IT IS ALWAYS dangerous to take the views of single witnesses as representative of a majority, yet that is how the understanding that the medieval Church was opposed to dancing in general and carolling in particular has been perpetuated. So let us review the evidence for when and where carolling was considered appropriate in medieval culture and examine the English Franciscans’ adoption of the carole genres of dance-song and lullaby in their song writing.

Vernacular song as an expression of piety and praise dates back to the very beginning of Franciscan practice in the Canticle of the Sun (Cantico delle creature) a hymn said to have been composed by St. Francis himself, ca. 1225. The lauda (pl. laude) a kind of strophic and devotional song in the vernacular was at the centre of Italian Franciscan devotion in non-liturgical contexts. In England, the Franciscans were particularly influential in the development of the carole, both religious and secular, and their approach to carolling is an important element in establishing the practice’s place in society.

Early Franciscan writers reflected a negative attitude to somatic manifestations of music, according with other evidence from ecclesiastical sources that has fostered prejudicial, often anti-feminist, readings by both medieval and modern commentators. However, the work of the Franciscans in the fifteenth century, in the heart of the community, led them to connect with the culture of the people, and dance, and dance-song, was for both men and women a fundamental part of entertainment culture. If ecclesiastical disapproval had been universal, it is difficult to understand how the carole became so embedded in fifteenth-century insular Franciscan culture that they adopted the dance-song and lullaby idioms, thus laying the foundation in England for the seasonal hymns that have been popular since the sixteenth century. In short, carolling was not universally condemned throughout the late Middle Ages and the inevitable association, by clerics, of carolling with a sinful life and the deflowering of virgins has been interpreted selectively by modern writers. Many of the condemnations were specific to particular times and places: the church or churchyard during services and on other occasions, such as during Sunday afternoon sermons, when the sacred and the secular competed directly for the people’s attention.

CAROLLING WAS FUNDAMENTALLY an orally transmitted cultural activity. Dance-songs, or caroles, existed within the context of the communal song culture of medieval society at all levels. Not only did caroles exist before any extant examples were written down, but many also circulated long after in a parallel oral culture, even within a predominantly literacy-dependant society. Just as music history is the history of the written record not of music itself, a carole recorded in a scene of carolling in a romance narrative is not the thing itself, just as a set of variations on Cotton Patch Rag published in a Bluegrass Fiddle Styles book is not Bluegrass Fiddling. Caroles have been brought to the attention of scholars by their presence in medieval literature and sermons, and by the later recording of texts as poems, but the originals belong to a song culture that accompanied many activities of daily living and has left virtually no trace. As early as the fourth century ce, St. John Chrysostom offers a summary of this widely acknowledged tradition:

Only fragments remain in a written record dating from the fourteenth century, distorted by the influence of the Church on book production and by the vagaries of the survival of any text from that period. The picture of the oral vernacular culture, portrayed by the written record, is as tantalizingly fleeting as the sparkle of a speck of gold in a prospector’s pan. The study of caroles and carolling needs to shake off the written tradition to bring this predominantly oral, secular song culture that existed throughout the Middle-Ages into a new focus. In this opening chapter, however, we take a swift overview of source texts relating to carolling, that evidence the existence of that oral culture and provide a context for understanding the relationship between oral and written cultures in a developing literate society.

IN THIS BOOK we have seen that medieval carolling was an activity enjoyed by people from all levels of society, from the highly educated clerics and most sophisticated courtiers down to the illiterate peasant. The carole form was flexible and adaptable, and singing or dancing ability were no criteria for, or against, communal participation, although the inventiveness of the lead singer and their ability to project in a clear, tuneful voice was considered necessary. Participation could be spontaneous, meaning that no rehearsal was required, and strangers could join in even though they were not part of a particular community. Some more complex song repertoire was developed among clerical communities and a shared repertoire probably existed in certain circumstances.

