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Christmas Carols Which the Tudors Would Have Sung

© Ellen McDaniel-Weissler

The "carol" (in this case, Christmas Carol) did not appear in its currently familiar form until well into Medieval history. The word "caraula" from which the modern term derives represented dance music to the Church of the Dark Ages - and dancing in celebration of festivals in the Church had been banned well into the Middle Ages as something evil and uncontrollable. (As early as the seventh century, St. Ouen in his Life of the Contemporary St. Eligius speaks of "ballatio (ballads) aut saltationes aut caraulas aut cantica" as proceeding "from the devil". All four of these terms signify musical dances and vocal singing, particularly "ballatio", from which finally derives the word "ballet".)

The carol is actually a creation of the fifteenth century, although many melodies used in familiar Christmas carols predate that time period. It wasn't until the time of Chaucer that the "carol" began to emerge from the metrical chronicle or the melancholy elegiac poetry so familiar to people of the previous two centuries. The carol is a sample of the emergence of the people (and the Church) from the puritanical domination which had kept the tradition of spiritual rejoicing underground for centuries. Finally an acceptance was growing of celebration in a more secular form, to be refined for Church purposes: dancing, drama (such as the Mystery Plays), communal singing, and the "tendency of the people to disport themselves in church on festivals" (The Oxford Book of Carols, p. vii).

Popular topics for carols for the Christmas season were the Biblical stories and legends which had grown up around the events of the birth of Christ. Particularly common were re-tellings of the visitation of Mary by the Angel Gabriel, the Birth itself, Joseph's difficulty in accepting his fiancée's pregnancy, the visits of the shepherds and the Wise Men to Bethlehem, and the Slaughter of the Innocents by Herod's soldiers. According to The Oxford Book of Carols:

'The carol arose with the ballad in the fifteenth century, because people wanted something less severe than the old Latin office hymns, something more vivacious than the plainsong melodies.'

(I have occasionally included a carol whose lyrics are 18th or 19th century, but whose melody seems to be from the medieval period. Often the provenance of a particular carol cannot be pinpointed at all, but if it is at least known to predate the 17th century in either words or melody, I have felt free to use it, knowing that a great number of carols simply described as "traditional" have actually come down to us by word of mouth from many hundreds of years ago.)

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