DK Wilson: A Tudor Twelfth Night
This excerpt from DK Wilson’s Tudor crime novel, The First Horseman, gives us a glimpse into a merry Tudor Twelfth Night.
‘At the Sign of the Swan we celebrated Twelfth Night in style. I owed it to the whole household to signal that we had put behind us the anxieties and troubles of recent weeks. We filled the house with families and friends. All the lamps were lit and the walls hung with branches of holly and bay. The scene was set for a night of riotous festivity. The tables were piled high with food, a hogshead was kept replenished with hot wassail and the kitchen produced the biggest king cake I have ever seen. The workshop benches were cleared to the sides of the room to make space for musicians, dancing and performances by mummers hired for the occasion.
It was customary that a gold half-crown should be concealed within the cake and that whoever found it would be leader of the revels. On this occasion I cheated and ensured that Lizzie discovered the coin. She was by now very popular in the household and her nomination as revel queen was enthusiastically received. Many were the suggestive shouts, whoops and whistles when she nominated Bart as her consort. Together they presided over the night’s events with bawdy good humour and the party ran on well into the early morning.’
Each novel in this thrilling new series of mysteries by historian DK Wilson is based on a real unsolved Tudor crime.
