What Christmas Was REALLY Like in England’s Dark Ages, 900 AD | History for Sleep

Settle in for a calm, relaxing history for sleep set in the Dark Ages of England, in the year 900 AD, through the Twelve Days of Christmas in a Wessex village. Follow a free Anglo-Saxon farming family through one long midwinter night, from the church vigil on Christmas Eve to the quiet hours when the whole village sleeps, with a few glimpses of the days ahead. In this long sleep history narration, you will learn how King Alfred’s law set aside twelve days of rest at Christmas for free men, why Bede wrote that the English once began their year on Mothers’ Night, and how a harp was passed around the benches at an Anglo-Saxon feast. You will also find out what a family ate and drank at a medieval Christmas feast, how riddles, songs and storytelling filled the evening, what small gifts might have been exchanged, how children played and went to bed, and how a house, a village and the chalk downs sounded in the deep of a winter night. The story separates what the sources really record from later traditions. It also explains the Yule log, the boar’s head and wassailing honestly, and it leaves out the Christmas trees, mistletoe and Santa that came centuries later. #historyforsleep #AnglosaxonEngland #AlfredTheGreat #Wessex #SaxonEngland #BedtimeHistory #900ad