Royal Maundy pence to each of fifty poor men. It is not known, however, whether it was as yet the practice each year to have the number of pence and the number of recipients track the monarch's age: Henry IV was the first monarch to decree that the number of pence given be determined by the monarch's age. The ceremony was not always performed on Maundy Thursday; it could be postponed a day to Good Friday by royal command, as it was in 1510. Nobles could hold their own Maundy distributions, as did Henry Percy, 5th Earl of Northumberland in the early
Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience) "reduced to misery". The "Holy Thursday" referred to in the poem is Ascension Thursday, which in the Church of England and other parts of the Anglican Communion, can be used a synonym for the same feast; Thomas Pruen uses the term to refer to Ascension Day in his "Illustration of the Liturgy of the Church of England", published in 1820; however use of the term "Holy Thursday" to mean Ascension Day is rare, and the term is more generally applied by most Christian denominations to Maundy Thursday in Holy Week. On Ascension Day a service was held in St. Paul's