OT Advent Calendar Day 24: The Coventry Carol
Advent has always been my favorite time of year. Not only does it lead up to the festival of Christmas, but my birthday falls right around half way through. What’s more, I grew up in snowy Central New York—that’s the barren hinterlands of Upstate, for those in the city so nice they named it twice—and if I didn’t get a White Christmas, the Great Lakes were good for a storm around my birthday so there’d at least be a good beginning to the winter.
Advent is far from an untouched subject around these parts, so I’m clearly not alone.
Your OT Advent Calendar this year will be musical. We’ll talk about diamond-in-the-rough traditional tunes just waiting for renewed popularity, crimes against Christmas, the silly songs and the songs that have become modern traditions. We’ll also talk about the notion of true Christmas Carols, those which address the twelve days festival beginning on Christmas itself, including not just the one day-counting song but another.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Today’s tune is “The Coventry Carol.”
Another I’ve loved all my life, this and tomorrow’s song are lullabies. “The Coventry Carol” was the second of two songs included in a 16th century nativity play, The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors.
We are lucky to still have this song. Its lyric was written no later than March of 1534, perhaps by one Thomas Croo or Crowe. His writing of the lyric is debatable however, as it appears that his work with the plays of Coventry were often adaptations of preexisting material. The plays and their music was suppressed during the reformation, and we owe the survival of the song to the survival of Croo’s prompt book for the play.
The lyric is a treatment of the Massacre of the Innocents from St. Matthew’s Gospel.
The music is from no later than 1591, when it was added to Croo’s manuscript by one Thomas Mawdyke. Again, Mawdyke may or may not have written the tune, as it features elements that could be much older. We’ll likely never know. What I do know is that I’m a sucker for a Picardy Third.
Here’s a version by my fellow English teacher, Gordon Sumner Sting:
