One Christmas I found myself on London’s Oxford Street, admiring the twinkly decorations and listening to a piped version of “Jingle Bells.” In Chinese.
Our Christmas songs and carols turn up in some surprising places. They come from some surprising places, too. “Ding, Dong! Merrily on High” began life in a French Renaissance dancing manual. The tune of “Good King Wenceslas” was first published in Finland (to completely different words, about priests and virgins, mostly). Certainly, not all of them began life with their seasonal associations attached. Some were born to Christmas, some have achieved Christmas, and some have had Christmas thrust upon them.
For example, every Christmas, you will find yourself singing a song whose original words were about a dead cow and a delinquent ploughboy. The song was heard in a pub in Forest Green, Surrey, in the leafy commuter-belt fringes of London, by the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and it was sung to him by an old man called Mr. Garman. Vaughan Williams found a use for the tune a few years later when he was given the job of music editor of The English Hymnal. He wanted to include a poem by an American bishop called Phillips Brooks but didn’t know (or didn’t like) the tune that Brooks’s own church organist had written for this text back in Philadelphia. So Vaughan Williams helped himself to Mr. Garman’s folk song. The result—“O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
That’s not the only transatlantic immigrant into our English carol tradition. “We Three Kings” is American. So is “Away in a Manger,” which was first published in the journal of the Universalist movement in Boston. The editors confidently informed their readers that the poem is by Martin Luther. It isn’t: They made that up. They claimed they were celebrating the 400th anniversary of Luther’s birth. They weren’t: They made that up, too (or, at least, got the date wrong).
“O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Away in a Manger” are both sung today to different tunes on either side of the Atlantic. Many of our best-known carol texts have had many musical partners over the years. Different tunes sometimes represent differences between one denomination and another, or from one village to the next. Sometimes, a carol would be sung to one tune in church and to a different tune in the pub afterward.
Often, tunes turn up in different parts of the UK in slightly different versions. London gives us a good example. The composer John Stainer once heard “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” raggedly sung on the streets of the capital by a tattered band of Dickensian urchins. A little later, the folklorist Cecil Sharp collected the same tune in Cambridgeshire, England. The same, but different: Stainer’s tune has a different first note from Sharp’s. Somebody, once upon a time, traveled those 70 miles singing carols and got that bit wrong, or misremembered it, or changed it. That’s how an oral tradition works. There is no “correct” version. Even today, hymnbooks and carol collections don’t agree on the exact words of “Away in a Manger” or the precise rhythm of “Angels from the Realms of Glory.”
This ability to absorb influences from everywhere and nowhere produces memorable, and often rather odd, results. This partly explains why, for most of its history, the English carol has been an outdoor creature, kept tied up in the churchyard, not allowed to show its muddy face in church. For much of the 18th century, only one carol was permitted in worship, Nahum Tate’s “While Shepherds Watched.” Hymns like “O Come, All Ye Faithful” weren’t granted access until the first half of the 19th century. Even long after that, the idea of singing secular things like wassail songs cheek by jowl with holy writ would have been deeply shocking.
The word carol, too, has had many associations over the centuries. Shakespeare describes a pair of young lovers:
This carol they began that hour …
How that life was but a flower.
The carol sung by this lover and his lass is a springtime love song: It has nothing to do with Christmas, still less church. Some later composers like Gerald Finzi used the term carol for purely instrumental pieces with a songlike character.
Even in a sacred context, the carol was never exclusively a Christmas song—many collections include Easter carols and other varieties, and folk carols like “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day” have many verses which cover the entire Christian story, often from the creation of the world to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If someone tries to tell you that such and such an item is or isn’t a proper carol, remember that, like so many catchall musical terms, this one really defies precise definition. It captures a huge range of types and influences. That’s part of its appeal.
Tracing the history of our carol tradition can be a bit like trying to sweep up all the stray pine needles when you’ve taken down your Christmas tree: There’s always a corner you find you haven’t reached. There’s really no such thing as the history of the English carol.
But there are phases and themes.
Folk and oral traditions provide the earliest sources. Folk carols appear in manuscript sources from the 13th century on. Familiar items such as “The Boar’s Head Carol” and the various holly-and-ivy carols start turning up in the 15th and early 16th centuries. The explosion of printing in the 16th century saw the advent of the broadside ballad: cheap editions of popular songs, including countless versions of carols and Christmas poems of all kinds, a practice that persisted well into the 19th century. Protestant hymnbooks and schoolbooks give us well-known songs such as “In Dulci Jubilo” and “Personent Hodie.” Eighteenth-century hymn singing added “While Shepherds Watched” and the lyrics of Isaac Watts and John and Charles Wesley.
Up to this point, most written versions of Christmas carols and hymns would have reached their performers as words only, leaving the singers to provide suitable tunes which they already knew and which happened to fit. Together with the vagaries of the oral tradition, the lack of any sort of copyright control, and the willingness of different religious traditions or even different villages to adopt their own local variant of a much-loved song, the idea of any sort of correct or standard version of many of our most traditional items gets thoroughly lost in the undergrowth. In “I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In),” the titular vessels have been recorded sailing to Newcastle and up the English Channel. Sometimes the passengers are Jesus and Mary, sometimes Mary and Joseph, occasionally the archangel Michael or the bodies of the three kings on their way to burial in Cologne Cathedral, and sometimes a group of pretty girls.
The intellectual currents of the 19th century brought two main influences to bear on the broad meanderings of our carol tradition. First, scholars and antiquarians started to take folk culture seriously and to collect and write down versions of songs and carols from manuscripts, ballad sheets, and their own encounters with carolers. As the 19th century moved into the 20th, their work was continued in important books edited and collected by, among many others, John Stainer, Sabine Baring-Gould, Lucy Broadwood, Cecil Sharp, J. A. Fuller-Maitland, Edith Rickert, George Ratcliffe Woodward, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Most carols with their roots deep in folk traditions reach the versions we know today in this period: You will probably find yourself singing Stainer’s “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” this Christmas, but his setting preserves only one version among countless possible variants of detail. The compiler exercises an element of choice as well as scholarship. It is a rich and fascinating process.
The second strand of 19th-century thought to feed fatly into what we sing and hear today was the tradition of churchmanship around the Oxford Movement and High-Church Anglicanism. Alongside its theological tracts, the movement gloried in a theatrical style of worship with plenty of ceremony and lots of music. At the same time, its message of social inclusivity gave rise to an explosion in parish choirs and in hymns for congregations to sing.
Tunes could be drawn from wherever a good melody was to be found. The muscular, high-minded, high-collared clergymen who led this revival put new words to melodies they found in old books (as in “Good King Wenceslas” and “Ding, Dong! Merrily”). They edited and translated items from all sorts of traditions, turning the Catholic torch song “Adeste Fideles” into “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and using Lutheran chorales as inspiration for songs like “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.” They borrowed and bolted together art-music and nonconformist lyrics (think “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”), as well as writing many pieces of their own.
These habits—gleaning in the highways and byways of folk and liturgical traditions and composing new items to fit into that tradition—meet in hybrids like “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” a new poem married to an old folk melody.
Next, poets and composers wrote new songs, but in a deliberately archaic style to match the faux-medieval and Victorian sensibility which had so thoroughly colonized the English carol tradition with songs like “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Many of our most cherished moments of Christmas magic have their roots in the fireside imaginings of Victorians like Christina Rossetti and George Ratcliffe Woodward. (There are no frosty winds in Luke’s gospel.)
The next time you clamber to your feet from some buttock-numbing pew or cheap plastic chair to hear once again those familiar old tunes banged out on a wheezy organ or cracked school piano, remember just how English this most English of traditions actually is: not very. Remember the American Phillips Brooks, finding peace from the horrors of the Civil War in the Holy Land at the birthplace of Christ, where the silent stars go by. Remember the dead cow and the naughty ploughboy, carried off to hell by a genie in a puff of blue smoke—all very festive. Remember Mr. Garman of Forest Green, Surrey.
And what about “Jingle Bells”? That one’s American, too, composed by a man who ran away to sea in a whaling ship at age 14, lost everything in the Gold Rush of 1849, and was the uncle of the founder of the J. P. Morgan banking house (more than one cowboy in that family, then). A carol used to be just a party song about love, keeping warm, or having a good time. “Jingle Bells” can surely claim its place in that tradition.
This wonderful, rich musical pudding gives us a unique insight into what makes us who we are. Even more importantly, it gives us lots of great songs. Happy Christmas.
Andrew Gant is a composer, conductor, and lecturer in music at St. Peter’s College at the University of Oxford. This article is adapted from his book Deck the Hall: The Stories of our Favourite Christmas Carols ©Hodder Faith. This article may not be reproduced for any other use without permission.
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