The First Anglican Christmas Carol

Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year!  Here's a little subcast episode on poet Nahum Tate's "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks," the first Christmas carol sanctioned by the Anglican Church around the turn of the 18th century.

Recording: "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night"  THE B.B.C. CHORUS; Berkeley Mason Writer: Nahum Tate (Traditional Christmas Carol); (Text: (1696); Tune: "Winchester Old" 16th Cent.)

Transcript

Merry Christmas, everyone, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Subcast, that quirky little stream off the main river of the podcast in which we bathe and swim and fish for . . . I don’t know.  Not sure why I started on that metaphor.

Anyway, today, to mark the Christmas holiday, I’d like to give you a little stocking-stuffer of an episode.  Shakespeare would be the obvious go-to, yeah, since we’ve been rattling around with him for a while now.  There’s that nice little speech in Hamlet by Marcellus, after he and Horatio and the other guards have seen the ghost.  I like it because it’s not typically-Christmassy, or at least not to our modern ears.  There’s a medieval, almost primordial, feeling to it, one of threat and sanctuary:

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,

This bird of dawning singeth all night long;

And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,

The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

Or, there’s that line from the Dream. Titania notes the human need for the sanctuary that Marcellus desperately hopes for.  She says, “The human mortals want their winter cheer; No night is now with hymn or carol blest.”  

But let’s give Shakespeare the holiday off.  Let’s instead look at one of those carols Titania mentions.  I recently found out that there was only one 17th-century Christmas carol approved by Good King Billy himself – William III, House of Orange, if you’re counting – and the first officially recognized by the Church of England, and that is “While shepherds watched their flocks by night,” originally published as “Song of the Angels at the Nativity of our Blessed Saviour.”  There’s a quite interesting story attached to this.  Would you like to hear it? (yes!)  Are you sitting comfortably?  Then we’ll begin.

First, let’s have a listen to the song:

 While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
all seated on the ground,
an angel of the Lord came down,
and glory shone around.

 "Fear not," said he for mighty dread
had seized their troubled mind
"glad tidings of great joy I bring
to you and all mankind.

"To you, in David's town, this day
is born of David's line
a Savior, who is Christ the Lord;
and this shall be the sign:

"The heavenly babe you there shall find
to human view displayed,
all simply wrapped in swaddling clothes
and in a manger laid."

Thus spoke the angel. Suddenly
appeared a shining throng
of angels praising God, who thus
addressed their joyful song:

"All glory be to God on high,
and to the earth be peace;
to those on whom his favor rests
goodwill shall never cease."

The English word “carol” comes from the French “carole” which is a dance in a ring, or round dance, accompanied by a cheerful tune – the ultimate origin of the word may be the Latin choraula, meaning a dance to a flute, which in turn probably comes from a Greek word meaning the flute player itself.  Anyway, what we have is a peppy song that prompts a communal, popular dance, and these perhaps go back to the 7th century.  They were not tied to any particular holiday or festival originally.

We don’t do the ring-around-the-rosy dance much anymore and the word carol now restricts itself to Christmas hymns.  Frosty the Snowman, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are not carols – they are merely maddening.  But because of the form’s rather secular and carnivalesque roots, the stern guardians of Protestant moral rectitude sucked their lemons while standing athwart merriment and said, “Stop!”

Well, sort of.  Back in 1534, when Henry VIII divorced the Pope because he couldn’t divorce Catherine of Aragon and set up his own independent Church, many felt an opportunity had been missed.  Henry didn’t really do much in the way of theological, doctrinal, or liturgical reform – basically he made himself the boss.  The real lemon-suckers, whom we now call Puritans, believed that the Church needed a radical colonic flush, not a mere wipe, to fully rid itself of Catholicism’s pageantry, superstition, and avarice, which contradicted what they believed to be the Bible’s plain teaching Christian austerity.

Accordingly, even in the Anglican congregation, music was generally restricted to the communal singing of the Psalms – a book of poems in the Hebrew scriptures ascribed to King David.  A leader would “line out” the psalm and the congregation would repeat – the vocals were unaccompanied.  

But “While Shepherds” got the thumbs-up because, though not a psalm, it sets to music a metrical paraphrase of the Annunciation of the Shepherds, the story told in the Gospel of St. Luke, chapter 2, verses 8-14.  I take the text from the Authorized Version of the Bible, commonly known as the King James, as that is the rendering versified in the carol:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Irish-born English poet laureate Nahum Tate renders this passage poetically, at least in the first publication, in three 8-line stanzas, though it has been subsequently rendered in quatrains with alternating 4-foot and 3-foot lines, lines 2 and 4 rhyming perfectly.  In hymnody, this is called “common meter,” and allows for the lyrics to be sung to any number of tunes composed in what was called – wait for it – “common measure.”  Words and music were interchangeable and could be mixed and matched as suited a particular congregation’s tastes.  Suggestions included “Winchester Old” or “St James’ Tune.”  Another melody sometimes associated with this text comes from the aria “Non vi piacque ingiusti Dei” G.F. Handel’s  opera Siroe.  Mr. Handel, of course, graciously supplies the theme music for our main podcast episodes.

(Why, thank you!)

Anyway, the brief of the rhymester in such tasks is to render prose into poetry without adding or deleting anything from the source text.  Tate was an experienced scribbler, well known for his translations of Ovid and Juvenal and also for a revision of Shakespeare’s King Lear, giving that bleakest of all plays a happy ending!  More on that another time, perhaps.  The hymn was included in a supplement to a revised edition of the A New Version of the Psalms of David of 1696, which supplanted the "old version," titled The Whole Booke of Psalms, from 1562, nearly a century and a half earlier in the dawning years of Elizabeth’s reign.

However, Tate’s work on “While Shepherds,” when published in the year 1700, drew a bit of criticism for straying from the Biblical text a bit too much.  Alas, everyone’s a critic.  He responded that faithfulness to the text must be balanced with “elegance.”  Hymn scholar J.R. Watson praises the paraphrase’s narrative tastefulness and effectiveness, as it “carries the story with unobtrusive strength and a grand simplicity.” This method became quite influential in psalmody and began to loosen some of the strictures surrounding the composition of sacred music, giving the form a greater flexibility.  

So, there you go, Litterbugs. Mental stocking stuffed.  I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a happy new year.  Till next time . . . .