Gone Medieval - Origins of Carols

Episode Date: December 10, 2022

The Christmas carols we sing each year share roots in medieval church music. But as Matt Lewis finds out in this episode, carols were not just for Christmas but could be sung in different settings all your round.To find out the origins of carols, Matt talks to Micah Mackay, who is a doctoral candidate researching medieval carols at Balliol College, Oxford.This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.We've also been nominated for Best History Podcast and the Listener's Choice Award at the Signal Awards! We need your help though - it would mean so much to the whole Gone Medieval team if you followed this link to sign up and vote. Thank you!If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. If we think of carols today, we probably think of, oh come all ye faithful, deck the halls, hark the herald angels sing, or something like that. But carols have their roots in medieval church music. So how similar would they have been centuries ago to what we associate with this type of music today? To find out, I'm delighted to be joined by Mika Mackay, who is the Levehume and Deweeler doctoral scholar

at the publication before print doctoral centre researching medieval carol music at Baylor College in Oxford. Thank you very much for joining us. No worries at all. Delighted to be here. Fascinating subject to talk about, I think. Can we start off by talking a little bit about why music was important to the medieval church? Yeah, sure. So music was central to the church, both as. an accompaniment to the mass, but also as a sort of means of expression. If we think of music, we should also think of it as a sort of language, a way of expressing something that traverses language

in a sense. There are those that might not understand Latin, but certainly music can touch them in a different profound way. So when we think of the church experience, we shouldn't just think of the church music as religious, Latin, it, text, just being recited to song. We should think of it as something that's conveying a bigger message than itself, something that is really speaking to the laity as well, in a sort of profound sense. And so in a less literate world, was music an effective way to deliver a message to those who couldn't understand Latin, perhaps didn't understand the words of a service that was being delivered, but music was maybe a way that they could be involved and understand a message? Yes, I certainly think so. Music is something that, even if we don't

understand the words we can connect to it in some way. Even today, if you listen to a French song, perhaps, a French folk song or a French secular song, you could still get some sort of impact from it, even if you don't understand the language. I certainly have that experience when I listen to Afrikaans songs from South Africa where I'm from. I'm not very good with the language, but I still am affected by the music of it. So even though we might not understand what's going on in text, we can still have a sort of relationship with the music itself. And I think when we think of church, we often think of Latin, and many of the works I explore are actually in Middle English, the vernacular, and they have a connection to the church still through the Mendicant

orders, so the Dominicans, the Franciscans. And this use of the vernacular was basically to make the text more accessible, make the message more accessible. So there was that sort of thought process of how do we get these songs across to people, how do we make them understand them or how do we make them engage with the lyrics as well as the music. I think the whole idea of everything being in Latin, we really have to move ourselves away from that a little bit. And it's perhaps why some scholarship has struggled with engaging with the medieval carol in the actual medieval church space as well. Because we see it such a secular form, we don't really want to imagine it in the holy church space, but medieval conceptions of secular

and sacred were far different to our own. And the world's often collided and bled in into one another. It's very difficult to differentiate secular space from sacred space in a way. It's fascinating to think that the music and the carols could be similar to the art that we often forget was often on the walls of medieval churches, that this was a way of delivering messages packaged up in a way that medieval people could and would understand and have been able to relate to. Yeah. When the carol was disseminated throughout the sort of 15th century, mainly, that's when we start singing it in text for sure, but it was probably going around before then. The Franciscans played quite a big role in it. So we find carols in a lot of manuscripts

connect to the Franciscans. James Reiman, a Franciscan friar, wrote quite a lot of carols. And so we see this sort of importance within that Franciscan frame of thought, Dominican frame of thought, of being able to connect with the laity, of being able to get messages across, being able to connect with them through a song form that they would perhaps be more familiar with, a song form they could relate to one that wasn't entirely latinate or entirely complicated, one that could participate in as well in the sense. So you mentioned then that carols start to emerge at least in writing in the 15th century. What do we know about the history of a carol as a form? Were they always performed in a church? Do we know where they start to originate from? Presumably if they

start being written down, they may well have been in circulation before that, but how much do we know about that side of it. So what's really interesting about the medieval carol is that we start to see it appear in the 15th century in all these books in both musically notated books, and there are four primary manuscripts for that, the edited manuscript, Trinity Carol Roll, which is kept in Cambridge, the Selden Carol book, which is kept in Oxford, and the Ritson manuscript, which is in the British Library, and that's connected with Exeter Cathedral as well. So we see those four books containing musical notation and carols. We then see a lot of books containing just the lyrics of carols without any musical notation or very limited musical notation. And so before that, we have this

