The story of carols
David L Saunders reviews a book that provides some interesting insights into ten favourite Christmas carols
The carols we love to sing, like Christmas itself, owe much to pre-Christmas midwinter rejoicings at having reached the shortest day – with the prospect of new growth and abundance to come. The many references, for example, in ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ to evergreens refer to the need to celebrate signs of life at a time of year when so much else is dormant. ‘Why was the Partridge in a Pear Tree?’: The History of Christmas Carols is a pocket-sized book that tells the story of ten of the best loved carols and does a thorough detective job on them.
The author, Mark Lawson-Jones, thinks the earliest carols date back to the thirteenth century. The word itself may derive from Old French or Middle English carole, meaning dance, or it may come from the Latin choraula. ‘The Coventry Carol’, which describes Herod’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’, was part of a sixteenth century mystery play.
Prolific hymn writers
Some of our best known carols come from the prolific pens of hymn writers such as Charles Wesley (‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’), Christina Rossetti (‘In the bleak midwinter’) and Cecil Francis Alexander (‘Once in Royal David’s City’).
The words get rather more attention in this book than the tunes, although the author does tell us that ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ really took off when it was joined, a hundred years, later, to a Mendelssohn tune (which the composer would probably have disapproved of!).
‘Adeste Fideles’ – ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ to us – has been the subject of a thirty-two page essay by a Benedictine monk, who takes us back to Douai in France where the writer of the words, John Francis Wade, had fled in 1745 after the Jacobite rising. The words, in fact, are a heartfelt plea for France to invade England and restore the Catholic faith and practice!
Wassail
The word ‘wassail’ has an important role in carol history. It derives from the greeting ‘was hail’ in Anglo Saxon, meaning something like ‘good health’, but came to denote partying, carousing and the practice of taking the Wassail Bowl around neighbours. It then developed into the practice on twelfth night of selecting a king and queen who would conduct ceremonies in the fruit orchards, placing bread soaked in cider on the fruit trees to encourage next year’s growth.
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Christmas had become associated with revelry, dancing, superstition and wildness – for example, ‘The Lord of Misrule’. The Puritans, because of this, sought to ban the celebration of Christmas and introduced laws to this effect; but, in practice, Christmas and its customs could not be abolished just like that and the restoration of 1660 saw the return of Christmas to England.
The golden age of carols
It was in the nineteenth century that christmas, as we know it, developed with Prince Albert bringing to England the Germanic customs of decorated Christmas trees and present giving. The author describes the nineteenth century as the ‘golden age’ of carols. Although he makes many references to the present day, his field is that of the traditional carol and there are no references to the world of John Rutter and other contemporary carol writers and composers: so he, rightly, confines himself to throwing light on what lies behind the familiar words of our traditional carols.
A poignant section of this densely packed book tells of the Christmas Armistice during the first world war in 1914 when English soldiers started singing ‘O come All Ye Faithful’ and the German soldiers responded with ‘Adeste Fideles’. This groundswell of good will from troops on the front line initially appalled the high commands on both sides, but it led to Christmas trees being raised above the trenches, fraternising between German and English soldiers, singing and football.
Twelve days of Christmas
In what is a small, handy-sized pocket book of 130 pages we learn a lot about local customs, such as pub carol singing in the north of England and the Mari Lwyd tradition in Wales of taking a horse’s skull on a stick around town ‘knocking up’ the residents. We are also given explanations of the hidden meanings behind popular carols. The, for me, interminable ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ may have an extraordinary religious sub-plot: one partridge in a pear tree = Jesus. Until I read this book I was quite unaware of the different perching propensities of French red-legged partridges (they do) and English grey partridges (they don’t). The theology continues with four calling birds = the four gospels; eight maids a milking = the beatitudes; eleven pipers piping = the eleven faithful apostles, twelve drummer drumming = the twelve points of belief listed in the apostles’ creed.
Good King Wenceslas turns out to have had a pretty chequered life – and a grisly death – but does appear to have been charitably inclined towards the poor in Bohemia, dragging his trusted knight, Podiven, with him on his delivery rounds.
The author admits that mystery still surrounds the origins of some of our best known carols but he is not afraid to demolish myths: Henry VIII did not write ‘Greensleeves’ (the source of the original tune for ‘I Saw Three Ships’), nor was ‘Silent Night’ written with guitar accompaniment because the organ was broken in St Nikolaus Church in Oberndorf, Austria.
‘Why was the Partridge in the Pear Tree?’: The History of Christmas Carols. The History Press Ltd., The Mill, Brimscombe Port, Stroud, Gloucestershire GL5 2QG ISBN: 9780752459578. £7.99.
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