The Sussex Carol

On Christmas night all Christians sing,
To hear the news the angels bring.
On Christmas night all Christians sing,
To hear the news the angels bring.
News of great joy, news of great mirth,
News of our merciful King’s birth.

Then why should men on earth be sad
Since our Redeemer made us glad?
Then why should we on earth be sad
Since our Redeemer made us glad?
When from our sin He set us free,
All for to gain our liberty.

When sin departs before Your grace,
Then life and health come in its place.
When sin departs before Your grace,
Then life and health come in its place.
Angels and men with joy may sing,
All for to see the new-born King.

All out of darkness we have light
Which made the angels sing this night.
All out of darkness we have light
Which made the angels sing this night.
“Glory to God and peace to men,
Now and forevermore. Amen.”

The names of many of our most popular carols, as you will have noticed by now, are usually derived from the first line of the first verse; The Sussex Carol isn’t one of them however, and in that respect it’s more like The Coventry Carol and The Wexford Carol, by taking its name from the area in which it was found.

In the case of The Sussex Carol, its name came from the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams collecting folk tunes from the home counties south of London. Vaughan Williams’ tune Forest Green, which is now associated with O Little Town of Bethlehem, was collected by him in the village of that name in Surrey, and it was in Monks Gate in West Sussex that he met Mrs Harriet Verrall on 24 May 1904 where she sang him this carol, hence, The Sussex Carol. He didn’t call it Monks Gate, as you might expect, because he’d just given that name to another the tune Mrs Verrall had just sung – one that we now associate with John Bunyan’s To Be A Pilgrim (or He Who Would True Valiant Be.) If two such memorable tunes could be recalled by this one old lady in Sussex, it does make you wonder how many other unique tunes have been lost because we have had no record of them.

The actual carol itself was not unique to Sussex; Cecil Sharp, for example found another version of the carol with a different tune in Gloucestershire in 1911, and the carol had featured in an earlier collection of hymns and carols in 1878. It is likely to have been written around 1684 by Luke Wadding as it was included in a publication of his printed in that year. Wadding was an influential Irish scholar and priest who went on to work in the Vatican, and in papal conclaves he received votes to become the new Pope in both 1644 and 1655.

Of the various carols I’ve considered to date this seems to be only one I’ve discovered to have been written by a Catholic. The puritans had the reputation of famously attempting to abolish Christmas in the 1640s, considering it to be a pagan and vulgar distraction from the solemnity of the occasion, and the Anglican faith only tolerated the introduction of “secular” hymns rather than renditions of biblical texts after 1700, so the joyfulness of a song such as Wadding’s would have been considered as frivolous popery by Cromwell’s zealots.

“Carolling” was, after all) the practice of singing boisterous winter songs – often accompanied by copious draughts of ale and wine. Such behaviour may not have conformed to the expectations of a more sober clergy but the non-conformist churches recognised that the melodies were popular and that the joyfulness of the Christian message should be matched by the joyfulness of popular music. The methodists could be quite puritanical themselves in campaigning for temperance, but they were insistent in declaring that the devil shouldn’t have all the best tunes. Vaughan Williams and other collectors of folk tunes helped to ensure that they didn’t.

Merry Christmas

Header image: original manuscript by Ralph Vaughan Williams from JubalsLyre.com

Commemorative postage stamp of Luke Wadding issued in Ireland in 1957

Commemorative postage stamp of Ralph Vaughan Williams issued in UK in 1972

Footer image : Happy Snowmen by WallpapersWide.com