Coventry Carol: A Song History

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The "Coventry Carol" comes from the Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, one of the plays Coventry's craft guilds staged after the city's Corpus Christi procession[1]. Of those plays, only this one and the Weavers' pageant are known in any detail[1]. The Shearmen and Tailors dedicated their pageant to the Nativity and worked the Massacre of the Innocents into it, and the carol belongs to the mothers of Bethlehem, who sing it while trying to keep their infants quiet[1]. The Traditional Ballad Index calls the song both a lullaby and a lament, and places the play in the fourteenth or fifteenth century[2].

Sixteenth-century painting of the Virgin Mary cradling the infant Jesus before a landscape with a distant castle

Master of the Female Half-Lengths, Virgin and Child, oil on wood, ca. 1525–50. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its mother and child; it has no connection to the carol.

A colophon dated 14 March 1534 records that Robert Croo had newly corrected the pageant's text[3]. After it comes a note assigning the pageant's three songs: the shepherds have the first and last, and the women the middle one[3]. The note bears Thomas Mawdycke's name and the date 13 May 1591[3]. Thomas Sharp published the pageant in 1825 in his Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry, and the book prints the songs after the play[4][5]. The Royal Academy's catalogue record for a copy lists leaves of music at pages 115 to 118[6]. The manuscripts Sharp had used later passed, by way of the Staunton collection, to Birmingham's Free Reference Library, and a fire there in 1879 destroyed them[3][4]. The Ballad Index notes that this leaves the text dependent on transcriptions printed in 1817 and 1825[2], and Hardin Craig's 1902 edition of the pageant was itself re-edited from Sharp's[3]. Citing Robbins, the Ballad Index also observes that the three-part setting carries the tune in the top voice rather than in the tenor, the usual fifteenth-century place, so it may be a sixteenth-century rearrangement rather than what was sung in the play[2].

The Ballad Index doubts the carol is a folk song in the strict sense, though it allows that modern popularity may have made it one, and it lists the song in the Oxford Book of Carols and other standard collections[2]. Hymnary.org finds its tune, COVENTRY CAROL, in 33 hymnals, dating the melody to the fifteenth century in some entries and to 1591 in others[7]. On 26 April 1939 in New York, John Jacob Niles recorded "Lulle Lullay (The Coventry Carol)" for Victor as a vocal with dulcimer, billed on the label as a "Mountaineer tenor"[8].

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Sources

  1. The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry: "Archives Blog: Coventry Carol".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Coventry Carol, The".
  3. Internet Archive: Hardin Craig, ed., "Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays" (Early English Text Society, 1902).
  4. Lancaster University (Pamela M. King): "The Coventry Plays".
  5. Internet Archive: Thomas Sharp, "A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry" (1825).
  6. Royal Academy of Arts: "A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently performed at Coventry" (catalogue record).
  7. Hymnary.org: "COVENTRY CAROL" (tune).
  8. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UC Santa Barbara): "Victor matrix BS-036814. Lulle lullay (The Coventry carol) / John Jacob Niles".