adapted, since the days of your old and timesy, and what other holidays have been celebrated throughout the years. I am ready if you are.

Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets Professor Ronald Hutton. Hello. Hello. I am so excited to talk to you. You have absolutely no idea. I'm having a proper academic fan girl moment here. Thank you. No pressure, no pressure.

But I love your work and I love what you write about and you pop up on TV. shows all the time. And now you're here and I'm so excited about it. Although I think that perhaps what you're going to talk to me about today might blow some of my much beloved ideas of what Christmas is out of the water. I have a sneaky feeling that we might be doing that because there's this sort of, we like to think of, or at least some people like to think of Christmas is this really ancient festival that predated Christianity and when we were all happily cavorting around bonfires and it was Yule and outside and orgies and I've got a feeling you're going to tell me that's not true. I think it's all true except maybe they're brushing on the orgies.

That's true. That's true. So tell me about the festival of Yule. What is known about that? What was that? Yule is just the ancient Scandinavian term for the midwinter festival, which was celebrated by pretty well Europeans. If you're a Viking, you call it Yule. If you're an Anglo-Saxon, you call it Modrenicht. If you're a Roman, you call it Saturnalia and then the New Year is Calendai. So the name varies wherever you are, but there are basic customs that don't. And is it always gathered around the winter solstice? Is that important to this festival? Yeah, it's pivotal. It's the turning of the year. Okay. The term solstice has changed completely in its meaning. It's now a scientific term. So we can say that the winter solstice of 2017 was say at 748 a.m. on the 21st of December.

Until the 19th century, when you have scientific instruments and people talking to each other in different hemispheres, you can't do that. And then it means thing utterly different. something more magical. And that is that as the year goes on, the sun rises and sets at different places in the horizon. That's why days get shorter and longer. But in June and December it slows down. And around sunset on the 20th of December, 20th and June, it appears to stop moving. To the naked eye, it seems to rise and set at the same place on the horizon. And that's why the Romans gave this magic interlude in which normality is suspended, the name solstice, and solstice means the sun stands still. I did not know that. And Ronald, what will you be doing on the winter solstice? Do you have, like, a

party with everything that you study about ancient pagan customs and do you have a solstice party? I would love to, and the winter solstice itself at present, though the rail strikes are endangering it, I'm supposed to be filming in Istanbul. Oh, okay. Yeah, I bet the ancient pagans didn't have to deal with rail strikes and their winter solstice. No, for them, winter solstice was the time preeminent when you didn't actually move. You stayed home in your community and celebrated with it. Oh, wow.

Do we have a sense of what happened around the winter solstice? Like, what was the festival? Was it like spiritual reverence? Or was it like a proper nese? up? Do we have any idea? It's a bit of both. The reverence goes with the mystery of the solstice and the rebirth of the sun and of nature and of the world. But there's a huge element of keeping happy at the most boring and depressing time of year. There are lots of components to it. The biggest is feasting, so one of the oldest Christmas customs is Christmas dinner.

And the second is lighting up and warming up your home with big candles, big fire. And the third is decorating, Christmas decorations. They're traditionally greenery. Whatever is still green in the woods is brought in to decorate the home. And across most of Europe, it's holly and ivy. Here's a starter question. What do we mean by pagan? You hear that kind of bandied around about how Christmas was originally a pagan holiday.

What does that mean? Does that have any historical meaning really? Oh, it has. And in many ways it can be made quite simple. Pagan with a small P is the term that we can use for the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East. The religions that were there when Christianity arrived and against which it defined itself.

And an enormous amount in later and modern culture comes out of the pagan ancient world literature, art, mythology, architecture, philosophy. We've been processing it ever since. The same goes for seasonal festivity. So it just sort of means anyone that's not a Christian? Yeah, it's a Christian hold all term for anybody who's not a Christian and as a member of an older religion than Christianity.

Do we have any sense of how these people would have understood themselves? So presumably they weren't walking around going, I'm a pagan, are you a pagan? Do we have any idea of how they understood themselves? Yes, they were simply followers of traditional religions, rooted religions. And the Christian term is pretty accurate. It's not derogatory in its essence. It means those who follow the religions of the Pagas or Pagas, which is the local unit of government. In other words, the rooted religions, the old religions, the traditional religions.

