CAROLES AND CAROLLING are so frequently referred to in literary texts and other records from the eleventh century to the sixteenth century that it is clear carolling was understood to be a universally shared cultural experience in Western Europe. It is, however, the very universality of that cultural experience that presents a problem to modern researchers. When a familiarity can be assumed, among contemporary readers, it is not necessary for a writer to describe the activity in detail. The “cultural assumption,” within any particular society, leaves a void in the record for the reader who lacks that shared knowledge. Medieval carolling is a case in point: it was apparently ubiquitous in practice, but it is rarely documented with clarity. There are no extant medieval manuscripts containing tunes or song texts that designate particular ones as caroles. Although carolling is mentioned, in passing, in many sources, it is very seldom described in detail regarding what steps were used or how many people took part, or how long it took. With the benefit of my background as a professional musician, historical dance specialist and qualified Dance Movement Psychotherapist, I take an inter-disciplinary approach to the medieval activity of carolling and explore what carolling may have meant to the people of late medieval Britain. By drawing together existing scholarship from the disciplines of Music, English, French or Anglo-Norman, Dance, Social History, and Cultural History, together with undertaking original research focussing on the activity of carolling, rather than just the written object of the carole text, I re-instate the symbiotic relationship of song, text, and dance within the communal culture of medieval Britain and shed new light on our understanding of the activity of carolling.

The seminal work on the extant texts of medieval English carols is by Richard Leighton Greene and, although it was published in 1935, it has only been added to, not superseded in subsequent scholarship. Greene’s collection, of necessity, covers the later medieval period from ca. 1400 to ca. 1550 as it relies on extant written or printed manuscript sources. My study begins with the earliest evidence of the activity of carolling in Britain, before the Norman Conquest, and long before any actual “carols” were recorded.