idea that the carol may have been transmitted primarily through oral tradition. So being passed down just by listening, hearing, engaging, repeating. And it is a sort of form that's very easily memorized in its most basic sense. Some of the polyphonic compositions may be a bit harder to memorize to modern performers perhaps, but medieval memory was something different. But in its most basic form, the carol was quite easy to memorize being made up of what's called a burden, so a short phrase to begin the carol, and then a series of verses, and after each verse, the burden is repeated. So it's got that sort of framework that is always tied back to this central idea that is repeated in the burden. And the burden often contains the most important phrase of the carol, as

essentially, the main idea, the main message we're trying to get across. It was very easy to imagine this form and these texts and these lyrics and this music being able to be transmitted through a oral tradition, being able to be passed down my word of mouth. And in the 15th century, certainly what I believe happened was the carol started to gain a more important place within the household chapels. So the prominent households within England and actually within Scotland as well, we see some carols up there too. But in the manuscripts that we see the polyphonic carols occurring, we can connect them through figures like Bishop Edmund Lacey, who was a bishop of

Hereford and then Bishop of Exeter, and a very close friend to Henry V. We can connect them to this courtly environment and this sort of travelling households who were able to exchange pieces, whose musicians were able to perform together to meet one another. And there's this whole culture that appears with caroling, where it's being transmitted in these circles. And that's perhaps why we find them more in the books of the 15th century, because these carols were occurring in an environment where they had the scribes and the musicians available to write these pieces down and where the carol was becoming a more important form within that environment. I'm going to show my ignorance here. What's the difference between polyphonic music and plain song?

Polyphonic literally means many voices. So it's set. Separate voices singing single melodic lines together at the same time. So we get a lot of it with the famous composers. You'll hear an even song, so Talis, people like that. And so, yeah, polyphonic music had its sort of heyday with the Notre Dame School of polyphony. And with the carol certainly, we see them take a polyphonic form here in the 15th century, particularly. Rigorian chant, playing song, was one voice. And so polyphony, if you will, has a...

I want to be careful here, for all the... of any scholars, but more enhanced texture with these individual melodic lines coming together. And so you mentioned then as well that a medieval carol was kind of made up of the burden and the verses, which sounds a bit like a chorus and a verse that we might expect to hear in a carol today. So how different would a medieval carol have sounded from one that we might listen to today? That's always a very interesting question because a lot of what we hear today is very Victorian-influenced. A lot of carols that are in your traditional Christmas Christmas. concert will have had a massive Victorian influence and won't necessarily have been for the medieval

period itself. We still have songs like Adam Leahy Bounden, which come up occasionally in performance, which have been transcribed by scholars over the years from the original manuscripts. But it's difficult to say with exact precision, certainty, whether the transcriptions were making of those medieval carols are sounding anything like they did centuries ago. But modern transcribers do give it their best shot. I try, at least. So a lot of what we hear today is made for that church environment. And with medieval carols, we have to move away from this idea of it being chained to the church or being chained to secular space. It existed in both. It existed in these different environments. And it was a form that was very versatile. So we have

medieval carols focused on the birth of Christ. We then have medieval carols, which are bawdy drinking songs. I think in Selden, we actually have a carol which initially looks. like a religious song. It starts off Verbo-Carran fact a Mest, but it's actually a drinking song, so it's disguised almost as a religious text. So they're hugely versatile, capable of being performed in vastly different spaces. But that's precisely why they were so good at reaching out to people, because they could occur in these different spaces. They could occur with these different texts on different subjects, because they were this versatile form. I definitely want to try and start a round of a medieval carol drinking song next time I'm down the pub and see

if I can get anyone to join in. Trust me, I tried. It's an interesting experience when you're in Oxford and you're in a pub with a couple of medievalists and you crack out a carol. Yeah, you get a few odd looks. Definitely worth it though. And so what do the Carol books that we have tell us about the performance of Carol? So who is performing them? If they're not always in a church, are the clergy involved? Do the laity also get involved? If they're sung away from the church, presumably they don't require the clergy. What do the books tell us about the ways in which they're performed and who was performing them? So we have a range of different books in which carols occur.

