THE Christmas crib is 800 years old. That’s right, the Nativity scene with ox, ass and manger wasn’t always a thing. It was the genius idea of St Francis of Assisi, who had returned from the Holy Land and thought to himself that the landscape around Greccio, near Assisi, was really like what he’d seen at Bethlehem, with all the rocks and things.
And so he asked the local lord for a hay-filled manger, viz, the trough animals ate from, plus ox and donkey. The lord duly obliged and St Francis brought them to a cave outside town, where he invited the locals to come and contemplate the bleak poverty in which the King of kings was born, because there was no room at the inn, “to see”, as St Francis said, “as much as possible with my bodily eyes the discomfort of his infant needs; how he lay in a manger, and how, with an ox and ass standing by, he was laid upon a bed of hay”.
