Three Carols from Old England

Along with their ten favourite pieces of music and a luxury, castaways on the B.B.C.’s programme Desert Island Discs are given three books: the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a volume of their choice.  Unlikely though it is that I will suffer that fate (either to be cast away on a desert island or to be interviewed on Radio 4), I have been thinking that my choice might be Sloane manuscript 2593, a collection of fifteenth-century English carols and poems held in the British Library.  A (smallish) digitised image can be seen here.

These manuscripts have preserved something quite precious of medieval England’s character.  Sacred lyrics are mixed with profane in the manuscript, which alone tells us something about faith and life in those days, but it is the carols that I find the most spine-tingling.  I think the best-known are Lullay, myn lyking, Adam lay ybounden and I sing of a maiden, which have each been set to music by various composers.  Not only the meaning of these three texts have survived, and their noteworthy Marian spirituality, but also (as I hear it) their mood, something altogether more fragile.  The lyricist sets off with a catechetical aim but succeeds in amazing himself with his own catechesis.  This amazement is expressed in a restrained, a mild — and dare I say even an English — way.  For instance, I find very moving this depiction of the Adam’s ‘happy fault’ in Adam lay ybounden:

Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never our ladie
Abeen heav’ne queen.

Or, in I sing of a mayden, there is the quiet awe of the line 

Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.

which leaves nothing else to be said.  With closing lines like this, the middle three verses can afford to be duplicates (but beautiful duplicates!) of each other.

Or there is the detail of the line ‘as clerkes finden written in their book’, an image which for the original listeners linked the everyday and familiar seamlessly to the song’s spiritual subject-matter, and which for us transmits a flicker of the flavour of their life and worship. (We marvel that clerics had to read Sacred Scripture on behalf of laypeople; these words were written by someone for whom this was normal).  As an Englishman, certainly as an English speaker, I cannot read them as a neutral observer or objective student: I feel I have inherited these carols in a certain way.  This only magnifies the flash of elation that comes with reading any good poem.  Centuries separate the England I know from the England that produced these words, but the feeling that that I know what they meant, or that I think exactly what they thought — which is also an assurance of the unchanging nature of the Christian faith — is, in my view, very precious indeed.

Here are some musical settings which to my mind have captured the words’ mood: Lullay, myn lyking — Richard Runciman Terry:

Adam lay ybounden — Philip Ledger:

or https://play.spotify.com/track/1hDflwTiGeSXvD2hHqLRii

I sing of a maiden —Patrick Hadley: