Free The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum Page B

Samuel Breck, belonged to a very wealthy family. He was born in 1770 and lived in a mansion in central Boston during the years when the Anticks paid their holiday visits (his recollections presumably date from the yearsaround 1780). Breck recalled the Anticks as “a set of the lowest blackguards” who were “disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces.” They “went from house to house in large companies, and
bon gre, mal gre
, obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen.” There they “would demean themselves with great insolence.”
    Breck’s account makes it amply clear that the Anticks were indeed Christmas mummers, and that they would actually perform an old mummer’s play, “St. George and the Dragon”:
    I have seen them at my father’s, when his assembled friends were at cards, take possession of a table, seat themselves on rich furniture and proceed to handle the cards, to the great annoyance of the company. The only way to get rid of them was to give them money, and listen patiendy to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them. One of them would cry out, “Ladies and gentlemen sitting by the fire, put your hands in your pockets and give us our desire.” When this was done and they had received some money, a kind of acting took place. One fellow was knocked down, and lay sprawling on the carpet, while another bellowed out,
    “See, there he lies,
But ere he dies
A doctor must be had.”
    He calls for a doctor, who soon appears, and enacts the part so well that the wounded man revives. 85
    This often went on for half an hour. Breck remembered that even after the men finally left, “the house would be filled with another gang.” (Apparently there were multiple bands of Anticks.) Breck concluded by recalling an especially significant cultural point, that the victims of such visitations did not feel entitled to expel the Anticks from their houses: “Custom had licensed these vagabonds to enter even by force any place they chose.” (“What should we say to such intruders now?” Breck asked rhetorically in the very different culture of his old age. “Our manners would not brook such usage a moment.”)
    The third and final report about the Boston Anticks reveals that at the century’s end the customary “license” to which Breck referred was coming under challenge. This third report, dating from 1793, is firsthand evidence. On December 20, 1793, a Boston newspaper printed an anonymous letter to the Boston Police Inspector, warning of the Anticks’ imminentannual appearance and demanding that something be done to stop them. The letter specified in outraged detail the threat these mummers posed to respectable Bostonians:
    The disadvantages, interruptions, and injuries which the inhabitants sustain from these gangs, are too many for enumeration, a few only must suffice. When different clubs of them meet in the street, noise and fighting immediately commences. Their demands for entrance in house, are insolent and clamourous; and should the peaceful citizen (not choosing to have the tranquillity of his family interrupted) persevere in refusing them admittance, his windows are broke, or the latches and knockers wrenched from his door as the penalty: Or should they gain admittance, the delicate ear is oftentimes offended, children affrighted, or catch the phrases of their senseless ribaldry. [In other words, the Anticks used bawdy language.] 86
    Aggressive, indeed. But the behavior of these mummers can also be seen as a kind of symbolic “counter-theater,” their response to the refusal of “peaceful citizens” to perform
their
allotted Christmas role. In any event, the Police Inspector responded with a letter of his own. Such gangs had been performing for years, he noted, though he agreed that they caused “inconveniency and frights” by “disturbing families and
begging a Copper.”
But it was difficult to