English Legends of the Three Kings
Why does England have a special fondness for the three kings – or magi – of the Christmas story?
Although the account in Matthew’s Gospel of the 'wise men from the East' who were guided to the infant Jesus by the Star of Bethlehem (2:1-12) is so tantalizingly short and vague, it is a magical story whose unfathomable mystery has captured the imagination of Christians and others from the earliest times to the present day. And no country in the world possesses more legends about the Magi than England.
In these legends, the Wise Men are almost always referred to as the Three Kings, an appellation derived not from Matthew but from two Roman authors, Tertullian (c. 160-230) and Origen (c.185-254). The former was the first person to call the Magi kings in his Adversus Judaeos, probably because of the prophecy in Psalm 72, verses 10-11, that kings would come to worship Jesus bearing gifts, and because of the costliness of the gold, frankincense and myrrh offered. The latter was the first to state that there were three kings in his Genesim Homiliae.
The names of the Three Kings, Caspar (often changed to Jasper in English legends), Balthasar and Melchior, are not found until the early sixth century, when they appear in a lost Greek manuscript which was included in the seventh-century Excerpta Latina Barbari in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
In the English folk-tale tradition, obtained originally from an eighth-century Irish manuscript, Excerpta et Collectanea, Melchior, King of Arabia, who presented gold, is considered to be an elderly, grey-haired man, Balthasar, King of Ethiopia, the giver of frankincense, is regarded as middle-aged, swarthy and bearded, and Caspar, King of Tarsus, who brought myrrh, is seen as a young stripling.
Most of the English stories about the Three Kings are linked to legends concerning St Helena, after whom countless towns, churches and holy wells in this country are named. Modern scholarship accepts that Helena was born c.250 in Drepanum (later Helenopolis) in Bithynia, and that her son Constantine the Great was born in Naissus in Moesia Superior in c.271-73.
Between 900 and 1900, however, it was believed throughout England that Helena was the only child of mythical King Cole, the supposed first British king, who held his court at Colchester; that she was born in the town, married the Roman general Constantius, and gave birth to Constantine within the city walls.
The earliest written account of this story occurs in Colchester’s St John’s Abbey Chronicle of 1120. Geoffrey of Monmouth repeated the legend in his Historia Britonum in 1139, adding that Helena was the most beautiful woman in England. The tale reappears in William Camden’s Brittania of 1586, and in numerous other history books down to the Victorian era.
Helena probably married Constantius in AD 270, and it is not impossible that at some stage between that year and 293, when he became Caesar and divorced her to marry Theodora, she resided with him for a short while in the Roman colonia of Colchester. All we know for certain is that Constantius campaigned frequently in Britain from 296 until his death at York in 306 and that Constantine was then proclaimed Caesar Augustus in London and elsewhere in the country.
The English were eager to claim Helena as their own because, after she had been converted to Christianity by Constantine in AD 312, she went about building churches and ministering to the poor, and acquired a universal reputation for special saintliness. In c.325 she visited the Holy Land, where she was believed to have discovered the True Cross and the Three Holy Nails that fastened Christ thereon, and the veneration with which she was regarded increased a thousand-fold.
Even more exciting to many people than these two sensational finds, however, was the story in several Vitae of Bishop Eustorgius of Milan that, on leaving Palestine, Helena journeyed to India and there unearthed the bodies of the Three Kings, which she placed in a richly adorned chest and conveyed to Constantinople.
Until Constantine’s death in 337, these supposed remains of the Magi were treated with great respect. But during the Greek schism that followed they were totally neglected. Sometime before his own death in 350 Eustorgius transported the bones to Milan. And here they remained until 1164 when Archbishop Reinald von Dassel of Cologne brought them back with him to that city, having been granted them by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. A magnificent golden shrine to house the relics was built between 1190 and 1220, and this can still be seen today in Cologne Cathedral.
As soon as the Three Kings reached Cologne, they began to perform miracles for the sick and needy, and when pilgrims flocked to the town to pay homage to these monarchs, they speedily became the most popular saints in Christendom.
By 900 there was already a chapel and a holy well dedicated to St Helena in Colchester, and by 1200 the Borough seal contained an image of her, too. In 1413, however, the Town Council decided that their new Borough arms should feature not Helena but her famous discoveries, so they show the True Cross, the Three Nails and three crowns, representing the Magi.
The arms of Nottingham, first recorded in 1614, are virtually the same as those of Colchester: a red shield containing a green ragged cross and three gold crowns (although the Holy Nails are omitted), as this city, too, believes it has connections with St Helena. In his History of Nottingham of 1751, for example, Charles Deering states that King Cole was buried in Nottingham. And John Leland in his Collectanea, first published in 1715, tells us that Helena’s quite fictitious son Lucius built Nottingham. The three gold crowns of the Magi have also appeared on the arms of Cologne since 1500.
By about 1200, Epiphany, on January 6th, the Feast of the Three Kings, had assumed great importance in England, and next to Christmas Day was considered to be the most thrilling day of the year, when wild parties were held and mummers’ plays performed. The festival reached its apotheosis in the late seventeenth century, with large iced cakes topped by sugar figures of the Three Kings being consumed at the evening revels, and delightful chasing, kissing and guessing games played.
From 1200 to the 1590s, cycles of mystery plays acting out Bible stories were performed in over a hundred English towns; at first in churches and churchyards, and later on wagons that toured the streets. The plays featuring the Three Kings were some of the most celebrated of these pageants, and all the ones now extant share the same basic characteristics – they are extremely reverent in tone, they depict the Magi as holy, dignified, courteous men and they speculate about the true significance of the miraculous guiding Star.
In most of the plays the Three Kings find Jesus in a stable, but in others in a house or ‘halle’. The Christ Child is referred to by a variety of beautiful names in these pageants, of which ‘Lily Flower’ in the York Cycle ‘Three Kings Play’ is the most poetic. The Magi usually travel to Bethlehem on foot or on horse-back, but in the Chester play they ‘ride upon Drombodaries’.
In the 17th century a chapbook called The Three Kings of Colchester was widely on sale throughout England. This is a charming fairy-tale woven from several garbled strands of the St Helena and Magi myths. It tells the story of King Cole and his daughter, who is renowned for her beauty and affability. After Cole’s queen dies, ‘from covetousness’, he marries a hideous but fabulously wealthy woman. The new queen and her equally ugly daughter are jealous of the comely princess and banish her from Colchester; providing her only with some ‘brown bread, hard cheese and a bottle of beer’. The princess shares these rations with a poor old man she meets on the road and he blesses her.
Next she comes to a holy well containing the three ‘Golden Heads’ of the Magi, who beg her not to neglect them but to ‘wash and comb’ and honour them. The princess does this and is rewarded by marriage to ‘the greatest King that reigns’.
In the 18th century this tale was incorporated in a chapbook entitled The History of the Four Kings of Canterbury, Colchester, Cornwall and Cumberland, which continued to be reissued until about 1840. Then in 1849 James Orchard Halliwell included the story in his Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England, giving it an extended lease of life.
In Victorian times English schoolchildren began to perform Nativity plays in which the Three Kings featured prominently. Children all over the country still act the story of the Three Wise Men in their Christmas plays. And, like earlier actors, they insert imaginative touches into their roles; adding vigour to the interpretation of these legendary characters.
