The humble pancake, one English writer suggested in 1620, has magical powers. Not merely an innocuous tasty treat, it could corrupt the sensibilities of its consumer, who might otherwise be a quite ordinary citizen, and imprint on the mind a kind of rabid disorder. The sorcery of pancakes has perhaps not entirely vanished over the 400 intervening years, for this year it is February 17 which they have bewitched and transformed into Pancake Day.
According to contemporary recipe books, the pancakes of Tudor and Stuart England were only a little different from our own, sometimes incorporating a few spoonfuls of ale and various spices into their recipe. But pick up John Taylor’s Jack a Lent (1620) from a London bookshop, and the prolific author would have you know that there were also supernatural ingredients. “There is a thing called wheaten flour, which the sulphory Necromanticke Cooks do mingle with water, eggs, spice, and other tragical magical inchantments,” he observed, his tongue firmly in his cheek.
Thus while our modern Pancake Days tend to be peaceable affairs (save for the occasional heated pancake race) in the 17th century, the day was notorious for outbreaks of violent disorder. Apprentices would take to the streets in their hundreds, leaving a path of destruction and chaos in their wake.
Taylor was quite right that the ingredients were at the heart of this. As people hurried to taverns and victualling-houses at the ringing of “Pancake Bells” — parish bells specially rung to mark the beginning of a day of feasting and festivity — they knew it was their final opportunity to enjoy the cream, eggs, animal fat, and butter used in pancakes before the start of Lent.
During the 40 days before Easter, these delicacies would be strictly forbidden, alongside meat, to encourage abstinence. Perhaps the authorities should have banned pancakes outright, if Taylor’s description of their effect on the human psyche is to be believed:
…they have no sooner swallowed that swéet candyed baite, but straight their wits forsake them, and they runne starke mad assembling in routs and throngs numberlesse of ungoverned numbers, with uncivill civill commotions.
Taylor was an eccentric, who styled himself the “Water Poet” on account of his simultaneous occupation as a waterman on the River Thames. Always keen to write about London’s idiosyncrasies, he provided a colourful account of the Shrove Tuesday gatherings of youths in London.
They assembled in a “ragged regiment” and prowled the streets armed with “cudgels, stones, hammers, rules, trowels, and hand-sawes”, targeting in particular brothels and playhouses. The latter had not yet attained the respectability we associate with theatres today and so both were vandalised, with those who dwelt inside them assaulted — “Constables are baffled, Bawdes are bangd, Punkes are pillag’d, Panders are plagued.” This was done perhaps under the pretence of suppressing venues which promoted levity, indulgence, and sexual impropriety. Really it was an opportunity for mob violence.
On Shrove Tuesday in 1617, a crowd of some 3,000 protestors — mostly apprentices — attempted to destroy the Cockpit Theatre after it was announced that the Queen’s Servants acting troupe would be relocating there from the Red Bull playhouse in Clerkenwell, which offered significantly cheaper tickets. A group stormed the private theatre in Drury Lane, assaulting the actors inside and burning their playbooks. The bloody aftermath of this tumult was substantial damage to the venue, numerous injuries, and the deaths of three rioters who were shot by the actors in self-defence.
This surely conjured in Londoners’ minds memories of the rioting by apprentices which was endemic to London towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign and culminated in 1595 with the public execution of a number of ringleaders. Now it seemed this violence had been concentrated into regular outbursts at about the same time every year or so; between 1603 and 1642, there were 24 major riots on Shrove Tuesday.
In 1641, the authorities of Norwich were so afraid that a throng of apprentices would attack the cathedral on Shrove Tuesday that they shut its gates, assembled a defending army of about 500 clergymen and godly worshippers armed with pistols and swords inside the building, and prepared for battle. A contemporary Puritan writer mocked this fear, suggesting choristers were deployed like cannons — “they must blow the Rebels away with their profound sounding roaring voices”.
Though no attack ever materialised, the fear was not misplaced. Just two years later, emboldened by the outbreak of the English Civil War, a Puritan mob really did invade the cathedral and lay waste to its organ, ornate stonework, and stained glass windows.
The woodcut illustration which adorned the title page of Taylor’s pamphlet in 1620 sheds light on another traditional, and violent, custom. Its central figure is Jack o’ Lent, who is riding a four-legged fish (the only type of flesh permitted for consumption during Lent). For reasons that are obscure, it was customary in the Middle Ages and early modern period to mark Ash Wednesday by constructing a Jack o’ Lent figure out of straw and old clothing, who was then riotously drawn or carried through the streets before being burnt, shot at, or chucked down a chimney.
Behind Jack o’ Lent is the personification of Hunger, a skeletal figure bearing a sword and a wooden pole from which some meagre permitted rations — fish and vegetables — dangle. At the front of the miniature procession is Shrove Tuesday himself, a markedly podgier fellow with a frying pan slung over his shoulder.
In a sense, this crude and curious illustration may reveal precisely why apprentices got so riled up on Pancake Day. It was a day on which, by convention, they were released early from their work and would want to gorge on the foodstuffs soon to be denied them — probably washing it all down with a liberal quantity of ale. They were shortly to be subjected to Lenten restrictions and a barrage of patronising godly sermons at tedious church services. Shrove Tuesday, then, was a sudden moment of frivolity and indulgence. Clearly all this pent up energy required a greater outlet than brutalising a straw man.
