What would Christmas be like if we weren’t singing carols? Apparently the origin of this kind of folk song at this time of year is found back in medieval Europe in pagan songs sung at the winter solstice celebration, as people danced around stone circles. The word “carol” comes from the old French word “carole,” which meant a popular circle dance accompanied by singing. Carols of this kind used to be written and sung during all four of seasons of the year. There used to be May carols and harvest carols, but it is only the tradition of singing them at Christmas which has survived in the manner with which we’re familiar.
As most of us know, even Christmas itself as a religious celebration originated in the ancient Roman pagan festival of Saturnalia, which honored the agricultural god Saturn. This took place during the winter solstice. This is also the source of many of the traditions we now associate with Christmas, things like wreaths, candles, feasting, and gift giving. It was only later that carols began to be sing in connection with Christian remembrances of Jesus’ birth, which was actually more likely to have occurred in the spring rather in winter.
A uniquely Christian Christmas tradition can be traced to 4th century Rome and was in Latin. In the 9th and 10th centuries, Northern European monasteries developed Christmas hymns as part of sequences of rhymed stanzas. The Parisian monk Adam of Saint Victor began to draw music from popular songs in the 12th century, introducing something closer to our modern Christmas carol. But even these were not allowed in worship, as a result of a decision by the Council of Laodicea in 367, which banned congregational singing because of the heretical teachings of the Arians which were spreading through their hymns. This was an early heresy, even from post-Apostolic times, which denied the full deity of Jesus, viewing Him only as the first and greatest among created beings. Christian hymns and carols prior to the Reformation were sung in street festivals, not in church. It was Luther who first effectively restored congregational singing for the people.
English carols first appeared in a 1426 work of John Awdlay, a Shropshire chaplain, who listed twenty-five “caroles of Cristemas,” probably sung by groups of “wassailers,” who went through the streets from house to house. The word “wassail” was a toast and comes from the Old Norse “ves heill,” meaning “be well and in good health.” But by the Victorian period wassailers were caroling groups who went around the town and would be rewarded with a hot, spiced drink, known as “wassail.”
When Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans came to power in England in 1647, the celebration of Christmas and singing carols was banished as it was judged to be a pagan festival. However, carols survived as people still sang them in secret. But carols remained mainly unsung until Victorian times, when Christmas became a holiday that families could enjoy, and music became a big part of the celebrations. It would become a tradition to sing carols at home after the Christmas meal.
It was during this time that two Cornishmen, William Sandys and Davis Gilbert, began collecting old seasonal music from villages all round England. Gilbert published two small collections of carols and Sandys published the lyrics and tunes to over 100 carols.This created a carol resurgence and many composers created new ones like “Good King Wenceslas,” with many of these still familiar to us today such as “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and “We Three Kings of Orient.” The publication in 1871 of “Christmas Carols, New and Old” by Henry Ramsden Bramley and Sir John Stainer was another significant contribution to a revival of carols in Victorian Britain. Some carols like “Personent Hodie” and “The Holly and the Ivy” can be traced directly back to the Middle Ages and are among the oldest musical compositions still regularly sung.
Many of today’s popular carols were printed in “Piae Cantiones,” a collection of late medieval Latin songs first published in 1582. Early Latin forms of carols such as “Christ was Born on Christmas Day” and “Good Christian Men, Rejoice” can be found in this book. The words and music of Christmas carols were not always written at the same time. The music for “Ding Dong Merrily on High” dates back to the mid-1500s, but the lyrics are from the 1800s. The tune for “Good King Wenceslas” is a medieval dance tune from the 1200s, while the words were written in the 1800s.England’s oldest surviving carol is “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night,” which has a 16th century tune and 17th century words, but these were not put together until the 19th century. The oldest popular carol, where music and words were written at the same time, is likely to be “O Come All Ye Faithful” at the end of the 18th century.
Carol singing from house-to-house has origins in medieval times when there were official carol singers called Waits. These were led by important locals, such as council leaders, who had the power to take money from the public. They were called Waits because they only sang on Christmas Eve (often known as “watchnight” or “waitnight”), when the Christmas celebrations began.In Charles Dickens’ 1854 short story, “The Seven Poor Travelers,” he describes a group of musicians performing in a town one winter’s evening: “As I passed along the High Street, I heard the Waits at a distance, and struck off to find them. They were playing near one of the old gates of the City, at the corner of a wonderfully quaint row of red-brick tenements.”
The first carol service is believed to have been held at Truro Cathedral, Cornwall, in 1880. It was organized by Edward White Benson, the First Bishop of Truro, who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury.Today, carol singers will more likely be found in town squares, shopping centers and visiting hospitals and residential care homes, and rather than waiting to be rewarded with a cup of wassail, modern carolers are more likely to ask for donations to charity.
One of these carols which has its origins in that folk tradition is the light-hearted and appealing song commonly known as the Sussex Carol, since being popularized after it was heard and written down by the great composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) early in the last century as he was in a Sussex village. The song had already been around for some three and a half centuries.Part of its charm and memorability is the way it repeats the first two lines before going on to finish the verse. It’s a very good example of the way carols take a doctrine out of the study or the pulpit and make it dance. In this carol the doctrine is of the Incarnation, which teaches that God became flesh, Emmanuel, God with us in our humanity, and so made it possible for the first time for people to seek the way of peace and for sinful humanity to be reconciled to its Creator.
Today it is most often known by its opening line, “On Christmas Night All Christians Sing.” Its words were first published by Luke Wadding, a 17th century Irish bishop, in a 1684 work called “Small Garland of Pious and Godly Songs.” It is unclear whether Wadding wrote the song or was recording an earlier composition. An earlier version than that of Vaughan Williams used a different tune and a variation on the first line, “On Christmas night true Christians sing.” It was published as early as 1878 in Henry Ramsden Bramley and John Stainer’s“Christmas Carols New and Old.”
The carol has been arranged by a number of composers. Vaughan Williams included the carol in his “Fantasia on Christmas Carols,” first performed at the 1912 “Three Choirs Festival” at Hereford Cathedral. Erik Routley’s arrangement in the 1961 “University Carol Book” adds a modal inflection to the setting. The carol often appears at the annual Christmas Eve King’s College “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” in Cambridge where it is performed in arrangements by either Sir David Willcocks or Philip Ledger, both former directors of music at the Cambridge chapel.
Through his composing, conducting, collecting, editing, and teaching, Ralph Vaughan Williams became the chief figure in the realm of English music and church music in the first half of the twentieth century. His education included instruction at the Royal College of Music in London and Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as additional studies in Berlin and Paris. During World War I he served in the army medical corps in France. Vaughan Williams taught music at the Royal College of Music (1920-1940), conducted the Bach Choir in London (1920-1927), and directed the Leith Hill Music Festival in Dorking (1905-1953).
A major influence in his life was the English folk song. A knowledgeable collector of folk songs, he was also a member of the Folksong Society and a supporter of the English Folk Dance Society. Vaughan Williams wrote various articles and books, including “National Music” (1935), and composed numerous arrangements of folk songs. Many of his compositions show the impact of folk rhythms and melodic modes. His original compositions cover nearly all musical genres, from orchestral symphonies and concertos to choral works, from songs to operas, and from chamber music to music for films. Vaughan Williams’s church music includes anthems; choral-orchestral works, such as “Magnificat” (1932), “Dona Nobis Pacem” (1936), and “Hodie” (1953); and hymn tune settings for organ. But most important to the history of hymnody, he was music editor of the most influential British hymnal at the beginning of the twentieth century, “The English Hymnal” (1906), and coeditor (with Martin Shaw) of “Songs of Praise” (1925, 1931) and the “Oxford Book of Carols” (1928).
Hymn writer and hymnologist Carl P. Daw, Jr. notes that the text of the carol contains little of the biblical narrative except the song of the angels from Luke 2:14. It has more to say about the interpretation and excitement of the angelic good news than with the coming and going of shepherds and Magi. At its heart the carol celebrates the theological implications of the incarnation rather than the circumstances of the Nativity itself. And the overwhelming theme of the carol is the joy that this news brings to the heart of the believer!
One of the unique features of this carol is the pattern of repeated phrases, best accentuated when it is sung with phrases alternating between unison and harmony.
Stanza 1 tells us that it is inevitable that all Christians will sing on Christmas night. This joy arising in our hearts will overflow in song, just as it did with the angels who could not contain their joy, but had to fill the heavens with their song of praise. And this “news of our merciful King’s birth” was not simply a publication of facts, but one which was expressed with “great joy” and “great mirth.”
On Christmas night all Christians sing to hear the news the angels bring;
On Christmas night all Christians sing to hear the news the angels bring:
News of great joy, news of great mirth, news of our merciful King’s birth.
Stanza 2 asks a rhetorical question, that arises from the reality of sadness that fills our lives from all the struggles within and around us that weight us down. Even though the effects of sin continue, we have been set free and granted liberty because of the redemption Jesus has brought. In comparison with our troubles, this glorious truth should make us very glad!
Then why should men on earth be sad, since our Redeemer made us glad;
Then why should men on earth be sad, since our Redeemer made us glad,
When from our sin He set us free, all for to gain our liberty.
Stanza 3 explains more of the reason such joy characterizes all Christians on Christmas night. It is that the marvelous grace of God has made sin depart, the sin that pollutes our thoughts and actions and attitudes and brings such misery into our lives, including the misery of embarrassment over the sins we continue to commit. In its place He has brought spiritual life and health.
When sin departs before Your grace, then life and health come in its place;
When sin departs before Your grace, then life and health come in its place;
Angels and men with joy may sing, all for to see our new-born King.
Stanza 4 opens to us the light that flooded the dark sky on that night outside of Bethlehem as the angels sang their “Gloria in Excelsis,” rejoicing that God has manifested His glory in such a powerful and eternally beneficial way.
All out of darkness we have light, which made the angels sing this night;
All out of darkness we have light, which made the angels sing this night:
“Glory to God and peace to men, now and forevermore. Amen.”
Here is a recording of the carol as sung by the choir at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, England.