Evolution of carols
By Shiv Darshanlal Sharma

A CAROL is a kind of song affiliated with dancing and associated with the season of the year, especially Christmas. Noel and Weihnachtslied are its equivalents in French and German, respectively. The word carol has not remained constant since the 14th century, when both the things and the name came into English social life. It has an affinity with the ballad, the hymn and the folk song, as well as with dancing. The church and drama have also played a part in its evolution. The setting up of the crib of the infant Saviour and the Holy family, said to have been initiated by St. Francis of Assisi to inculcate the doctrine of the incarnation, was an early occasion for the singing of carols both in the church and at home.

The great age of the English carol was the 15th century, but there is a nativity carol of about 1350 that has a burden, or refrain, as follows:

Hound by hound we schulle ous take.
And joye and blisse schulle we make.

Here is evidence of the round dance that gave the carol its original character as a dance song; and here is the recurrent burden that is a feature fundamental to a carol. The recurrent refrain fixed the form of the carol until the end of the Middle Ages. With the coming of the Reformation and the steady growth of Puritanism, the carols, which had ranged widely in subject — became more gloomy and began to decline. After the Commonwealth, however, Christmas festivities were revived and with them came back the singing of carols.

Carols were published on jumbo sheets (broadsides), in the later part of the 18th century. The first modern collections were those of D. Gilbert Some Ancient Christmas Carols (1822), and W. Sandy’s, Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833). With the concentration of the carols upon the nativity, the form became less rigid, although the refrain often survived, as a relic of the dance. An example is The Holy and the Ivy, carol in which many strains, pagan and Christian, are embedded. A definition for modern times was therefore, framed by Percy Dearmer (in The Oxford Book of Carols) as follows: Carols are songs with a religious impulse that are simple, hilarious, popular and modern. The word ‘modern’ expressed, for the ordinary man, the age in which people lived. This definition does not, however, significantly demarcate the carol from the Christmas hymn, such as O Come, All ye Faithful, which was a product of the 18th century. Carol singing is modern in a more literal sense.

At the time when Gilbert and Sandys produced their little collections, William Hone in his Ancient Mysteries Described (1822) predicted that carols were dying and in a few years would be heard no more. He spoke too soon, for out of the Oxford Movement grew a new sympathy with medieval piety, and one of the curiosities of the 20th century has been an emotion that finds in the Holy Babe, the rosa mystica, the Latin interjections of joy, something congenial, such as was absent from the Victorian ideal of Christmas, as presented for instance in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The modern revival dates from 1852 when J.M.N. Neale received the gift by a copy of Piae cantiones, a Swedish collection of 1582 A.D. In the following year he published Carols for Christ-mastide, set to ancient melodies by the Rev. T. Helmore, M.A.; the words principally in imitation of the original, by the Rev. J.M.N. Neale, D.D. The imitation was not always as close as it might have been Good King Wenceslas, which he took from Piae cantiones, was a spring carol, tempus adest floridum; and Christ was born on Christmas day, was fitted somewhat incongruously to the tune of In dulci jubilo.

Nevertheless, he started a movement for bringing back carols into church and home and open air that has steadily increased in momentum and range in England and the USA. The development of the Christmas services of lessons and carols, introduced by the first Bishop of Truror in 1880, was one of the movement’s important aspect.It was first used at King’s College, Cambridge in 1918 A.D. and in the following year modified to the form that, through broadcasting, became familiar in England. In spite of Puritan traditions, Scotland accepted Christmas carols.

The important collection of J.Stainer and H.R. Bramely Christmas Carols New and Old, had appeared in 1871 A.D. and in 1900 A.D. came the Cowley Carol Book, freshly inspired by a reversion to medieval mysticism. Several anthologies appeared in the subsequent six decades, enriched from still another source, the true folk carol, which was discovered in the folk-song revival that took place around 1900 A.D. The Oxford Book of Carols (1928 A.D.) compiled by Percy Dearmer, R. Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw, is comprehensive, in that it draws on all these sources and on foreign carols and also contains valuable historical notes.

Wassail songs, mumming songs, cumulative songs like The Twelve Days of Christmas belong not to Christmas but to the turn of the year. These are pagan and magical in origin, but these have made their way into the corpus of Christmas carols. Some attempts have been made to reintroduce Spring and Easter carols, but the popular imagination has firmly associated carols with Christmastide. Composers have compiled with the demand for new carols, so that in the 21st century as in the 15th the carol is a living and flourishing art.