Villagers all, this frosty tide,
Let your doors swing open wide,
Though wind may follow, and snow beside,
Yet draw us in by your fire to bide;
Joy shall be yours in the morning!
—Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
British author Kenneth Grahame wrote the carol quoted above for his 1911 book The Wind in the Willows for a scene in which carolers come to the door of Mr Mole and are met with generous hospitality. In Grahame’s time, caroling was still a robust tradition not only in England but throughout Europe and parts of America. It is now vanishingly rare to encounter one’s neighbors’ children caroling door to door, but the carols live on.
Christmas carols are an almost unbroken folk tradition that extends all the way back to medieval Europe. In America, we are mostly familiar with the English caroling tradition, and with European carols that have been translated into English, but among the more modern holiday music are carols that originate as long ago as the twelfth century.
There were earlier Christmas songs and hymns—one of the first pieces of music that we might consider a Christmas Carol is the “Angel’s Hymn” written in the year 129 AD, and the earliest version of the carol “O Come O Come Emmanuel” originates in the eighth century, but these were liturgical songs, written in Latin for use in church. The music we think of as carols has its roots in the twelfth century.
Saint Francis of Assisi encouraged the singing of Christmas songs as part of his nativity plays in the early 1200s. These canticles told the story of the birth of Jesus and they were in the language of the people not the Latin of the Church.
The word carol is French by way of Latin and originally referred to a song accompanied by a circular dance. Carols made their way to England in the late thirteenth century. Not all carols were Christmas carols, and not all of them were religious. The fifteenth century “Agincourt Carol” celebrates the 1415 victory of British King Henry V (he of the “this band of brothers” speech from the eponymous play by William Shakespeare).
Geoffrey Chaucer references carols in the Knight’s Tale in his Canterbury Tales, published in 1400: “Carols and instruments and feasts and dances.” It’s probably safe to assume these were secular carols and not Christmas themed ones, but the Miller’s Tale includes a line from a genuine early Chrstmas song: “Playing so sweetly that the chamber rang; And Angelus ad virginem he sang” (both quotes are from The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
The first written reference to Christmas carols in England appears in the writings of Shropshire chaplain and poet John Audelay, who died in 1426. He lists twenty five “caroles of Cristemas” in his writings. Of the nearly five hundred surviving English medieval carols, almost 250 have Christmas themes. By the end of the fifteenth century, the term ‘carol’ was already being synonymous with music for Christmas. By this time, Christmas caroling had become part of wassailing—a pre-Christian custom of going from house to house to bring blessings and good fortune. The word wassail means “be well” in Old English.
Many beautiful and much loved carols date to the sixteenth century. “Lo How a Rose is Blooming” was first published in Cologne in 1599, and the “Coventry Carol”, which was part of a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, dates to 1591.
“Carols were especially good at conveying these many moods — elation, wonder, apprehension, reverence — and their texts, written in the local vernacular, told compelling stories,” writes music historian David Vernier, in his essay “From Christemas to Carole: The Birth of Christmas in Medieval England”(www.listenmusicculture.com/features/from-christemasse-to-carole).
Troops of traveling musicians and townsfolk have sung Christmas carols throughout Europe for more than 500 years, but the luck ran out for English carolers in the seventeenth century. Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell and his Commonwealth government banned all Christmas festivities including carols as soon as they came into power in 1647. The puritans regarded Lewis got his inspiration for a kingdom where it was always winter and never Christmas.
Christmas was also banned in the American colonies, and while carols remained popular throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and became popular again in England after the Commonwealth, they never really took root in the Colonies, where the Puritan chill remained in the air.
Cromwell lost his head, quite literally, in 1658. King Charles II was restored to the throne of England and Christmas festivities were no longer outlawed, but Christmas carols had moved indoors during the Commonwealth, out of the hearing of Cromwell’s puritanical roundheads. Christmas in Charles II’s time was all about feasting and visiting, balls, and entertainments, but also musical performances for family and friends. Caroling eventually returned to popularity, in part thanks to broadsheets—inexpensive printed pages that made the words and music of carols widely available.
Broadsheets helped to repopularize the caroling tradition in the aftermath of the English Civil War and probably played a role in setting the lyrics in a standard form for the first time. They remained popular right through the nineteenth century.
Charles Dickens is often said to have invented the modern idea of Christmas, but that’s a disservice to his contemporaries and their passion for collecting, reviving, and repurposing traditional folk customs and music.
Two of the earliest “song catchers”, William Sandys and Davis Gilbert, traveled around the English countryside, gathering carols and publishing more than 100 of them in 1833. Sandys and Gilbert were followed by a host of others who scoured England and Europe for lost treasures.
Some of these carols were repurposed with new lyrics. The tune for “What Child Is This” was written by Henry the eighth as the decidedly secular lament “Greensleeves.” “In Dulci Jubilo” and “O Come O Come Emmanuel” combine ancient hymn tunes from the days of Gregorian chant with new, or embellished lyrics, but the music was given new life. Early versions of the carols we know as “Good King Wensaslas”, “Good Christian Men Rejoice”, and “Christ Was Born on Christmas Day” date to fifteenth century Scandinavia, but the familiar English lyrics were written in the nineteenth.
Nineteenth century researchers couldn’t resist tinkering and romanticizing things. They rewrote carols, but they also sang them with gusto and enthusiasm, and they wrote new ones, too.
The Victorians embraced caroling traditions with enthusiasm, and composed new carols, these include favorites like “Once in Royal David’s City,” which combines an 1848 poem with an 1849 composition.“In the Bleak Midwinter” began life as a poem written by Christina Rossetti in 1872. The popular setting was written in 1909 by composer Gustav Holst—surprisingly modern.
New England took a long time to shake off the influence of Cromwell, but by the nineteenth century, Christmas was being celebrated even in this last bastion of puritanism. There aren’t many traditional American Christmas carols from the folk tradition. The African American spiritual “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is probably the best known.
It wasn’t until the twentieth century motion picture era that American Christmas music really began to make an impact. The Irving Berlin song “White Christmas” debuted as part of the film Holiday Inn in 1943. The 1947 film The Bishop’s Wife incorporated traditional carols, including “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, into the score. The 1957 film White Christmas brings together just about every American holiday trope that could be crammed in one film, and generations of American children have been raised on Charlie Brown’s Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Holiday music is an essential part of both animated shorts. Rudolph may seem out of place in a history of Christmas carols, but one could make the argument that even holiday novelty songs about hippopotamuses and Santa Claus have their roots in the medieval tradition of bringing good cheer to the darkest time of the year.
There are Christmas carols that almost everyone is familiar with that are among the oldest musical compositions in the West that are still regularly sung, and sung not just by professional choirs or in churches but by ordinary people every winter. In a society that is increasingly focused on the next new thing, that’s an astonishing survival. Or maybe not. These are songs that carry a message of hope down through the centuries, and that message is always relevant. Peace on earth, goodwill to all.