So if we look at the four polyphonic manuscripts of the 15th century, we have the Ritson manuscript, which, as I said, is in the British Library, and that's connected to Exeter Cathedral. It has composers which we know to have been performing in Exeter during the late 15th century. And so we know that was originating within a church kind of environment, or firstly in an environment in which the composers connected with the cathedral were present. We then have books, or rather, roles like the Trinity Carol roll, which is a massive, almost six foot, I think, or maybe over six foot, roll containing carols. And if you think of a role, you'd probably think it's actually a bit hard to perform from a six foot seven role, but probably possible. but that the design of it it's got quite a lot of red markings it looks quite nice like the edgerton manuscript which is also carroll book that is also quite nice looking

so we can imagine those two manuscripts occurring in a more affluent household-based environment so an aristocratic household maybe with its own chapel its own group of singers who were capable of performing these pieces and for whom this repertoire is important so we have these sort of different environments going on in which the carols are performed. We have non-notated carol books as well. Old style of thinking used to say that they were connected to wandering minstrels as if England was full of these wandering songsters going about and singing at people. But a lot of them, we can take a more informed guest now that they are possibly connected to institutions or certainly to musicians who are close to institutions like household chapels or the church. So yeah, there's this range of different environments going around. And range of different

people performing these songs. So you would normally with the polyphonic carols say that they were performed by highly trained musicians. Just because of the nature of the song, the difficulty of perhaps polyphonic performance and combining individual melodic lines just for an untrained musician. So you would normally put that in an environment where there was certainly a few skilled musicians rolling about who could perform and write these pieces. The sort of simpler carol form maybe that we find in the more non-notated manuscripts where we have the text written down and then just maybe a couple of notes here and there at the start. We could say was designed for a more informal gathering,

a gathering where one person perhaps just had to know the first few lines and the basic tune and would start the song off, and then everyone else would be like, oh, I know this song too, and be able to join in with the burden when it came along. Like your folk songs today. If you go to a folk gig, often the thing that you get to join in on is the chorus. And you hear a familiar lines, you're like, oh, I know that song, I know I can join you.

in here. I know where I'm expected to join in. I know where I'm expected to back off and let the musicians have the little moment. So we have different performance environments and we have different performers that we can tie these carols in with. So it's difficult to say for certain a lot of the time, who actively was out there performing these carols, but we can say that it was probably fairly highly trained musicians with the polyphonic carols. And it was probably people connected to households in which these carols were being performed, the aristocratic households and perhaps even lay households. You know, the carol is, as I said, so versatile.

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Is the reason that all of the Carol books that we have, that they're polyphonic, is that to do with the fact that they would have been created in these wealthier environments, whereas maybe the down the pub version of the Carol, which sounds an awful lot like me at the women's juries in the summer singing in the Chorus to Sweet Caroline, as loud as I possibly can. Is that likely to be more? of an oral tradition. So it's the reason that the surviving material is polyphonic because the wealthy people were having these books created to display their wealth and to have those in their

household. Yeah, I think with polyphonic performance, obviously you have singers and composers more highly trained available to you to be able to notate these songs and put them down in these books. And that's not to say they don't make mistakes. Gosh, my thesis is riddled with how composers and musicians make mistakes in the carols constantly. But yeah, you do have these books and they do indicate this slightly posher, more affluent household, where these highly trained musicians are. And it's interesting to look at them a lot of the time because in comparison to the choir books that we would associate with the 15th century, they are very different. So the choir books from households like the Duke of Clarenter's household, Duke of Bedbid household, are absolutely massive. They are basically constructed so that ensemble of singers can stand in front of them and all sing from the page together.

The Carol books, on the other hand, are actually quite small, the four we have, the four polyphonic ones we have. And that creates an interesting dilemma for the Carroll Scholar because then we say, oh, so wait, those books were huge and obviously being used in performance by this ensemble, and it's easy to imagine people standing in front of it and being able to sing from it. These books are tiny. How would people stand around it? and sing from it. So I'm still trying to work that one out, but my guess is that with carols, it's probably designed for a smaller ensemble. And it was also a repertoire that was designed for an ensemble already familiar with the songs and who were able to have a sort of reliance on their memory for some of the repertoire. And it's important to remember also with the performance

of polyphonic pieces and the whole idea of oral tradition that the polyphonic repertoire was capable of being memorized and performed. So medieval memory is a completely different thing to our modern understanding of memory, where we have a lot of technology around us, constantly reminding us of things. If we're forgetting something, put a remind on your phone, it buzzes, tells you you need to do this. Medieval memory was a sort of more highly trained thing, and Mary Kerruthers writes quite a lot about this. A medieval performer would have been able to memorize a lot of repertoire in a far more capable manner than we perhaps would now and would be able to bring that up far easier

than perhaps a modern performer. So we've got to remember those differences. In regards to oral tradition, there is indications of a monophonic form of the carol. And David Fellows has written about this a bit. We find traces of it going on here and there within manuscripts. And that is an earlier form of the carol, we think. So it's before it started emerging in its polyphonic life

and start taking on this greater complexity, perhaps. I was reluctant to say that because I always think songs are always more complex than they appear. So I don't want to just say polyphony is complex. Monophonic music is not because not the case. But we definitely associate the more monophonic traces of the carol with an earlier form of it. And we see the polyphonic forms of the carol as slightly later. And I guess the crunch question is, did carols always relate to Christmas? Has the function of a carol, our understanding of a carol, has that changed over time to become so associated with Christmas?

