Hymns and Carols: Coventry Carol
On December 28th, the Church remembers the Massacre of the Holy Innocents: it is fitting then that this week’s addition to our series on Advent and Christmas carols is Dr Beatrice Groves’s piece on Coventry Carol. Dr Groves is Research Fellow and Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Oxford. Her books include Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 and, delightfully, Literary Allusion in Harry Potter.
This is a series on Advent and Christmas carols, but today we are looking at a carol that was originally written as a song to be performed as part of the celebrations of the summertime feast of Corpus Christi. In the medieval period in England, dramatic presentations of salvation history—usually spanning all time from Creation to Doomsday—were a major part of the way in which Corpus Christi was celebrated in many towns and cities. During the festival plays of episodes from the Old and New Testaments were performed on pageant wagons by the city guilds (the Plumbers putting on Noah’s Flood or the Cooks dramatizing the Harrowing of Hell, for example) and people from all over the country flocked to watch. The Coventry Corpus Christi plays were the most popular in Tudor England and the Coventry Carol was originally sung in the Shearmen and Taylors’ Nativity pageant. The Coventry guild of the Shearman and Taylors had been founded under Richard II ‘to the honour of Christs Nativity’ and its seal was the Virgin and Child adored by the three Kings. This devotion, alongside the natural link of ‘Shearmen’ (who worked woollen cloth) and shepherd suited this guild perfectly to perform the Nativity play. Although not originally performed at Christmas the Shearmen and Taylors’ pageant performs a perfect whistle-stop tour of the season. It begins with Isaiah prophesying the birth of Christ in words familiar from Advent readings, moving on to the Annunciation, the journey to Bethlehem, the angels’ message to the Shepherds, Herod and the three Kings, the Adoration of Shepherds, the Slaughter of the Innocents and the Flight into Egypt.
Representation of a Pageant Vehicle at the time of Performance. David Gee (1793-1872).
In 1579, due to pressure from Protestant authorities, ‘the padgins were layd downe.’ In hopes, however, that they might be taken up again Thomas Mawdycke wrote down three songs from the pageant in 1591, and in doing so he created the sole witness to this early Tudor song. This is his version, slightly different from the version usually sung today (the initial refrain would have been repeated throughout) [1]:
Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully lullay.O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day—
This poor youngling for whom we do sing
By-by, lully, lullay?Herod, the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.That woe is me, poor child for thee,
And ever mourn and say
For thy parting nether say nor sing
By by, lully, lullay.
The Coventry carol is sung near the end of the pageant by three mothers over their soon-to-be-slaughtered innocents. Like the two for the Shepherds in Mawdycke’s manuscript, the song is written for three voices (a tenor, a treble and a bass) suggesting that the Shepherds and the Mothers were doubled in performance.[2] The stage direction makes it clear that the three women sing this song as a lullaby to their own children: ‘Here the women cum in wythe there chyldur syngyng them, and Mare and Josoff goth awaey cleyne.’ In modern performance (sundered from its original context), however, this carol is always sung to Jesus. But this is not simply a modern mistaking. The Christ-child is made the direct subject of the carol when the three women address a single child (‘this poor youngling for whom we do sing’). When the women lament over ‘thy parting’ it makes sense that they are also addressing Jesus as he leaves simultaneously with their entrance: ‘Mare and Josoff goth awaey cleyne.’ The word ‘parting’ knits together a valedictory song to the Christ-child as the holy family flees to Egypt (familiar from Berlioz’s beautiful ‘The Shepherd’s Farewell’) with the final ‘parting’ of death which hangs over the other children in the scene. The synthesis is, of course, theologically appropriate as it underlines the early and brutal death which lies in the Christ-child’s own future.
In most medieval drama it would usually be Mary who sings a lullaby such as this, and the playwright’s choice to replace her with the mothers of Innocents is probably to bring Christ’s final ‘parting’ more closely to mind. The way in which the carol gestures to the Innocents and the Christ-child simultaneously performs the way in which they prefigure him. The fact that their mothers, even in this moment of crisis, mourn for Jesus alongside them gives distinct power to the traditional devotion that finds intimations of the cross hanging over the manger. These three lamenting women anticipate the three women who come to anoint Christ’s body. (And, indeed, the reference to these three women as sisters— ‘O sisters too;—may mirror the apocryphal tradition that the three women at the tomb were sisters.)
‘Herod, the king, in his raging’
This carol may be one of the most haunting and plangent of the season, but the pageant from which it comes is surprisingly humourous. The carol’s reference to the ‘raging’ of Herod recalls the most famously slap-stick aspect of the pageant: the pantomime-style over-acting of Herod. Alongside Herod there are many other burlesque episodes which use laughter to encapsulate to joyous spirt of the season. Herod’s messenger abuses the audience in French, ordering them to be silent in ludicrous Franglais - ‘je vos command dugard treytus sylance’ – in a speech that would surely have to united the audience in laughingly jeering, as a pantomime villain does today. There is humour, too, at Joseph’s expense in the Annunciation section of the pageant, as he is presented as a stock old man who believes he has been cuckolded by his young wife (humour underlined by direct audience address as he warns other men from making his mistake). There is even an attempt at humour immediately after the Coventry carol has been sung, with an odd tonal shift into burlesque as the mothers set upon the soldiers with their cooking implements: ‘I schall make his braynis addull,/ And here with my pott ladull/ With hym woll I fight.’ Earlier in the pageant there is the comic business of the Shepherds playing games with each other and the charm of their heart-felt, if inappropriately sized gifts for the Christ-child: ‘haue here my mittens to pytt on thi hondis;/ Othur treysure haue I non to present the with.’ A poignant moment that anticipates O. Henry’s ‘Gifts of the Magi’ as well as the conclusion of ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’.
