“Carols,” Nikiforos Lytras, 1872, oil on canvas
9 December 2024
Why do we call them Christmas carols? The word carol was introduced into English by the Normans and comes from the Old French carole. It shares a root with words like chorus and choir. But in what may be surprising to most, the first English carols were not just songs; they were also dances. After all, in ancient Greek drama the chorus both sang and danced, and Terpsichore, note the ending of the name, was the muse of dancing. Nor were early uses of the word associated particularly with Christmas.
Carol is first recorded in English use around 1300, and in these early citations it refers to a ring-dance. One of the earliest instances of the word is in the poem Kyng Alisaunder:
Mury is in June, and hote, verreyment,
Faire is carole of maide gent,
Bothe in halle, and eke in tent.
(It is merry in June, and hote, to be honest,
Fair is the carol of the noble maid,
Both in the hall, and also in the tent.)
Robert Mannyng’s devotional poem Handlyng Synne from 1303 records both the noun and verb in the sense of both singing and dancing:
Þese wommen ȝede and tolled here oute
wyþ hem to karolle þe cherche aboute.
Beune ordeyned here karollyng;
Gerlew endyted what þey shuld syng:
Þys ys þe karolle þat þey sunge,
As telleþ þe latyn tunge.
[A Latin version of the song follows.]
(These women went and enticed her out to carol with them about the church. Beune ordained their caroling; Gerlew wrote what they should sing: this is the carol that they sung, as told in the Latin tongue.)
General merrymaking was associated with carols from the beginning. The poem Cursor Mundi, also written about the same time, refers to:
Caroles, iolites, and plaies,
Ic haue be haldyn and ledde in ways,
Oþer men dedis oft i demyd,
þar-in my aun folis yemyd,
Poer and ald and men vnwyse
Til hethyng haue i driuen oft-sythes.
(I have engaged in and led in ways carols, jollities, and games; I did often deem that other men—poor and old and unwise men—took heed therein of my own folly until time and time again I have driven off the scorn.)
These early uses were not, however, particularly associated with Christmas. That association began in the early sixteenth century. Court financial records tell us that Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII, spent in December 1502:
It[e]m to Cornishe for setting of a carralle upon Cristmas day in reward . . . xiij s, iiij d.
And the early English printer Wynkyn de Worde published a book in 1521 titled Christmasse Carolles. Unfortunately, only an incomplete copy of this book survives, containing just two carols relating to hunting and bringing the game into the Christmas feast. So we don’t know what other Christmas songs might have been included. But over time, this association of carols with Christmas grew stronger, eventually driving out carols and caroling at other seasons.
The early use of the word to mean a ring dance also gives us another modern word, the library carrel. The use of carol to refer to a ring or enclosure also dates to the early fourteenth century. Robert Mannyng, whose Handlyng Synne is quoted above, also used the word in his Chronicle to refer to Stonehenge. And there are numerous medieval glosses of the Latin pluteus with the word carol. In classical Latin a pluteus is a shed or enclosure, particularly one used during a siege to protect the soldiers, but in medieval Latin had also come to refer to a monk’s work space (the medieval equivalent of the modern cubicle). We see the Latin carola used to refer to a monk’s “cubicle” in the thirteenth-century Customary of Saint Peter, Westminster:
De carolis vero in claustro habendis hanc consideracionem habere debent, quibus committitur claustri tutela, ut videlicet celerarius forinsecus aut intrinsecus, vel infirmarius, aut camerarius, seu alii fratres qui raro in claustro resident suas carolas in claustro non habeant; sed neque aliqui fratres, nisi in scribendo, vel illuminando, aut tantem notando communitati aut eciam sibimet ipsis proficere sciant.
(As for those having carols in the cloister, they must take into account this consideration, to whom the keeping of the cloister is committed, so that the external or internal steward, or the infirmary, or the chamberlain, or other brothers who rarely reside in the cloister, do not have their carols in the cloister; but neither do any of the brethren who know how to benefit the community, or even themselves, except in writing, or illuminating, or recording.)
This sense of the word starts appearing in English use in the late sixteenth century, making the shift from monasteries to libraries and universities by the end of the nineteenth century.
The corral for animals is also ultimately from the same Indo-European root, but that particular modern English word comes to us from Spanish America in the late sixteenth century.
Sources:
Christmasse Carolles. London: Wynken de Worde, 1521. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of Saint Augustine, Canterbury, and Saint Peter, Westminster, vol. 2 of 2. Edward Maunde Thompson, ed. London: Harrison and Sons for the Henry Bradshaw Society, 1904, 165. Archive.org.
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. carola, carolus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Furnivall, Frederick J., ed. Roberd of Brunnè’s Handlyng Synne. London: J. B. Nichols and Sons for the Roxburghe Club, 1862, lines 9041–46, 280. Archive.org.
Kyng Alisaunder. In Henry Weber, ed. Metrical Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries, vol. 1. Edinburgh: George Ramsay, 1810, lines 1844–46, 80. Archive.org.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. carole, n.
Morris, Richard, ed. Cursor Mundi, vol. 3 of 4. Early English Text Society. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1874–93, lines 28146–151, 1553. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
Nicolas, Nicholas Harris, ed. Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York: Wardrobe Accounts of Edward the Fourth. London: William Pickering, 1830, 83. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. carol, n., carrel, n.2., corral, n.
Image credit: Nikiforos Lytras, 1872. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.