Back to: The Twelve Days of Christmas Carols
When the Puritans came to power in England in the 1640s, the celebration of Christmas and singing carols was stopped. However, the carols survived as people still sang them in secret. Carols remained mainly unsung until Victorian times.
Before carol singing in public became popular, there were sometimes official carol singers called ‘Waits’. These were bands of people led by important local leaders (such as council leaders) who had the only power in the towns and villages to take money from the public. They were called ‘Waits’ because they only sang on Christmas Eve. (This was sometimes known as ‘watchnight’ or ‘waitnight’ because the shepherds were watching their sheep when the angels appeared to them).
Also, at this time, many orchestras and choirs were being set up in the cities of England and people wanted Christmas songs to sing, so carols once again became popular. Many new carols, such as ‘Good King Wenceslas’, were also written in the Victorian period.
Many of the carols sung today have their origins in the 19th Century Victorian period as Christmas celebrations expanded. Many drew on melodies from a century earlier.
The publication of Christmas music books in the 19th century helped to widen the popular appeal of carols. The first appearance in print of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”, “The First Noel”, “I Saw Three Ships” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” was in William Sandys’ 1833 collection Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern. Composers such as Arthur Sullivan helped to repopularize the carol, and it is this period that gave rise to such favorites as “Good King Wenceslas” and “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”, a New England carol written by Edmund H. Sears and Richard S. Willis.
The Oxford Book of Carols, first published in 1928 by Oxford University Press (OUP), was a notably successful collection; edited by the British composers Martin Shaw and Ralph Vaughan Williams, along with clergyman and author Percy Dearmer. This collection included various carols–medieval carols as well as Christmas songs from other countries–and therefore the term “carol” began to mean Christmas songs in a broader sense. It became a widely used source of carols among choirs and church congregations in Britain and remains in print today.
Carols were rarely sung in churches until the 1880s when EW Benson, Bishop of Truro (later Archbishop of Canterbury) drew up the format for the Nine Lessons and Carols service, which has remained in use ever since.