The Carol in Anglo-Saxon Canterbury?

Summary

FOR MANY YEARS, I thought it very impressive that William Blake found a way to mention Paddington and Mount Zion in one poem. I now think John Caldwell achieved even more to get Beowulf and Arnold Bax into one book. Among the many qualities that make The Oxford History of English Music such an exceptional achievement for a single author, there is one that some readers might miss. The early pages of volume I stand almost alone, among musicological writings, for showing that the musical landscape of England before 1066 contains much more than just the Winchester Troper. They range over such matters as the performance of the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf (or rather, the rendition of the earlier lays that may have been redacted to make the surviving poem), the use of the lyre in aristocratic society, manuscripts of Latin verse by Prudentius, Boethius and others supplied with musical notation, and the question of ‘Roman’ chant in eighth-century Northumbria. This by no means exhausts the author's engagement with the earliest layers of musical experience that can legitimately be called ‘English’. It is a masterly synthesis and one that will surely stand for many years as the definitive account of the Anglo-Saxon musical scene, insofar as it can now be glimpsed. Any attempt to add to it is bound to seem presumptuous. Nonetheless, there is one text that has never received the attention it deserves, despite the shaft of light it may cast upon one of the most important musical forms of medieval England: the carol.

Richard Leighton Greene long ago demonstrated that the essence of a medieval English carol is not its subject matter but rather its metrical form. The poem must begin and end with a refrain or burden (B), and the burden must be sung between each verse (V) and at the end. Hence the carol form is essentially BVBVBV … B, according to the length of the poem. The texts of poems that evidently or seemingly take carol form are rare before the fourteenth century, and there are none amongst the modest but remarkable poetic legacy of Anglo-Saxon verse.