Is that what that means, rooted religions? Pagas is those who follow the religion of the Pagos, which is the local unit of government. It's the hood, the neighbourhood. So it's those who follow the religions of the traditional locality, the community. I did not know that. That is fascinating. So one of the things that it must be really difficult when you study the periods that you do. So we're talking ancient, ancient worlds, is there is limited sources with which to try and understand

these people because they didn't write about themselves, or at least we've got nothing left that they wrote about themselves? That is quite correct. In the case of most of Northern Europe, there's absolutely zero. Nothing. Yeah, all that we know about their religions are a few comments made by literate peoples from the South who were pagan at the same time, like Greeks and Romans, or reconstructions of what paganism had been like in medieval. Christian writings of the people's concern like the Irish or the Norse. And unfortunately, we have no real idea of how accurate these reconstructions are, although all of it is clearly not made up. A great example of that, I think, is mistletoe. Now, mistletoe is not made up,

but there's this whole thing about the druids loved mistletoe. It was really important. It was sacred. If you've watched Asterix, they're gathering it with a golden sickle. There's a whole druids and mistletoe, but am I right in thinking that that mostly comes down to what one Roman writer said about these customs? You're absolutely right, but we can probably trust him on this. For your money, you trust him. Yeah, I think most people do on this point. Okay. When he says other things, he's less trustworthy. But he's writing about a part of the Roman empire that was quite well known. Okay. And people's in it before the Romans arrive, who are quite well known to the Greeks and Romans. So it's southern France, as it is now. And what Pliny

says is that for the tribes in this area, mistletoe created a sensation when it was found growing on an oak tree. And if you know your woods, you'll know that the whole deal is, mistletoe almost never grows on an oak tree. And so this is a blue moon event. When it was found there, the locals in what, now southern France, would get very excited and a priest among them, who may or may not have been a druid, would get a golden sickle, climb the tree in a white robe, and cut the mistletoe, and it would be made into an all-healing type of medicine. But there are a number of things that aren't connected to this that do get connected. First is that the priest probably was a druid, because that's the local name for a priest, among those who speak the languages of what's now France,

but it doesn't actually say that. And the second thing is that the ritual, the white robe, the golden sickle have all been projected onto druids in general. Right. And that may not be warranted. And the final thing, the big whammy, is that there's no connection between any of this and Christmas.

Oh, no. It's a one-off event, finding the mistletoe on the oak. And Pliny says they don't. wait till midwinter to cut it. They wait till the sixth day off the next new moon, and then they cut it. So there's no connection with midwinter at all. Right. So all the mistletoe that I've got is useless, because first of all, they didn't use it that way. Second of all, it probably didn't grow on an oak tree. And if I remember my pliny correctly, there weren't two white bullocks sacrificed underneath it when it was being gathered.

You're right about the white bullocks. There are detail I left out being kind-hearted. your Missal Turk Christmas and mine is very important because it becomes a fashionable Christmas decoration in London in the 18th century when it becomes common for the first time in Britain and it's added as an exotic to the familiar holly and ivy and in the late 18th century servants in London houses start kissing underneath it.

I don't know why, but it's a great idea. Yeah, bring it on. And when their mistresses and masters find out they're doing this, really commendably, instead of stopping it, they imitate it. I bet they did. So we can stop worrying about the druids. What we're doing under the mistletoe is commemorating the enterprise of domestic servants in 18th century England and the broad-mindedness of the people who employed them.

And those are two great causes. I endorse them wholeheartedly. There are some satirical prints that come out sort of the early 19th century, one by Thomas Rawlinson in particular. It's called Christmas Gambles, you can Google it and look it up. And it's this really debauched scene underneath this Springer Mistletoe that's obviously in a kitchen. And like there's nude people cavorting. And it looks like, did Missletoe really do this? Did it have that kind of a reputation of like, you know, you just produce this mistletoe.

And now everybody has just gone completely AWOL and are just ripping the knickers off each other. Rowlandson was a great producer of crowd scenes, which could politely be called erotic. So shepherds and shepherdesses, sultans and harrims, lots and lots of bear-riving bodies. You get the point? I do, indeed, yes. Less to do with a general custom than with Rowlandson and his art. Yes, he was kind of the poor Raymond of his age in terms of publication. So do we have any idea where the kissing thing came from?

Or is that one of those things that's just sort of lost to us? It's lost. It just appears among domestic servants, the chamber boys and the chambermaids. Wow. Okay, so that's nothing to do with druids, but for your money, mistletoe growing on an oak, was sacred to these people? Yes, it was definitely sacred to the priests,

the tribes of southern France, who almost certainly could be called druids. Okay. And is there supporting evidence from anywhere else about mistletoe. Because I know that some mistletoe pollens were found in the gut of the bug-body Lindoman, but that might have just been an accident. Yeah, it might have been an accident. It might just have blown onto his last meal. Right. Oh, okay. He was eating in the open air. It's only four grains of mistletoe. That's not really enough for a drink. Yeah, that's a good point.

If it weren't for Pliny, we wouldn't pay any attention to the mistletoe and Lindo Man. That's very true. Okay, so let's think about some other Christmas traditions that we like to think of as being pagan in the Lucer's term, the Christmas tree. Can we date that back to the ancient world? No, but the main point about all sorts of things we can't date back to the ancient world is they're all relatively modern forms of things which more broadly do date back to the ancient world. So decorating your temples, then your churches, then your homes, with greenery at midwinter is prehistoric. It emerges into history with the Romans. The decoration of temples of greenery is mentioned among the Anglo-Saxons by a Pope, round about 600. So we know it was done. Missletoe and the Christmas

tree are just more recent additions to the holly and the ivy. The Christmas tree is German. Forchbrom d'Uch technique. It is actually not a medieval or ancient German custom. It appears There was a Pusburg Cathedral in 1604 when somebody had the great idea of taking the risk of lighting up a big evergreen tree in the cathedral with candles. And everybody liked it so much that it spread to other churches and then to people's homes. And German refugees from Napoleon brought it to England in the 1810s. But it was really that notable German immigrant, Prince Albert, who popularised it by bringing it into the Royal Royalty. family. Oh. Even so, in 1850, Charles Dickens, who wrote more about Christmas than most people, could still snootily call it the new German toy. Oh, did he? That's a bit of shade, isn't it?

It is, yes. A slight sniff in the air. Right, okay. So Missletoe is about servants trying to kiss each other in the 18th century. Christmas trees is about German immigrants coming over here and bringing us their Christmas trees. Oh, what about caroling and wasailing? Because that's still done in some places around the country, isn't it? Tell me about was sailing. I'll tell you about both. Oh, please do. Carolling is Christian. Wasling is probably pagan. Carolling is started by St. Francis' people, the Franciscan friars, as part of their missionary effort in the Middle Ages. And it's originally an attempt to make Christianity fun by getting people to dance around holding. hands and singing songs and praise of God, which can be fun.

Yeah, I can see that. And it's called the Carol. And this continues till the end of the Middle Ages, when the dance gets boring and it's jettisoned, and the songs are kept up. Now, carols are not specifically at Christmas for hundreds of years. There are May carols, Halloween carols, midsummer carols.

But it's really Christmas when you need to collect money for charity or for yourselves by singing. It's the time when people are most in need. And therefore Christmas carols kept up and kept on being augmented and multiplied. And the other carols died out. Wassling is utterly different. It's singing to your land and your property to make it abundant for the next year. If you can wassell people by presenting them with a bowl of hooch and inviting them to drink from it and be blessed,

You wossel your beehives by singing to the bees. You wossel your cereal fields by singing to them to be fruitful. You wossel your cattle and sheep by singing to them and their buyers and their stables. And of course, you wossel your orchards by singing to the apple trees. Right. I don't have any of those things. I'm not sure what I can wossel to. Could wossel your friends. I can wossel my friends or possibly a bottle of Prosecco in the fridge.

You wossel things with the bottle. Oh, right. That's the start of a good whistling. So how does you all fit into other pre-Christian pagan yearly festivals? Like the summer solstice, for example, that was a big deal as well. A very big deal was the greatest fire festival in northern Europe. Really midwinter's the biggest of all the six traditional festivals. festivals of old northern Europe that spread out rather unevenly around the year.

