The First Noel: A Song History
“The First Nowell” is an English folk carol. Its earliest known copy is a manuscript that John Hutchens wrote out for Davies Gilbert around 1816–17, giving the melody and nine verses; it is now held at Kresen Kernow, Cornwall’s archive.[1] Gilbert printed the words only, without the tune, in the second edition (1823) of Some Ancient Christmas Carols.[1][2] He said his carols had been gathered in the West of England, and in his preface he explained “nowell” as a word of joy once shouted at festivals.[1] The tune was first printed in William Sandys’s Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern (1833).[1][2][3] Sandys had Cornish ancestry, and many of his carols came from the West Country.[2] He did not say where this one came from, though later writers often claim he collected it in Cornwall.[1]
Abraham de Bruyn, The Annunciation to the Shepherds, engraving, 1580–1600 (detail). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Sandys’s melody differs noticeably from the Hutchens manuscript.[1] A form close to today’s appears in Edward Rimbault’s A Little Book of Christmas Carols (1846), and John Stainer’s arrangement in Bramley and Stainer’s Christmas Carols New and Old gave the carol the version most people now sing.[2] The hymnologist Alan Luff, quoted by Hymnology Archive, praised Stainer’s upward movement in thirds in the first half of the refrain.[1] Sources date the collection’s first series to 1867 or 1868.[1][2][4] The often-repeated date of 1871 belongs to the second series and seems to stem from ambiguous wording in the preface to The Oxford Book of Carols (1928).[4] Stainer’s setting remains the standard harmonization.[3]
Where the tune came from is debated. Anne Gilchrist (1915), and later Erik Routley, suggested it began as a harmony or descant line to some other melody. The editors of The New Oxford Book of Carols (1992) dismissed the search for a missing parent tune. In their view the melody arose from an unconscious blending of parts, a common slip in country choirs whose singers learned their lines by ear.[1] Ralph Vaughan Williams worked the tune into several pieces, including his Fantasia on Christmas Carols (1912).[1]
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