So I always feel like the grinch when this question comes up, because people are always like, is the carol for Christmas? And I'm like, no, it's not. I'm sorry if I'm a Christmas letdown on this podcast now. Yeah, the carol wasn't always for Christmas. The carol was for a variety of different purposes. It was for expressing the nativity, the joy over that. It was for celebrating as well. So we've got the boar's head carol, Deiagrazias, Anglia.

which was sung after Henry V's return from the Battle of Agincourt to welcome him back home, and we've got records that say it was welcomed back home to London with caroling. And so we've got carols for celebration with nothing to do particularly with Christmas. We then have carols for drinking, like the Verben Carver Factum Est from Selden. We have all these different types of carols, and they were on a range of different subjects. And Richard Leighton Green, who was actually known as the big voice within carols, He, 50 years ago, came up with this working definition of the carol, which is a song on any subject, provided with uniform standards and provided with a burden.

And that stayed the definition of the carol for a while. It's just been generally accepted if we see something with a burden, and verses, and the burden repeating after every verse, probably a carol. We have to remember also that is a modern inference upon carols. It's a modern conception of a definition that he's then placing on the carols. So it's not necessarily how the medieval audience would have thought of a carol. But he does, and this is something I agree with, define it as a song on any subject, not connected specifically at Christmas.

We do, and I'm trying to save the day here on the Christmas connection and not ruining everyone's idea of carols, get a stronger connection with Christmas towards the end of the 15th century. It starts to be more associated with themes of the nativity and things like that. So there is a fight back and a sort of closer connection with Christmas as we come to that period of time. And I do looking at those carols because it is quite nice to get a bit Christmassy sometimes and not have to remember that your entire repertoire has nothing to do with Christmas to begin with.

There you go. Important message though. Carrels aren't just for Christmas. They're for life. They are for life. And was the carol a purely English form? Is it something that emerges and develops in England? Or do we see similar things happening in other countries around Christendom? So this is where my research is right now, exploring the carol in a more international context. So 50 years, ago when Carroll's scholarship was really taking off. The Carol was seen as very much an English form. It adopted this sort of national identity within scholarship of saying this is a purely English musical form. It's ours. However, we do see similar forms occurring on the continent. Perhaps the most similar of these forms is the Lauda Balata, in my opinion. It's a largely vernacular structure.

It has a very similar structure to the carol with refrain that repeats throughout. So we see these similar forms and what's interesting is that forms like the Lauda are also connected to the Franciscans. Obviously they had a big influence on the Lauder and writing a lot of Lauder in the same way that the Carol we find connected to a lot of Franciscan manuscripts, a lot of Franciscan figures. So we see it in that sense and can suggest that these forms were occurring in a similar sort of environment and in a similar sort of set up where they were used by the Franciscan in order to impart messages, normally to the laity, and they were developing alongside each other, but also with each other. We really, I think, have to keep in mind that

the possibilities of travel and exchange are so huge within the medieval period. I think often, when we think of the medieval period, we think everyone was confined to just their county or to a long horse ride somewhere to a different county or to London. That's not the case. Whole households were travelling across the channel. There's this constant exchange back and forth. And with that comes musical exchange. And with that comes musical changes across genres, across forms. And so in that sense, we really have to think of the carol

as being within this international context and not purely an English form. And I guess as well, when it's so closely connected to orders like the Franciscans and the Dominicans, we forget that the church was a multinational corporation, you know, with offices and branches all around Europe. quite a modern idea, I think, to think of England being so disconnected from the continent, because the church particularly connected all of those things together. So if there was something happening musically here, there's no reason to expect it wouldn't be happening in other places too. Exactly. And when we look at some of the carols, particularly from the written manuscript,