Let us turn now for the first time in research to explore the significance of circle dance formation from the perspective of Dance Movement Psychotherapy, using expertise in the praxis of leading improvised sessions as a background for the reconstruction of a carolling experience and the pastiche case study that will conclude this book. The urge to dance can be observed in infants as soon as they are able to stand, aided by support from an adult. It is an expression of self, of energy and emerging autonomy and a means of communication with the supporting adult. It usually takes the form of mirroring, espe-cially if the pair is holding hands and facing each other. It may comprise a bouncing action of the hands or a verbal expression, perhaps in the form of a nursery rhyme, thus creating dance-song. When this dyadic relationship is expanded to include firstly family and then a wider community the mirroring of movement and song also expands.

Building on this beginning, we observe that many ritual dances take a circular formation, the ring of dancers defining a sacred space. There may be a physical manifestation of the centre or focus of the inward facing circle, such as a fire or a person, or it may be that the focus of energy of the rotating circle defines the centre. Centroversion, this envisioning of the centre of the social group, through dance is an expression or an “act-ing out” of the cohesion of the group.

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.

I HAVE DANCED, on and off, since I was two years old and had some aspirations, until bassoon playing took over aged thirteen. When I needed some time out of the music profession, in 1995, I trained as a Dance Movement Psychotherapist and worked in that field for the next ten years. A group therapy session usually begins with the formation of an inward facing circle in which the members can acknowledge each other, and the leader (the therapist) can encourage some level of synchrony, to express empathy and cohesion. Later the circle may break up as the members are able to express themselves individually, the group being brought back to the circle at the close.

When I became a medievalist, I was struck by the resonances between this experience and the ancient activity of carolling. This book is a result of my fascination with this connection. I wish to thank Prof. Pamela King, who encouraged me to start this research and supervised my doctorate at the beginning, Prof. Emma Hornby who took over and saw me through, and Prof. Leah Tether who injected much needed enthusiasm towards the end. I also thank Prof. Christopher Page who generously gave me his research reference notes in a private email and assured me that he was happy for me to make use of them. I am grateful to Prof. King for working alongside me in reworking and rewriting the doctorate into a published monograph.

SCENES OF CAROLLING and references to the activity in courtly culture can be found in much of the literature of the late Middle Ages. The dependence of carolling upon the use of burdens or refrains, as already defined in the Introduction above, and the practice of including refrain material in literary works of the roman à chansons has also resulted in a large corpus of research in the field of refrain studies. Some of these studies have included the carole. However, because the focus of these scholars has also been predominantly on the romance literary sources, there has been an inevitable association of carolling with the idealized fictional world of courtly love and chivalry. Here we re-examine the record of courtly carolling in the context of a universal, though un-notated, medieval dance culture, for information about two main aspects of the practice. Firstly, when and why did carolling take place and secondly, how was it executed? We will review literary examples alongside accounts of carolling in chronicles and other pseudo-historical records to demonstrate that references to courtly carolling, as an activity, were not confined to romance narrative. As is well known, Francophile tastes continued to influence English court culture for the greater part of the four centuries after the Conquest in 1066, despite periods of enmity between the two countries. Hence there is a “striking absence” of English courtly love lyrics until the fifteenth century, and this lacuna in the written record applies equally to carole texts. The shared nature of the culture, therefore, leads us to French literary sources for information on insular courtly practices, including carolling.

The narratives of romans à chansons offer the most detailed descriptions of dance-song scenes. Although the songs are not always defined as caroles it is clear from the context that they represent the activity of carolling if, for example, the preceding narrative has introduced the idea with a phrase such as Ainz i sont si granz karoles. Jean Renart claimed that he was the first writer to include songs within a narrative, in Le Roman de la Rose ou Guillaume de Dole (ca. 1228), although other writers in the early thirteenth century, including Gautier de Coincy, were also exploring the genre that became known as roman à chanson.

WE HAVE SEEN in the foregoing chapters that medieval carolling was the activity of singing and dancing at the same time but that the two components appear to have taken separate lines of development in England after ca. 1500, according to the written record. It is possible that the combination of singing and dancing in dance-songs remained in oral culture far later, but the terms “carol” and “carolling” became attached to the seasonal song element alone. People continued to accompany their activities with songs, especially in the contexts of communal agricultural work, rowing, sailing and presumably dancing, in the absence of available musical instruments. However, the written record is fragmentary for the period from the sixteenth century until the interest in what came to be called “folk” culture blossomed in the nineteenth century. Recently, Robert Mullally has argued that the carole, as a medieval French dance, “went out of fashion about 1400.” Moreover, he continues, “The fact remains, however, that no obvious relationship is discernible between the carole as a dance and the carol as a burden-and-stanza form,” and that this English “lyric form,” though the name “carol” was applied to it, was unrelated to dancing. We have also seen, however, that there existed a more fluid and complex relationship between the French or Anglo-Norman use of the word carole, and the central position of the activity in insular British culture than his view allows. The emergence of the polyphonic carol, for example, as exemplified by The Agincourt Carol in 1415, represents just one, well documented, direction that the song element of carolling took during the fifteenth century. This is described by Lefferts as follows:

