What Child Is This?: A Song History

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The words are by William Chatterton Dix (1837–1898), a Bristol-born writer who, unlike most Victorian hymn authors, was a businessman rather than a clergyman; he is usually said to have managed a marine insurance company in Glasgow, though one biographer notes that he was living in England in 1871 and 1881.[1][2] He wrote the text around 1865.[2] It is often described as reworked from an earlier Dix poem, “The Manger Throne,”[1] but sources differ; one carol historian who set the two side by side found they share little in metre, theme or imagery.[3]

Gold-ground medieval painting of Mary and Joseph kneeling by the Christ child in a manger with the ox and donkey, angels singing above

Bartolo di Fredi, The Adoration of the Shepherds, tempera on poplar, gold ground, 1374. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Dix’s words appeared with “Greensleeves” in 1871, in Christmas Carols New and Old, edited by the Rev. Henry Ramsden Bramley and the composer John Stainer and published in London by Novello.[4] It is not known who first joined the words to the tune, though Stainer, who supplied the harmony, is a plausible candidate.[3] The Bramley & Stainer collection, aimed mainly at church choirs, stayed in use well into the twentieth century, and Stainer’s settings fixed the familiar versions of several folk carols that had circulated in variant forms.[5] “Greensleeves” is now the only tune sung to Dix’s words.[1]

The melody itself is far older. In September 1580 a ballad of the “Ladye Greene Sleeves,” billed as a new northern ditty, was entered in the Stationers’ Register, and Shakespeare mentions the tune twice in The Merry Wives of Windsor.[6][7] During the Civil War, Cavaliers set political ballads to it.[7] The popular story that Henry VIII wrote it for Anne Boleyn is best treated as legend: one carol historian calls the royal attribution a misconception,[3] and the tune is absent from the surviving manuscript of the king’s own compositions.[8]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "What Child Is This".
  2. Hymns and Carols of Christmas: "William Chatterton Dix".
  3. Hymns and Carols of Christmas: "What Child Is This - Version 1".
  4. Hymnary.org: "Christmas Carols New and Old: Series 1 and 2".
  5. Cambridge University Library Special Collections: "The Christmas Carol in Print".
  6. Wikisource (Grove, A Dictionary of Music and Musicians): "Greensleeves".
  7. Encyclopedia.com (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music): "Greensleeves".
  8. Classic FM: "Who was Greensleeves".