Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by William Hogarth, William Daniels and Thomas Webster. How England kept Christmas before the Victorians reinvented it: the boar's head, the mummers, the misrule, the carols and the food, taken from old accounts and parish records. Ashton wrote social history out of ephemera and this is his most cheerful book. This edition adds sixty plates of paintings by William Shayer, Andrew MacCallum, Robert Hills and John William North, ranging from cottage and snow scenes to Coutances Cathedral.