Certainly, singing and dancing followed separate paths of development in Britain, first in courtly culture and later in what might be referred to anachronistically as “folk” culture.

CAROLLING, AS WE are beginning to see, was primarily an orally transmitted culture and written records of carole texts represent a fragment of the repertoire in circulation during the late Middle Ages. The question to be asked, therefore, is not, “Why were so few caroles written down?” but “Why were particular caroles written down at all?” Let us now turn to some manuscripts that contain secular caroles compiled alongside religious caroles or other texts. Many of these caroles have been published in modern anthologies; so let us discover what can be learnt from the mise-en-page of these recorded caroles about their possible use, within the context of the manuscripts. Much can be gained from the small scraps of oblique evidence revealed by the inclusion of these texts and their compilation alongside content of differing registers, information not available when the same texts are anthologized by topic or chronologically. The four manuscripts studied here, examples of both individual and collaborative scribal practice, nuance this evidence in different ways. Mise-en-page as well as content of the texts reveal that even caroles written within the same manuscript or anthology may have been the result of a variety of compilational impulses: for example, non-religious material tends to be written, or at least begun, on the verso sides. We will also explore the correlation between conventional poetic scribal layouts and the culture in which the manuscripts were used or circulated.

No caroles are designated as such in the extant manuscript record. Texts of songs in carole form (a burden or refrain followed by stanzas) can be found within collections of songs or poems in other forms and also among prose material. In the manuscripts studied here, the songs are not separated by genre, so it is only in the self-referential context found in the “caroll” “Hay, ay, hay, ay, make we mery as we may,” and also in the religious lyrics of early fifteenth-century writer, John Audelay, that we can be sure of the appellation. Audelay’s twenty-five religious caroles are contained in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302, the final one containing the words: “I pray youe, seris, pur charyté, Redis this caral reverently.”

IF CAROLE TEXTS represent only a part of what was primarily an oral tradition, equally there are caroles which replicate that tradition but were always and only ever part of a clerical written tradition. Conventional “categories” of secular caroles are deployed by anthologists and commentators which we can apply to consider what themes and styles might have been widespread in the oral or improvised repertoire. We will take Kathleen Palti’s work on London, British Library, MS Sloane 2593 and its concordances, as a departure point in exploring the relationship between the secular clerical caroles in this and other manuscripts and that elusive and largely unwritten, culture.

It is important to recognize from the outset that themes and topics should not be taken too literally. For example, a song about Maytime might be sung all year round if it expresses universally appropriate sentiments, but a carole addressing a specific feast, such as the well-known Boar’s Head Carol, would be appropriate only for the mid-winter season. Possibly caroles attached to specific occasions were more likely to be written down, lest they were forgotten over the intervening year. On the other hand, Richard Kele’s Christmas Carolles Newely Inprynted includes songs that are not particularly Christmasy: possibly Christmas was just a particularly fruitful season for the invention of entertaining songs of all sorts, especially among clerical fraternities, for singing in halls and households. The question then arises whether the proliferation of manuscript evidence for this type of song, well suited for sedentary indoor delivery, arose from the clerical timetable, so need not reflect the balance of overall participation in carolling and dance-songs across the year. The performance of a complex narrative text depends on a good acoustic for its reception and would be less successful if the participants were dancing. Thus, the spring and summer repertoire, involving dancing outdoors, possibly remained solely in the oral repertoire. In short, winter caroles and those with complex narratives, are more likely to turn up in the manuscript record than caroles that could be sung all year round.

We have seen that secular caroles are found in predominantly religious manuscript collections and compilations.