The Coventry Herod’s raging was probably witnessed first-hand by a local lad who lived only fourteen miles away from Coventry and who was fifteen during Herod’s final performance in 1579. Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor causes Mistress Page to exclaim ‘what a Herod of Jewry is this!’ (2.1.19-21) - because his jigging verses, absurd boasts and sartorial excess recall the strutting, ranting Herod of the mystery plays. More famously, when Hamlet complains that over-acting ‘out-Herods Herod’ (3.2.14) we appear to be hearing Shakespeare’s own memory of Herod’s distractingly funny over-acting.
In both these examples Shakespeare’s linking of the biblical character of Herod with boisterous over-acting make it clear that he is remembering a theatrical performance of Herod. And Shakespeare has remembered something else from this pageant likewise: the sudden shift of tone from the burlesque attacks of the mothers on the soldiers to the terrible fact of the slaughter of their children. Shakespeare’s reference to the Slaughter of the Innocents in Henry V —‘mad mothers with their howls confused/ Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry’ (3.3.122-23)—derives less from scripture (which refers only to the single voice of Rachel mourning for her children) than from the communal grief staged in the Coventry cycle: ‘who hard eyuer soche a cry/ Of wemen that there chyldur haue lost.’ Indeed these specific echoes of both the comedy and horror of Coventry’s Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents do seem to suggest a possible influence of the Coventry mysteries on something far more fundamental to the nature of Shakespearean drama: the comic matrix of even his bleakest tragedies.
In the Shearmen and Taylor’s pageant Herod is the centre of the humour. When Herod discovers that the magi have tricked him, his words give stage directions for some outlandish over-acting ‘owt! owt! owtt!/… I stampe! I stare! I loke all abowtt!’ This is followed by one of my all-time favourite stage-directions: ‘Here Erode ragis in the pagond and in the street also.’ Herod’s rage is so furious, so comically over-blown, that it leads him to break the conventions of theatrical space, and come off the pageant wagon and set about the spectators in the street. Such an action is inherently funny, but it is also ‘comedic’ in the sense that it is usually the preserve of the explicitly comic characters (fools and clowns) to transgress theatrical bounds in this way. It also encapsulates the theological project of the mysteries – the idea of salvation history as performed not there, then, but here, now. In these pageants Christ’s life is played out on the streets of Coventry, enacted by local people – and nothing brings home the ‘presentness’ of the story like finding yourself actually getting hit over the head by Herod.
There is a serious theological point here: the point that the spectators are part of the action. All action in the mystery plays intentionally collapses the difference between the moment of salvation ‘then,’ in Palestine, and as happening now. It is always both/and: these plays operate in a fully realised liturgical time and this birth is happening now, and in Coventry. The Incarnation, and its celebration and re-enactment in the Mass, was the occasion of these plays as well as their central event. Early in the Coventry Weavers’ pageant, for example, an angel appears to Simeon at the Temple door telling him to prepare the Temple for the Lord’s arrival. Simeon hastens to make the Temple ready in precisely the ways – for example sweetening and decorating it with flowers and rushes – that the Coventry’s St Mary’s Cathedral would have been made ready for the entrance of the sacrament into it during the Corpus Christi procession.
O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day?
The evocative beauty of this carol is encapsulated in the single word ‘preserve.’ The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word from the 3rd century Latin praeservare ‘to keep, keep safe’ through the slightly later ‘to observe’ (5th century) to a shift (contemporaneous with the Coventry carol) to the modern sense of ‘to preserve.’ The carol unites these senses: how may the day be kept, observed and protected? The imminent danger that hangs over the Innocents gives additional force to the sense of preserve as ‘to keep alive; to keep from perishing;’ but the dominant sense is about the establishing and maintaining the holiness of Christmas: ‘to keep in its original or existing state; to make lasting; to maintain or keep alive (a memory, name, etc.).’ ‘Preserve’ also turns out to be an ironically apposite word for this carol, as its existence is owing solely to one person’s labour and love – both in 1591 when Thomas Mawdycke wrote out the original manuscript, without which the carol would have been lost, and then again in the nineteenth century, when the local antiquarian Thomas Sharp (1770-1841) transcribed it in his Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry (1825). Sharp’s interest in early drama drew ridicule and hostility in the early nineteenth century, but without him neither this carol, nor any of the the Shearmen and Taylor’s pageant would exist, for his publication is now the only copy after the original manuscript was destroyed in a library fire.
This is a carol about vulnerability. A vulnerability echoed in its manuscript’s future life as well as in a devotional performance that was not politically welcome in 1590s England (just as Jesus himself was politically unwelcome in first century Palestine). But primarily it is about the vulnerability of a baby. The tender, instinctual care of the three women for the Christ-child transfers onto to a cherishing of the day itself: ‘how may we do/ For to preserve this day?’ The feasts of Corpus Christi and Christmas – feasts of the body and the birth - are fused in the original setting of the carol. Christ’s body – as the community of the faithful, in the Eucharistic, as vulnerable baby - is cherished in observing the feast. The three women who gather round this baby prefigure the three women who come to the tomb: women who, like these women, respond to him with love. The Coventry Carol encapsulates the idea that this is the way to ‘preserve this day.’ This is how Christmas should be kept.
