The History of Valentine's Day

Once upon a very long time ago in ancient Rome, the sixteenth day before the kalends of March (the day we know as February 14th) was a public holiday in honour of the goddess Juno, the queen of all the Roman gods and goddesses. The following day was the beginning of the Festival of Lupercalia, a festival with the unusual aspect of not being associated with any of the regular gods or goddesses. Even the Romans were not sure who was being honoured, which didn't stop them from enjoying themselves. The focal point of the festival was the Lupercal, the cave on the Palatine Hill in which the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. That is what the legend says, anyway.

Lupercalia was a purification and fertility rite which involved the sacrifice of goats and a dog in the Lupercal by priests who smeared the foreheads of two noble young men with the blood of the sacrificed animals and then wiped it off. At this point, the youths were required to laugh. Then the priests, clothed in loincloths, ran about the area, lashing everyone they met with strips of skin from the sacrificed goats. Young wives were particularly eager to receive these blows, because it was believed that the ritual promoted fertility and easy childbirth. In common with many such rituals, these ceremonies were accompanied by much revelry and drinking. One of the customs of Lupercalia which involved the young people was 'name drawing'. On the eve of the festival the names of Roman girls were written on slips of paper and placed into jars. Each young man would draw a girl's name from the jar and would accept the girl whose name he had drawn out as his love. These two would then be partners for the duration of the festival. Sometimes they would stay together for the whole year, and sometimes they would fall in love and would later marry.

But Lupercalia, with its lover lottery, had no place in Rome when Christianity became the official state religion. In the year 496 AD, Pope Gelasius did away with the festival of Lupercalia, declaring that it was pagan and immoral. He chose Valentine as the patron saint of lovers, who would be honoured at the new festival on the fourteenth of every February. The church decided to come up with its own lottery and so the feast of St. Valentine featured a lottery of Saints. One would pull the name of a saint out of a box, and for the following year, study and attempt to emulate that saint.

There is some confusion about the exact identity of St. Valentine. There are several St. Valentines mentioned in early martyrologies. Of these there are three possibilities of the origin of our saint "! one is described as a priest in Rome, another as a Bishop of Interamna, now Terni, in Italy, while the third lived and died in Africa. The Bishop of Interamna is most widely accepted as the basis of the modern saint. He was an early Christian martyr who lived in northern Italy in the third century and who was put to death on the orders of Emperor Claudius II for disobeying the ban on Christianity. It is quite possible that Valentine of Terni and the priest Valentine of Rome were the same person. Whoever it was, the story goes like this.

Under the rule of Claudius Rome was involved in many bloody and unpopular campaigns. Claudius the Cruel, as he became known, was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his army. He came to the conclusion that this was because the Roman men did not want to leave their wives or girl-friends. So he passed a law declaring all marriages and engagements in Rome illegal. But there was living in Rome a priest by the name of Valentine who disagreed with this edict and secretly married couples. For this kind deed he was apprehended and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who sentenced him to imprisonment. Somehow Claudius met Valentine and took a liking to him. At this point Valentine made a strategic error - he tried to convert the Emperor to Christianity. This was too much for Claudius, and he condemned Valentine to death. While in prison awaiting his fate he is said to have restored the sight of the jailer's daughter, with the result that both she and her father became converts. The girl would often visit him in his cell where they would sit and talk for hours, and in this way helped him to keep his spirits up. On the day he was to die, he left her a little note thanking her for her friendship and loyalty, signing it, "Love from your Valentine". When came the time for his execution he was taken outside the Flaminian gate and there was beaten with clubs and stoned until he was dead, and then his head was cut off. This was in the year 269, and by a strange coincidence, happened on February 14th.

But back to Lupercalia. The Feast of St. Valentine and the saint lottery lasted for a couple hundred years, but the church just couldn't get the people to forget about Lupercalia. In time, the church gave up on Valentine all together. Very few churches chose to celebrate or observe the life of St. Valentine on a 'Valentine's Sunday'. The ancient custom of drawing names on the 14th of February was considered a good omen for love. The lottery finally returned to coupling eligible singles in the 15th century. The names of English maidens and bachelors were put into a box and drawn out in pairs. The couple exchanged gifts and the girl became the man's valentine for a year. He wore her name on his sleeve and it was his bounden duty to attend and protect her. The church attempted to revive the saint lottery once again in the 16th century, but it never caught on. Surprise, surprise.

It could be argued that the very first valentine cards were the slips of paper bearing names of maidens the early Romans first drew out of the jars. Or perhaps the note Valentine passed from his death cell. The first modern valentine cards are attributed to the young French Duke of Orleans. He was captured at the Battle of Agincourt and held prisoner in the Tower of London for many years. He was most prolific during his stay and wrote countless love poems to his wife. About sixty of them remain, and are among the royal papers in the British Museum. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois. By the 17th century, handmade cards had become quite elaborate and quite expensive. These ones were only for those with means. In 1797, a British publisher issued The Young Man's Valentine Writer, which contained suggested sentimental verses for the young lover suffering from writer's block. Printers began producing a limited number of cards with verses and sketches, called 'mechanical valentines', and the introduction of the 'penny post' in the next century also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Valentines could now be sent anonymously, and suddenly, racy and sexually suggestive verses started appearing in great numbers, causing quite a stir among prudish Victorians. The number of obscene valentines caused several countries to ban the practice of sending cards by post. Late in the nineteenth century the post office in Chicago rejected some twenty-five thousand cards on the grounds that they were not fit to be carried through the U.S. mail.

Bill Hutchings