Pining with religious intent

‘S nuggles loves Oofybot. Hug hug hug”; ‘S nuggles loves Oofybot. Hug hug hug”; “Many happy ears to my Valentine. I lobe you. Tickle.” It is, of course, the season for valentines: the newspapers and the mail are full of billets both doux and not so doux, recognising that this is the time when young men’s fancy lightly turns to love. And not so young either.
Scrupulously following St Jerome (who kept up a correspondence with some nine Roman ladies), and being a natural versifier, I do like to send valentines to the surpassing fair of my acquaintance. For which our gentle Features Editor calls me “cad, cad, cad!” I do not receive many compliments, so I record this one for posterity.
But how did it all begin? First, it’s a long story. It started with Romulus and Remus, and ended with John Paul II, taking in at least two further popes along the way. Second, it is a story of many conflicting versions, some of which may actually not be true. And so I trace a thread for you, not always following the most plausible path but preferring the one strewn with the most flowers. But I have made up nothing: everything I tell you has its stout defenders in tradition.
The first Roman settlement, on the Palatine Hill, by Romulus, took place on April 21, 753 BC. And so the wolf, which suckled him, became an important tutelary symbol leading, in course of time, to the festival of Lupercalia, which took place on February 15 on the Palatine Hill. It was a fertility festival, at which a goat – the ancient symbol of sexuality – was sacrificed, its blood being smeared on the youths’foreheads. The young people were paired off by lot, involving the youths chasing maidens and lightly lashing them with thongs of goat hide. This apparently helped their fertility, and those who know their Sabine Latin will recall that februa is an instrument of purification and expiation, after which the month is named. Whether the pairing conferred sexual rights for the year, or merely designated an affiliation, is not clear. But many marriages resulted, as they were to do in more recent times.
In 496, Pope Gelasius decided that this was not a good idea, and instituted the feast of St Valentine on February 14, changing the lottery so that the young picked the name of a saint, whose virtues they would attempt to follow during the coming year. This was commendable, but one feels he may have betrayed something of the spirit of the festival. The date commemorated the martyrdom of St Valentine, or rather the two St Valentines, whom I will treat as the same person, which they may well have been. A third Valentine shares their feast day but as he lived in Africa and nothing is known about him, he drops out of our story.
Our Valentine was a priest, or possibly a bishop, in the reign of Claudius II. The emperor had forbidden marriage on the grounds that it inhibited the menfolk from joining the army, of which he was making considerable use at the time. Valentine, who may well have been an important figure in the Christian resistance, continued to marry couples, and was eventually imprisoned and beaten. His case was not helped by his attempt to convert Claudius. About to be executed on February 14, 270 AD, he sent a farewell love letter to the daughter of his jailer signed, of course, “From your Valentine”.You may remember that, at that period, presbyteral romantic connections did not have to be concealed.
Pope Gelasius’s stratagem does not seem to have been successful. The picking of a romantic valentine by lot was still common in the 18th century. The valentine heart would often be appliquéd to the sleeve – hence the phrase “wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve”. The custom was revived, probably in the Middle Ages, some say by Chaucer. February 14 was believed to be the day when the birds first started their mating rituals.
The earliest extant valentine was sent by the Duke of Orleans to his wife from the Tower of London, where he was imprisoned after capture at Agincourt. She was apparently shopping at the time. Henry V is reputed to have sent a valentine to Catherine of Valois, though he had this composed for him by a third party – confirming the incoherence of his romantic style, as we see in Shakespeare.
In 1477, Margery Drews, lately affianced, addressed a note “Unto my right well beloved Valentine John Paston, Squyer” and went on to wish that his welfare and his heart’s desire would be long preserved by Almighty God. Not quite the tone of “From Tracey to Rick. Essex forever”, but I suppose the general drift is the same.
By the 18th century, valentines were becoming very common among the ordinary people. Children used the day as an occasion for giving presents to each other, and one assumes that many best friends were both won and lost. There was a superstition that you would marry the first person you saw on the day, which often led you to asking your friends to blindfold you until your chosen sweetheart came into sight. One shudders to think of the tricks a false friend could play. But the heyday of the valentine was really the 19th century, when cheaper postal costs and efficient printing methods became available. The tradition is celebrated in Canada, Australia, France and Mexico, and it was enthusiastically embraced, I think that is the right word, in the United States.
The ingenuity of the Victorian valentine was remarkable. There were puzzle purses made of much folded paper, with romantic messages to be discovered on different facets. There were three-dimensional pop-up valentines made from card. The acrostic valentine spelt out the name of the sender from the first letter in every line. The rebus valentine substituted little pictures for words, so that an eye and a heart would read as “I love”. This shared a characteristic with the paper glove valentine (though among the affluent, real gloves were often given) bearing a verse such as: “If that from Glove, you take the letter G, Then Glove is Love, and that I send to thee.” The love knot valentine could be made from ribbon, but was often drawn in a complex design on paper; the message could be read along the length of the strip. Green leaves were often part of a valentine’s design, since girls believed that, in sleeping on a pillow covered with bay leaves sprinkled with rose water, they would see the face of their future husband in their dreams. One would, perhaps, have done well not to have watched Shrek or The Simpsons the night before.
Although imaginative methods of cutting and pricking paper were commonly used, it was in the 1850s that the paperlace valentine, typically commercially produced, began to be popular. Allowing for the fact that all valentines (except the ones I send, of course) are likely to be schmaltzy and sentimental, some very attractive examples of popular art were available.
However, it was also possible to send a spiteful valentine. And these were very popular. It must have been uncomfortable to receive one in the form of a fish, bearing as its final couplet: “Now who, on earth, would ever wish, to have a man who smells of fish?” But sending these was not the preserve of the female sex: some cruel ones were sent to unmarried ladies of a certain age, and few would appreciate one which ended with the words: “So, Sentimental Slut, adieu! – no more romantic pine – for I do seek a lover true, – no dreary Valentine.” But the valentine continues, in all its diverse forms, from imaginative and romantic presents to newspaper entries, which vary from the sentimental to what can best be described as propositions. Cheap, and not so cheap, cards are in every high street. The florists are ready with traditional roses and green leaves.
An anonymous e-mail is hard to achieve, but I once sent a valentine poem to my beautiful secretary by fax; strangely it ended up in a poetry anthology in company of which I was not ashamed.
But the spirit of Pope Gelasius still burns brightly. Pope Valentine’s reign in the eighth century only lasted for about a month, and his opinion was not recorded.
Sadly Valentine, along with Christopher and Philomena, were expunged from the universal Roman Calendar in 1969, in the time of Pope Paul VI, on the grounds of historical dubiety.
But our own Pope chose St Valentine’s day last year to send a message to young lovers in France, extolling the virtues of a chaste courtship leading to marriage. Not a word about thongs of goat’s hide, nor about picking your partner out of a hat.