actually, we see similar music material to composers such as Binshwa, Burgundian composers. And we're able to see a sort of connection between song forms going on on the continent and carols here. And it really emphasises that collaborative environment where things are constantly being exchanged, going across borders, and in a way we don't even want to conceptualise the idea of a border within the medieval period, because of this fluid exchange between places, between peoples, between musicians, cultures, and really, it is a far more complex picture than perhaps we give it credit for. And we really need to think about that in terms of circulation, in terms of how musical forms are developing and are constructed and are being composed. And I think we do need to give more credit. And I think we do need to

give more credit to this collaborative environment. And something like a Burgundian connection, I think, is interesting in the 15th century, particularly because you're talking about around the time of Henry V, when England is allied to Burgundy, we're fighting with them against the French. So there's no reason to think that we wouldn't be singing songs in pubs with Burgundian people and stealing bits of their music and they're stealing bits of ours. Yeah, of course. And when households travelled across to France, they also brought with them the musicians.

So the musicians weren't just left behind. They were actually quite an important part of that. well, I was found it quite funny, then we have records in which it was said that for the household chapels, it was given instructions that scouts were sent from these household chapels on the continent back to England to source the best choristers to bring back to the chapels. So they were almost in competition with each other. Oh, I have this compose, I have this musician. Who do you have? Oh, hold on, I'll just send a scout off to England to find some new talent, and then I'll have the best household chapel.

these aristocratic households who are indirect competition with each other in terms of music and that creates a really rich environment of creation and collaboration where they have exposure to the French side of things, the continental side of things, the exposure to the stuff going on in England

and these things collide and come together in really creative and new ways and I really like to think about the carol within that context rather than being solely on English soil and the product of England as such, even the word character is connected to a dance song and the sort of lineage of the carol is something very debated,

the most argued thing within Carroll studies. There is this connection to the French world of Carol, which is this dance song and is very similar in terms of etymology to the word Carol. I quite like the idea of the medieval music as a kind of early arms race. It's like going around your friend's house and he's got a new 60-inch Oled TV, so you go home and you want one. I want a bigger, better TV. Everyone wants bigger and better choir singing, bigger and better music to make them look good. Exactly, and that's why we've got some very fancy books, but we also have some not so fancy books from the less affluent households.

If you look at Edgerton Manuscript, Edgerton 3-0-7, it is a beautiful book. It has these really nice illuminations. It has lots of use of red and blue going on. It's very nicely copied. You then turn to the Written Maniscript. It's a bit rougher. There's still a little bit of decoration here and there,

particularly from the composers, Smurton Triloff. They write their name. and these sort of fancy styles all over their pieces. And they also have a little back and forth with each other throughout the manuscript, which is quite funny to look at. But it's much rougher. It's much less easy to read in some places than Edgerton, which is an absolute joy as a manuscript scholar

to open up and be like, oh, I can actually read this. It's actually quite neat. Transcription today is going to be amazing. I guess just to end on, can we still hear medieval carols being performed today? Do we encounter them by accident? or would we have to go looking for a medieval carol? So I think most people will have heard at least one medieval carol going on,

or at least a transcription of that medieval carol. I don't want to say an exact replica, because obviously it's very hard to produce something that sounds, as it did in the medieval period. And sometimes as a transcriber or a composer, we have to give a little bit of our best guess in some areas of what's going on. But stuff like Adam Leibandon is a medieval carol text, and that's sung in a lot of Christmas carol concerts.

It's very traditional. We also have, there is no rose. That's a carol that comes up quite a lot, particularly in even song performances. So King's College probably perform it every couple of years in their Christmas broadcast. That is given music by Yorbert in this most famous setting, which isn't a specifically medieval setting of it, but still the carol text is the same.

It's a really lovely text, probably my favourite carol text. But yeah, so we do have those elements of medieval carols within our performances today. But largely when you hear, I don't know, Joy to the World, stuff like that, you're listening to something far more Victorian, and there will still be the occasional medieval carol coming up. But it is the product of modern transcription, and we've got to remember that.

It won't sound exactly as it did in the medieval period. It won't be a note-by-note replica in most cases. It will be a modern transcriber doing their best to give a sense of what was. Well, thank you so much for that. It's been incredibly interesting to understand what carols are and where they come from. And I love the idea that we associate them so much with Christmas, but in fact, you know, their pub drinking songs, they're almost anything like that, you know.

I think that's absolutely fascinating. So thank you very much for sharing all of that with us. No problem. And I hope I've not ruined anyone's Christmas by giving them a completely different idea of the carol. I hope not to. But, I mean, it means we get carols all year round and that they're medieval as well. So everything looks good is medieval. Exactly.

A carol is not just for Christmas. Thank you very much for joining us today, Mika. No problem at all. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify. It really does help signposts new listeners to the podcast.

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