The Bizarre History Of Caroling

The end of the year means the holiday season, and that means a whole host of wholesome, comforting traditions. One of the most wholesome and comforting of those traditions is caroling, when a group of people gathers and goes out in public to sing. Now, people sing in public at other times, whether it's the crazy person on the subway who appears to be singing a tuneless song about the spaghetti monster, or an ambitious artist seeking some publicity, but caroling is special. Caroling is all about spreading cheer and joy, celebrating the season, and harkening back to a more innocent time.

It wasn't always like that. Caroling isn't a 19th-century invention, as some think. The origins of caroling — as well as some of the songs we still sing — go back thousands of years. The path that this form of music and social performance has taken from its earliest religious roots to its current secular practice is a long, twisting one. Along the way, caroling has been suppressed by the church, considered dangerous and banned outright, and contributed to a comeback for a little holiday known as Christmas. Once you know the bizarre history of caroling, you'll never view walking around your neighborhood singing something like "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" the same way again.

In modern times, caroling is firmly associated with the Christmas holiday. Cheerful carolers are an iconic part of the Christmas holiday even for non-Christians. Most of the people who head out into the cold to sing traditional tunes don't expect much in return.

But when caroling began, it was quite different. Back in the Middle Ages, there was a tradition called "wassailing." As Arcadia Publishing explains, wassail was derived from an Old Norse phrase ves heill, which loosely translates to "be well." Wassail was also the name of a traditional spiced drink not too different from our modern eggnog. As The Daily Meal notes, back in the days of feudal lords, the peasants who lived under the nobles' protection (but who didn't own the land they worked) lived pretty hard lives. It became a tradition for them to go and sing carols outside the lord's house, and receive hot cups of wassail and food in exchange.

While wassailing was done during the cold months (when the poor folks might need a few free drinks and plates of food to survive the winter), it wasn't associated with Christmas. In accordance with the old definition of wassail, the songs usually focused on wishing their lord good health and good news, which of course lines up well with the spirit of the modern holiday.

In the modern sense, the term "carol" simply indicates a traditional holiday-themed song that a group of people can sing. But the carol is a specific type of music that has undergone a lengthy evolution. In the earliest days of Christianity, most of the religious songs were borrowed from old pagan ceremonies. When the Church began creating its own music to counter that trend, it began the musical tradition that eventually became a specific type of music known as the carol.

As Liberty Park Music explains, the origins and history of the songs we know as carols are pretty complicated. In the 12th century or so, a form of music originated in France called a carole. This was a simple musical tune accompanied by a choreographed dance, marked by a repeated refrain. As the Middle Ages progressed, the dance portion got left behind (thank goodness), but the term became applied to a specific kind of song composed of a repeated refrain with stanzas in-between. These carols were also what's known as

"monophonic," meaning they had just one melody line. Here's an example of a medieval carol sung by a choir. As you can hear, it isn't exactly the jaunty holiday song we think of today when we think of caroling. Eventually, people began taking popular songs and changing the lyrics to celebrate Christmas, and the modern carol slowly took shape.

It's hard to believe today, but the Christmas carols that people sang throughout the centuries were usually not written down. When people in the Middle Ages would go from house to house during the cold weather, singing well-wishers in exchange for cups of a hot, spiced drink called wassail, they generally sang songs that had been taught to them by the older generations. And in church, the songs celebrating Christmas and other religious themes were usually in Latin, were quite boring, and had similarly been taught to them orally.

In the 13th century, people began changing the ribald words of popular wassailing songs to be more Christmas appropriate, and carols became very popular. But they still weren't written down, because most people weren't literate. As Arcadia Publishing notes, these carols were handed down orally through the generations until the late 16th century.

As author Ronald M. Clancy notes, in 1582, a man named Theodoricus Petri Rutha collected several old Latin songs into written form for the first time, in a book called the Piae Cantiones. The book contains the earliest written version of the all-time classic carol "Good King Wenceslas" and preserved the carols until their resurgence in popularity in the 19th century.

The 17th century was a weird time in England. The King was overthrown and beheaded in 1649, and a man named Oliver Cromwell ruled the empire as Lord Protector until his death in 1658 (at which point the monarchy was restored). Cromwell was part of the Puritan movement that sought to cleanse the church of its immoral trappings. As the BBC reports, Cromwell and the Puritans didn't just think celebrating Christmas was unnecessary. They thought it was sinful, a relic of the Catholic Church that only brought violence and immoral behavior. And the fact that carols were traditionally religious songs celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ didn't save them. The Puritans regarded all singing, even religious songs, to be immoral.

It might sound like the plot of a children's novel, but as HowStuffWorks notes Christmas was actually legally canceled by Parliament between 1649 and 1660. Caroling continued under Cromwell's regime, but it was forced to go underground and become secretive. The result was as intended: Even after Cromwell's death, Christmas celebrations were no longer as popular and common as they had been, and caroling fell out of fashion. As Slate says, for the next two centuries, caroling faded from popular memory and was rarely engaged in, at least publicly.

With the advent of print, the imprecision of oral traditions ended. In the modern day, once someone writes a song, the words and music are preserved and can always be reproduced exactly. But for centuries Christmas carols were oral traditions, passed down through time. As Country Life notes, they often started as songs about completely different subjects and had little to do with the church. Many carols were secular songs that had new words written for them in order to make them appropriate for religious celebrations around Christmas.

In fact, many carols were originally songs that had no words at all and often had words supplied centuries after their original composition. The music for the carol "Ding Dong Merrily On High" dates back to a 16th-century dancing manual written in French. The lyrics were written in the 1920s. As author Andrew Gant notes, the carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was originally a folk song about a dead ox; new words were added in the early 1900s and a classic carol was born. In 1855, the carol "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" was created by grafting lyrics onto a piece of music composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1840. In other words, a lot of our carols weren't originally intended as such — they sort of evolved into it.

Caroling is an iconic and classic symbol of the Christmas season. Whenever a Christmas film or TV show wants to set the scene for a holiday story, there will inevitably be carolers on the street. Often they're depicted dressed in Victorian outfits, but even if they skip the costumes, it's an instantly recognizable activity.

Unfortunately, caroling is definitely on the decline. As reported by Roanoke.com, a survey conducted by Pew research in 2013 found that just 16% of respondents went caroling. This is backed up by simple observation, as it's now very uncommon to walk down the street during the holiday season and see groups of people going from door to door, or even standing in one place, singing carols. What's remarkable is that 36% of the people surveyed said they had gone caroling as children, yet they had little desire to keep up the tradition even as other traditions continue — 79%, for example, said they planned to put up a Christmas tree.

The Sun-Sentinel reports that one theory explaining this decline is technology — specifically stereos and radios, and more recently MP3 players and streaming sites. In the days before these technologies, caroling was one of the few ways to get Christmas music in the air during the holidays. Now we can all just cue up our favorite performance of our favorite carols. There's simply no need for caroling anymore.