How much do you know about Valentine’s Day history? Test your knowledge against these articles!

Nothing Says ‘I Hate You’ Like a ‘Vinegar Valentine’

Valentine’s Day is known as a time for people to send love notes, including anonymous ones signed “your secret admirer.” But during the Victorian era and the early 20th century, February 14 was also a day on which unlucky victims could receive “vinegar valentines” from their secret haters.

How Victorians trolled Valentine’s Day

By the 1820s, 200,000 valentines were given yearly in London. That number exploded when reforms to the Royal Mail ushered in a uniform rate of one penny to send letters of less than half an ounce from and to any post office in the British Isles. The Uniform Penny Post was introduced in 1840. By the late 1840s, 400,000 valentines were sent annually in London. By the 1860s it was 800,000. The mail was rife with lace, flowers, birdies, cupids and rhymes, motifs still now associated with Valentine’s Day.

Greek and Roman Recipes for Valentine’s Day

As you prepare to tuck into your oysters, followed by a garlicky main course, and a chocolaty desert on Valentine’s night, spare a thought for the Greeks and Romans, whose aphrodisiacs I now present to you.

A Valentine Gift?

I have a tiny enamel box, just 4cm by 2cm high, that was surely given as a love-token, perhaps for Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day in Tudor England

The Tudors obviously did celebrate St Valentine’s Day because it is mentioned three times in the Paston Letters* in the 1470s. Apparently, “valentines were chosen by lot from among a group of friends, who then had to buy their valentine a gift.”

The Oldest Valentine?

A letter from the teenager Margery Brews to her suitor John Paston contains the oldest surviving Valentine greeting in English. It is an extraordinary window on love and marriage in the late Middle Ages.

 World’s first printed Valentine’s Card

This is possibly the oldest printed Valentine’s card in the world. The delicate card has been pierced to produce a lace effect in the corners and is decorated with cupids, doves and flowers which were probably hand coloured after printing. It was published on 12th January 1797 by John Fairburn of 146, Minories, London. It includes a verse printed around the edge.

Victorian Valentine’s Day Cards 

A selection of Victorian Valentine’s Day cards went on show last year at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The cards, often handmade, featured lace, pressed grass and Valentine’s jokes. One card, titled “The Bark of Love”, featured a fairy in a gilded carriage drawn by two swans. Another, rather saucy card, featured what is possibly a pair of Victorian undergarments, with the message, “I think of you with inexpressible delight”.

Valentine’s Day in the Georgian Era 

There were many different customs and traditions surrounding Valentine’s Day, one of which baffled the unsentimental writer of this letter to the newspaper.

St Valentine’s Day customs 

On the night before Valentine’s Day, take five bay leaves, pin four of them to the corners of your pillow, and the fifth to the middle. If you dream of your sweetheart, you will be married before the year is over. To stimulate dreams, hard boil an egg, take out the yolk, and fill the egg with salt.  When you go to bed, eat the egg, shell included.  Do not speak or drink afterwards.

How to find your Valentine – Georgian style

Well, Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and it’s a leap year, so what are you waiting for, it’s the perfect time to find your soul mate. The Georgians were no different – they believed that they had to pull out all the stops to find the person of their dreams, so forget internet dating and give some of these a go!

Valentine’s Day in early 19th century America

The custom of celebrating St. Valentine’s Day came to America with English and German settlers. Though mass-produced valentine cards did not appear in the United States until the mid-19th century, handmade valentines were exchanged as early as the Revolutionary War.

Valentine’s Day in the 19th Century: Lost connections & Lonely Hearts 

To celebrate the holiday 19th century style, I’ve collected a few Valentine’s Day news items from Regency England, Victorian England, and even 1890s Texas.

 Valentine’s Day: A Brief History

Valentine’s precise identity is mysterious–he might have been a Bishop of Terni, he might have been a priest. Legends about him are various.

 Margery and John Paston: Fifteenth-Century Valentines

As we celebrate the day dedicated to love letters, it seems appropriate to share a Valentine’s Day story from one of the most famous letter-writing families of the Middle Ages: the Pastons. Letters written by all sorts of different members of the Paston family managed to survive the Middle Ages against all odds, and they are a treasure trove of information for historians and romantics alike.

John Brand in his Observations on Popular Antiquities (1813) quotes examples of names being drawn for Valentines and also of various ways of divining who your lover will be – for example taking five bay leaves, pining one to each corner of your pillow and one to the middle the night before the 14th and you would then dream of your beloved. The  sending of written Valentines or cards appears to have developed as the postal service improved at the end of the 18th century and the unimaginative male could turn to The Young Man’s Valentine Writer (1792) and copy out one of the sickly-sweet verses it contained.

Victorian Valentine’s Day verses for Rejecting Unwanted Suitors.

Published in 1875, The Lover’s Poetic Companion and Valentine Writer is a book intended for Victorian ladies and gentlemen “who wish to address those they love in suitable terms.”  It contains a variety of Valentine verses, ranging from the sweet to the satirical.  The book promises that these “Love Lyrics” are harmless and that even the more comical lines do not descend into vulgarity.  But what these verses lack in vulgarity, they more than make up for in unkindness and—in some instances—outright cruelty.

Love Me Do: Medieval Love Spells

 Valentine’s Day is all about love — mutual love and shared love. But what if love is unrequited or one-sided? The problem, as always, is not a new one. It was well known in ancient and medieval times alike, but different people had their own ways of dealing with it.