"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

#AdventCalendar – Day 13: Wynkyn de Worde, Christmas Carols and a boar’s head

Well, yesterday some of you people protested when I wrote that the brawn is probably something no one would cook, and I’m glad because I kind of like the stuff, but you have forced me to double down with another traditional Tudor Christmas dish: the boar head.

Wynkyn de Worde, most likely a pseudonym, was a German immigrant who first popularized products from the printing press in London: he worked with William Caxton publishing pamphlets, and his work was endorsed by patrons like Margaret Beaufort, grandmother of Henry VIII. He was the first to use Italic, but also found a way to include Hebrew and Arabic characters. In 1495 he was the first printer to use movable characters to print music on English soil. And music is precisely the reason we are concerned with him, as his Christmasse Carolles newley enprinted (1521) included a very old song called “The Boar’s Head Carol”.

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