It's the biggest simply because people are doing least in midwinter, so they have the most time for festivity. And they're all back in the community at that time, doing nothing. Okay. But otherwise, there are the feasts that begin the seasons, the feast of Imalk or Candlemus or Solmanath to begin the spring at the beginning of February, the feast to begin summer at the the beginning of May, May Day, Beltane, Kalamai, the summer nights. There's a feast that begins autumn, Lunasar, Lammus, Guil, oust, and the one that begins winter, which is Nosegalan or Sarwan,

or the winter nights, alias Halloween. And there are midwinter and midsummer. You don't get a lot going on around the equinoxes in ancient times, at least north of the Alps, because everyone's too busy. doing economic things around that time. That makes sense. What calendars were these people using? I mean, they weren't using the Gregorian Roman calendar.

Do we have a sense of how they understood time passing? No, except that they had some sense of the seasons because they all had these feasts to begin them when the sun got to a certain point. They did have their own calendars, which just very occasionally emerge into modernity, but they always emerge in bits. The most famous is the Coligny calendar,

which has a native Celtic, a Gaulish calendar from Eastern France, but it was found in a gigantic number of pieces, and it's a jigsaw with a lot of the pieces missing. And even the reconstructions that have been made result in completely different and vehemently controversial reconstructions among experts.

I keep well clear of the argument. Is that a proper bungee? fight then if you try and get involved in that one. Yeah, you get three astronomers against each other at the Cocholini calendar. Really, the rumble in the jungle doesn't come near it. I love that. I'll be back with Ronald after this short break. Festivals, how do we know about them?

Is it, again, is it Roman writers writing about them? Do we have other evidence left to us? A lot of it's slightly later medieval stuff. Okay. So we know about the winter nights, the summer nights, and Yule among the Scandinavians, the Vikings, from Icelandic writers in the 12th-13th centuries. We know about the Anglo-Saxons' beautiful name for Midwinter, the Winter Festival,

the Mother Knight, Modrinich. Because Bede, the first great English historian said that his pagan ancestors had celebrated us as their favourite. Do we know why it was called Mother's Night? Well, the translation is disputed. I like the one, the mother knight, but it could mean the knight of the mothers, which opens up all sorts of linguistic cans. We don't know is the answer.

Can I ask you about Father Christmas? Yeah. Because there's Santa Claus, who is the American interpretation of Sinterklaus, and his bowl full of jelly and all of that stuff. And then there's Father Christmas, who is a much older stranger figure. Santa Claus is older in the sense of a backstory, a line. because he's originally an early Christian saint, a bishop from what's now Turkey, who was made patron saint of children.

And his feast day was the 6th of December, and in some parts of Europe it became accustomed to tell children that he'd come riding around on a grey horse in his bishop's kit and deliver a present to a good child, leaving it in the child's shoe, on the eve of his day. so we're talking about the night of the 5th of December. And when he reached America with Dutch settlers, he had the Dutch name of Sinterklaus, as you've said, St. Nicholas.

And he settled in New Amsterdam, the Dutch city, which became when the British got it, New York. Oh. And then he had a makeover, because in 1821, a New Yorker called Clement Clark Moore wrote a poem for his children in which he transformed the medieval saint in his bishop's robes with his horse into a spirit of the northern midwinter who was secularised, rode in a sleigh drawn by reindeer, and came down chimneys with a sack on Christmas Eve to give presents to children.

And this poem spread, it proved wildly popular, and the reborn Santa Claus took over America, crossing the Atlantic and the 1880s to Britain. There he blended with Father Christmas. Father Christmas was born in 1616 in a pamphlet, probably written by Ben Johnson, the poet and friend of Shakespeare, which was a satire on the Puritans who were trying to abolish Christmas as pagan and Catholic,

and it personified Christmas for the first time as a jolly old man, And he was so lovable that he's remained with us ever since, except he wasn't associated with children. He didn't give presents to anybody. He simply represented Christmas feasting and games. But of course, once Santa arrived for America, Father C decided to upgrade and made a merger. And so Father Christmas and Santa Claus with the presents, the chimney trip on Christmas Eve, have been. identical ever since.

Like the Puritans famously didn't care very much for Christmas, did they? They tried to ban it, or was it more that they tried to ban people celebrating it in naughty ways? No, they tried to ban people celebrating it in church. Okay, okay, okay. They were out to abolish it as an official festival in which people went to church. And they were amazingly good at doing that while they were in power. What they couldn't do was stop people celebrating it at home.

