Welcome to English Folk Carols.com

12 Folk Carols: What is a folk-carol? Our selection criteria are:- that the carol has its own Roud index number as a 'folk song'; that it should be ‘Anonymous’ (in either tune or text) and passed on to us as ‘Traditional’; that there should be multiple variants of either text or tunes; and finally, that the carol is still cherished and popularly sung today (either by carollers or by folk artists).

Carols do come and go - William Hone, writing in 1823, listed 89 carols that were in printed circulation at the time, but today we sing only 5 or 6 of these.

Erik Routley, in his book The English Carol (1958, p43), wrote helpfully that a folk-carol is ‘sung first, written down later’ and that ‘it is what the people sing otherwise than when they are being instructed by the church or by the musically learned’.

Note: these carols are all in the New Oxford Book of Carols (NOBC, for short). A 'broadside' was a form of cheap printing (no tunes, just words), sold for a penny on city streets and at market fairs, mainly from the 17th century through to mid-19th century.