Happy Christmas! In this episode, we look at four wonderful Christmas carols that our Tudor friends would have known and loved.
Music Credits:
Boars Head Carol: The Boar’s Head Carol by TheBirdSings is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
All others: The chorus of U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own”, led by Colonel Thomas Rotondi, Jr. (Leader & Commander) and CSM Debra L. McGarity (Command Sergeant Major)
These works are in the public domain in the United States because they are work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Transcript: Tudor Christmas Carols
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being so much more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
It’s Christmas Eve, as I’m recording this Christmas Eve, and I know it’s such a weird time. It’s for many of you, you’re lonely, you’re by yourselves. Maybe some of you have lost people this year. I know that it’s not like other Christmases.
One of the things that has gotten me through times that were weird or sad, or just having me off kilter, was coming back to music. Music, the carols of Christmas are these familiar traditions that we come back to every year that grounds us in whatever faith we have, whatever traditions we have to come back to that, and wrap ourselves up in the warm familiarity, especially for me, of music. It makes things a little bit brighter, makes things a little brighter. So today, we’re going to listen to a couple of Christmas carols that our Tudor friends would have known and loved.
So one thing about Christmas carols is a lot of people think that they’re more Victorian, and they aren’t quite Victorian, many of them. But that’s because Christmas carols were banned during the Puritan period. Those gosh darn nasty Puritans closing theaters and banning singing and all of that kind of stuff.
So our Tudor friends actually celebrated Christmas in a really big way. They had lots of music and lots of singing. Then carols went away for 200 years or so thanks to those pesky Puritans. Then during the Victorian period, they came back when people started looking back and kind of romanticizing Christmas past and that’s when we start to get the rebirth of a number of the more famous carols that we know.
A lot of these carols people think that that they originated in the Victorian period, but that’s just because they came back during the Victorian period. So they were carols that our friends in the 16th century would have known.
– Boar’s Head Carol –
I’m going to start with one of the oldest Christmas carols which is the Boar’s Head Carol. The Boar’s Head Carol actually first appeared in a book of Christmasse Carolles printed in London, by Wynkyn de Worde in 1521.
It actually describes a very ancient tradition of sacrificing a boar and then presenting its head at the Yule feast. This very pagan ideas still goes back to the pagan rituals in England before the Christians came. Also it’s Norse, Danish, and the Anglo Saxons saw it as a sacrifice that was intended to ask Freyr to favor them in the new year.
So the boar’s head had an apple put in its mouth and then it was carried into the banqueting hall on a gold dish and trumpets would sound, and minstrels would play, and in comes this boar’s head which not sure that I would have enjoyed that so very much. But people got a kick out of it.
In both Scandinavia and England, Saint Stephen, began to inherit some of the legacy of Freyr and Saint Stephen’s day is the 26th of December. So Saint Stephen began to be a part of all of the yuletide celebrations that had previously been Freyr’s.
So the boar’s head then starts to take on a note of sacrifice, not sacrifice because that’s more pagan, but an offering to Saint Stephen as well. So this is a version that I found on SoundCloud by Lisa Goettel, California-based vocal facilitator and founder of Rise Up Singing classes and workshop experiences. So check her out if you’re in California and want to sing and enjoy the Boar’s Head Carol.
The boar’s head in hand bear I,
Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you, my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino
The boar’s head, as I understand,
Is the rarest dish in all this land,
Which thus bedeck’d with a gay garland
Let us servire cantico.
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino
Our steward hath provided this
In honour of the King of Bliss;
Which on this day to be servèd is
In Regimensi atrio.
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino
– Wassail Carol –
Next up wassailing – Here We Come A-wassailing. So the Wassail Carol dates from about the mid19th century, the one that we know “Here we come a-wassailing…” But the tradition of wassailing goes back to the 12th century in England.
What people would do is go from door-to-door like carol singing, and they would go bring cheer and be friendly, and have a lovely time partying with their neighbors. Almost like a pub crawl, but with your neighbors, right?
When you would show up at your neighbor’s house ready to sing and party and have fun, then they would give you back the communal wassail bowl, which would be mulled wine, spiced wine. So this whole tradition of going around from house to house, singing carols, and generally having a good time, and partying with your friends on a cold winter night. Sharing the communal wassail bowl is what people sing about in “Here We Come A-wassailing.”
So this particular song, like I said, the melody comes from the mid-19th century so the melody is Victorian, but people would have been singing a version of this song during the Tudor period and even before, because it does go back to the 12th century.
Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wand’ring
So fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year
And God send you a Happy New Year.
God bless the master of this house
Likewise the mistress too,
And all the little children
That round the table go.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year
And God send you a Happy New Year.
– Coventry Carol –
Perhaps the carol that had the most history that I’m particularly interested in is the Coventry Carol. The Coventry Carol comes from the 16th century. It was originally performed in Coventry in England, as part of one of the Coventry Mystery Plays. This particular one was The Pageant of the Shearmen and the Tailors.
So it talks about the Christmas story from chapter two in the Gospel of Matthew. It refers to the Massacre of the Innocents in which Herod ordered all the male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem to be killed. It sort of is the form of a very sad, very dark lullaby sung by the mothers of the doomed children.
The oldest known text of the Coventry Carol was written down by Robert Croo in 1534, and the oldest known setting of the melody dates from 1591. The mystery play itself was one of these kinds of traveling mystery plays that people would do, to tell the story of the gospel, to tell the story of Jesus.
The Coventry Mystery Plays were very famous, performed by the city guilds. We talked in the history of theater episodes that I did several years ago about these early traveling mystery plays and how they proceeded the Elizabethan Theatre, and they went away during the Reformation.
Now Robert Croo who wrote down the text in 1534, he was sort of the manager of the Mystery Plays. He often would play the part of God in the Draper’s Pageant, and he also would mend and make costumes and props as well.
During the mid-16th century, of course, the religious changes meant that the Mystery Plays went away. But Croo’s book where he wrote all of this stuff down did survive, and then it was probably published in 1817 by a Coventry antiquarian. This was really lucky because the original manuscript went on to the Birmingham Free Library, it was destroyed in a fire in 1879. So the translation by the antiquarian are the only sources we have left.
In the pageant itself, the carol is sung by three women of Bethlehem who enter on the stage with their children immediately after Joseph is warned by an angel to take his family and flee to Egypt. Now interestingly, the mystery play series was usually performed in the summer, so this wasn’t a Christmas carol per se, but it is a song that our Tudor friends would have known.
It became much more famous after being featured when the BBC’s Empire Broadcast at Christmas in 1940, it was right after the bombing of Coventry in World War II. The broadcast concluded with singing the carol in the bombed-out ruins of the cathedral which would have been very moving, I think.
The Coventry Carol has a really long really interesting history. It’s a very sort of dark song like I said, talking about these children being killed by Herod, but it’s a very beautiful song too, and it has a lot of history. So enjoy this version of the Coventry Carol.
Lully, lullah, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay”?
Lully, lullah, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.
Lully, lullah, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”
Lully, lullah, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
– Lo, how a rose e’er blooming –
Finally, we have “Lo, how a rose” which I think might be one of my favorite carols. There’s so many good carols, I can’t choose a favorite. Every year I try and think about a favorite like “In the bleak midwinter” is beautiful and “Once in Royal David’s City” and “Lo, how a rose” is always up there. But yeah I can’t pick a favorite.
Lo, how a rose in German Es ist ein Ros entsprungenin which literally means “it is a rose sprung up”. It actually is a German hymn translated to English and the text of course refers to the Virgin Mary, the spotless rose.
The text or the hymn itself first appeared in print in 1599. So it would have been quite new but then it is most commonly sung to a melody harmonized by the German composer Michael Praetorius in 1609.
The hymn was originally written with two verses expressing the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah foretelling the birth of Jesus. It emphasizes the genealogy of Jesus and the Christian messianic prophecies. It talks about a rose sprouting from the stem of the Tree of Jesse.
That links Jesus from Jesse of Bethlehem, who was the father of King David. The verse specifically from the book of Isaiah is: “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.” That’s Isaiah 11:1.
Now the poetry has been featured in Christian hymns since this 8th century, when Cosmas the Melodist wrote a hymn about the Virgin Mary flowering from the Root of Jesse. Then the text of the German hymn “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen” dates from the 15th century that’s anonymous.
Then its earliest source in a manuscript from the Carthusian Monastery of St. Alban in Trier. It’s thought to have been in use at the time of Martin Luther and then it appeared in print in the late 16th century in the Speyer Hymnbook.
Lo, how a rose e’er blooming,
From tender stem hath sprung.
Of Jesse’s lineage coming,
As men of old have sung;
It came, a flow’ret bright,
Amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.
Isaiah ’twas foretold it,
The Rose I have in mind,
With Mary we behold it,
The virgin mother kind;
To show God’s love aright,
She bore to men a Savior,
When half spent was the night.
Okay, my friends. There we have it for carols that our Tudor friends would have known and enjoyed and sung along to hopefully. So I will be back with a proper episode. I’m going to talk about the Tudor’s relationship with one of my favorite places on earth. If you know me, well, you know that one of my favorite places, perhaps my favorite place on Earth is not actually in England. I know it’s sacrilegious to say that. I’m so very sorry, England. I love you. But you are beaten out by Iceland.
So I’m gonna do an episode next on the Tudor relationships with Iceland because they had some. Isn’t that crazy? Again, I know it’s such a weird year. If you are lonely, if you are having a really miserable Christmas this year, I’m sorry. You know what? It’s okay. You don’t have to pretend to be having a happy Christmas. This Christmas really sucks for a lot of people.
I hope that you know we can fall back on these traditions that have kept us going through millennia. These rituals, welcoming the sunlight back. Because the sunlight is coming back now. The longest night is past. Hopefully, metaphorically, as well as in reality. If you haven’t gone out and looked to the Christmas star yet, I recommend you do that if you’re able to.
And the first time in 800 years, I think they said, this conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is visible at Christmas time. It’s the Christmas star. When I was looking at it, I was thinking about all of the people in the world who were looking at the star at that time, and all of the people. I call it a star it’s a planet, but the Christmas star, and all of the people throughout history who have looked in and wondered at it, and how we are all a part of something so much bigger than we can understand.
We’re all just part of something much bigger. Your story is part of my story, and my story is part of your story. We’re all linked together in this thread of humanity, in this beautiful quilt. I hope that if you have faith, you can lean on your faith this year. If you don’t have faith, that’s fine too. Hopefully, you can find some traditions or maybe start some new traditions to be able to get through this very, very strange Christmas.
So roll on 2021, right? Roll on, 2021! I’m thinking about you, I’m thinking about all of you. Thank you so much for listening to my show. Thank you so much for supporting me in all the many ways that you’ve had. And I will be back again very soon.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]