And they didn't really try. So the celebration at home went on. There's a lovely diary entry for somebody who was in the House of Commons on Christmas Day 1656, which was at the centre of the period of abolition. And an MP stood up and he said he noticed that the House of Commons was almost empty and that he'd been kept awake all night by people celebrating a festival that was no longer supposed to exist. But the Scots had a much more. more radical type of reformation of Protestant Christianity than we had, which was the model that the

Puritans were trying to follow in England. And they abolish Christmas really successfully. And the Scots did not reinstitute Christmas as a full public holiday until 1958. No. Yeah. But you can't be around in a northern midwinter and have no festival without going bonkers. and so the Scots ramped up New Year, Hogmoney, as their big midwinter festival instead. And the 20th century, they gave us New Year's Eve as a big deal. And we gave them Christmas. So we have a Twin Peak Festival on both sides of the border.

And that's why that happens. I didn't know that. Did the Christians, the Puritans even, try and ban any other pagan festivals? Was it just Christmas they had in their sights, or did they want Easter out the way and various other things? Well, they weren't really against pagan festivals. festivals so much as Christian festivals, which they thought were too pagan. And they did be on Easter, and they banned Saints' Days, the days of the Apostles. They banned every feast day apart from Sunday.

Oh. But they did realise that people need holidays, so they brought in rather boring kind of communist state festivals. Like... What was a Puritan holiday? Well, like the second Tuesday on each month being a holiday for the youth. They could get off their jobs, their apprenticeships and play football and so on. Okay. But there's no real ring to the second Tuesday of the month, is there? No, no, nobody's leaving their stockings out on the bed for the second Tuesday of the month. But Father Christmas, I've always wondered this, this sort of ancient figure of ancient-ish,

old figure of Father Christmas, is he linked to the ghost of Christmas present in a Christmas Carol and the Green Night in the Green Night? That kind of big figure with his green robes and he's waving holly. and the big beard and all that stuff. Is that the same root person? He's definitely linked to the spirit of Christmas because Dickens knew all about Father Christmas. He's definitely not linked to the Green Knight.

Because the Green Knight is 14th century. Right. And that is 300 years before Father Christmas appears. Good point. Okay. Whether he's a midwinter spirit can be discussed. The great thing about his green colour is it marks him off as something that's not human, or as a human who's under a really heavy enchantment, which is actually what he is.

Okay, that's ancient. That's answered that one. What is a midwinter spirit? I'm going to be mundane. It's a spirit that is a kind of non-human entity abroad in the natural world, who happens to be particularly active in winter. I mean, there are forest spirits, there are water spirits, there are rock spirits, there are fire spirits. And there are spirits that come out in May and disappear in October. So there are

seasonal spirits as well. Winter spirits tend to be associated with winter things like frost and darkness. Jack Frost. Yeah. Of course. Christmas does kind of have this reputation of where magic things happen. It's a magical time. But I mean like magic as in, you know, like if you're thinking about a story about Saguayne and the Green Night, it's not a coincidence that that whole strange story takes place around Christmas. And we're talking about like midwinter spirits. I mean, was this a time when sort of, I don't want to say Christmas fairies and imps and stuff,

but has it long had that reputation of this is a special time when magic happens? Festivals in general are special times when magic happens. The Welsh had the lovely name of Asbrodnos ghost night for a festival night. So midsummer, May Day, Halloween. these are all notoriously creepy or exciting times to encounter fairies or ghosts or other spirits. And a solstice is particularly magical because it's a time when the sun is standing still. And so normal supernatural bounds are loosed and rules are suspended. So you're much more likely to meet something that isn't human and might be interested in a relationship for some sort.

Now you're talking. Until the sun starts to move. So in midwinter, the moment when you can usually see the stun is starting to move again is the 25th of December, which is why Christmas is there. The Romans called it Solenvictus, literally Nartalis Solan Victus, some return, some birthday. Wow. Is that why we have the 12 days of Christmas? They're just basically a reason for having a good long winter festival. The 12 days of Christmas grow up slowly between Anglo-Saxon times and the late Middivus.

Ages. They keep on extending rather like pre-Christmas preparation period now. Right. Okay, so that makes sense. So that wasn't like it was a very specific 12-day-long festival that we start here and we finish it. That's just kind of evolved over the years. Yes, by the end of the Middle Ages, it actually was 12 days of holiday. But then people... God, that would be good, wouldn't it? Yeah, we could do this again. But people did work an awful a lot harder regularly than we do now. And also, with almost everybody being tied up with trading or especially farming, there is nothing to do at Midwinter. That's very true. You don't think about, like, it would have been a very, very different set of circumstances, obviously, but there

wouldn't have been as much work to do. And whenever I teach my students about this kind of very medieval histories, I'm always trying to emphasise how dark it was, not like the dark ages, but as in, like, they didn't have street lights or electric lights. And it's like you can't quite comprehend how black and dark. And when it's dark at half three in the afternoon, there are no lights. So people are sort of sat around in the darkness in ways that we can't really comprehend today. That's absolutely right. And the fire in the pub means everything.

Absolutely. And the beer as well. One of the things I wanted to ask you is because one day I'll actually go there to see this. but the midwinter solstice rising over Stonehenge, indeed the summer solstice over Stonehenge. And the English heritage now do a live feed of that. And you can actually watch the sun coming up on the winter solstice. And it's actually quite moving. It's quite lovely.

I'd love to be there. But what is the link between Stonehenge and the solstices other than it makes a very nice YouTube video? Like there's a proper link there. Or is that something that's just become tangled up over the years? No. a link with the solstices is fundamental to Stoneheny. Oh, thank God. Built into it right at the start.

The link with the summer solstice is clear, but it's the avenue that leads into and out of the stones is aligned directly on the rising sun. But the effect we've lost, which was more impressive still, is the midwinter sunset at Stonehenge, because the greatest of the three stone settings that define Stonehenge on a T-shirt or an album cover, the great trilithon was aligned directly on the midwinter sunset, so when the sun went down,

a laser-like beam of red light shone in the narrow gap between the two upright stones, straight on the altar stone. Wow. But it was lost because Stonehenge was built too carelessly in too much of a hurry. Either they couldn't find or they didn't bother to find, a second upright stone that went deep enough into the earth. They got a much shorter one and hoped that it would last. It didn't. It fell over and broke. We don't exactly know when.

And not only fell forward and knocked the altar stone over, but broke in half itself forever. And toppled the lintel, the big stone on top of the upright. And so the centre was wrecked and could never be used again for its original ceremonies. And those broken bits of stone are still there. I didn't know that. See, pay cheap, pay twilight. How do we know then that that was supposed to be the original stone, if it's all kind of in pieces?

Well, it's in two pieces. Okay, okay, that makes more sense. You can see the size of the original thing. It just wasn't long enough. They took a risk. See, don't take a risk. Don't go cheap when you are putting up important buildings and foundation work. That's the moral of this story.

Don't like Cowboys. Cowboys stonehenge builders. Ron, you have been amazing to talk to, and I've got one final question for you. How do you celebrate Christmas? What's a Christmas day for you? Are you cavorting around a bonfire? No, it'll be with my partner at her place in Wales. And it'll begin on Christmas Eve. We bring in Holly from the nearby wood in quite big boughs and build a Christmas tree out of it. That is amazing. Hang it with lights. And we'll have an open fire, which is not exactly a bonfire, but as an indoors thing is quite a blaze. a full-size half.

And we'll have Christmas dinner, which will take about five hours to cook, and we'll be extremely elaborate. When New Year comes, I shall first foot the house with gifts and open the back door for the audio and sing it out, and open the New Year's door from the front and sing it in. So those are our rituals.

What does that mean to first foot gifts? What's that? It's really the non-year. Northern English, Southern Scottish way of blessing the house at New Year, which is the first person to cross the threshold should be bringing gifts and a blessing for the house. And so I don't leave anything to chance. I cheat for my girlfriend and go out of the back door, pick up my presents, and then come in through the front door to sing a blessing on her house.

Oh, that is amazing. Ronald, you have just been the best Christmas treat to talk to. And if people want to know more about you, where can they find you? Where can they find your work? Oh, public libraries. Perfect. They'll find me in the catalogue under my name. Libraries need support and they won't cost you anything.

Go to the libraries. Absolutely. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You have just been wonderful. Thank you. You've been great as a hostess. It's been lovely talking. Thank you for listening.

And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe, wherever it is that you get your podcast. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.