The Christmas Prince: BBC Podcast
Unlike today, University students in the early seventeenth century generally did not leave their College for the vacation. Instead, the vacation meant only a suspension of formal teaching, leaving young scholars with little to do and eager for entertainment.
As described by Michael Riordan in the BBC podcast, St John’s students elected the witty and rather mischievous scholar Thomas Tucker as their ‘Christmas Prince’ for 1607. As mock monarch, Tucker was responsible for ruling the College until Twelfth Night (5 January) and presiding over a grand cycle of Christmas entertainments.
These entertainments comprised eight Latin plays performed across the vacation, combining satire, slapstick and high drama. The riotous fun of the plays – which, as described by Michael Riordan, often went awry with comic consequences – sometimes spilled over into everyday College life. On one notably occasion, student revelers ‘raised such a tumult’, breaking windows and throwing stones in Hall, that they were arrested by the College officers and imprisoned within the Porters’ Lodge.
Dr Elizabeth Sandis, an expert on early modern university drama, explains in the programme that St John’s election of a Christmas Prince was comparable to the medieval tradition of the ‘Boy Bishop’, by which a young chorister would preside at cathedral services with the authority of a bishop. The ‘Boy Bishop’ tradition had been suppressed by Henry VIII but was revived by his daughter, Mary I in 1556: well within the institutional memory of St John’s in 1607.
The festive entertainments overseen by Tucker during the Christmas vacation of 1607 are recorded in a manuscript held by the College Library (MS 52), which may be viewed via Digital Bodleian. Alongside the account of the ‘rising and falling of Thomas Tucker’, the manuscript also contains a Latin verse biography of the College’s Founder, Sir Thomas White.
Listeners can hear Michael Riordan’s episode, along with others in the Secret Oxfordshire series, on BBC Sounds.