On Christmas Night (The Sussex Carol)

On Christmas Night all christians sing (aka The Sussex Carol) Roud 597, NOBC 139: This joyous carol has a long back story that must be told straightaway. It first appeared in a chapbook of carols and poems, compiled by the Irish catholic Bishop Luke Wadding and printed in exile abroad in Ghent in Belgium in 1684. The full title of the book is A Smale Garland of Pious and Godly Songs, composed by a devout Man, For the Solace of his Freinds (sic) and neighbours in their afflictions.¹

Luke Wadding was born in 1628 in Ballycogley Castle, just outside Wexford in SE Ireland; he was the son of a wealthy merchant in a catholic but Royalist family of Old English descent. By that date many catholic families across Ireland had already had their estates confiscated by the English Crown and when the Irish Rebellion kicked off in October 1641,² it became increasingly difficult to be a catholic and still support a protestant King.

Following the execution of King Charles I in January 1649, Oliver Cromwell took 12,000 New Model Army troops over to Dublin to re-establish English authority. In October the siege and sack of Wexford took place. Luke’s father was one of nearly 2,000 people who died; the family’s lands and business were confiscated.

Two years later Luke, aged 23, escaped into exile to Paris, where he studied at the Irish college there, becoming a priest and doctor of divinity. He was in Paris for seventeen years until 1668, when he was appointed vicar general of the diocese of Ferns (which included the town of Wexford, 16 miles to the south). He moved back into Wexford town itself in 1671 after his promotion to ‘co-adjutor bishop’ (assistant and successor).³

Reaching across to influential protestant families there, he was able to rebuild his church until a ‘popish plot’, fabricated in London by Titus Oates in 1678, triggered a new round of persecution of catholics.⁴ Wadding was arrested and in danger of exile again. But the storm passed and Wadding was secretly consecrated as bishop of Ferns in late 1683 or early 1684.

Out of all this terrible turmoil, therefore, Wadding compiled his healing book of poems and carols to comfort his disinherited and suppressed flock. There were 9 poems, 19 songs and 12 christmas carols (words only) in the book, which was widely distributed, being reprinted in London in 1728 and 1731. It is not certain whether Wadding actually composed most or any of these carols, but he was musical enough to be specific about the tunes that should accompany his lyrics, suggesting a number of rare or forgotten Irish tunes.⁵ Unfortunately Wadding did not indicate the tune to which his ‘On Christmas Night’ carol should be sung! But his joyous carol calling all Christians to join together in celebration was clearly popular at the time. Here's his original printing...

       

However, although this carol is listed by Hone in 1823 as one of 89 carols ‘annually printed’, it yet made no appearance at all in five of the early carol collections (Gilbert, Sandys, Sylvester, Rimbault and Husk).⁶ But then it was picked up by Bramley & Stainer in their third series (1878) and matched to a new tune by Essex organist Arthur Henry Brown.⁷

In 4/4 time, Brown’s tune was rather complex and unmemorable; and it was no surprise that when Ralph Vaughan Williams came across a lively tune in 6/8 time from 49-year old folksinger Mrs Harriet Verrall at Monk’s Gate, near Horsham in Sussex in 1904, he seized upon it and that’s the tune we sing today.⁸

It was the third carol that Vaughan Williams incorporated in his Fantasia on Christmas Carols for baritone, chorus and orchestra, first performed at Hereford Cathedral in 1912.⁹ It was the second of his Eight Traditional carols published in 1919 (Stainer & Bell), but it only attracted the new title of The Sussex Carol in the first Oxford Book of Carols in 1928.

The carol was certainly not limited to the Sussex region, however, and had a life within folk circles from early in the 19th century. There were broadsides in London and in the Birmingham area.¹⁰ Sharp collected a variant from agricultural labourer William Bayliss at Buckland in Gloucestershire in 1909¹¹ and another from Thomas Lawley in Church Stretton in Shropshire in 1923. Lucy Broadwood had previously noted a tune in 1892 from a ‘Mr Grantham, a carter’ in Holmwood village, three miles north of her home in Capel, Surrey.¹²

There are similarities between Grantham’s tune and Mrs Verrall’s tune (the two locations are only 12 miles apart). Broadwood suggested that both tunes might have derived from the tune Hark Hark What News in Sandys book, but this was conjecture.

Interestingly, a further tune was noted in the 1905 Journal of the Folk Song Society (p126); this had been sent to Broadwood in 1904 by Dr James Cooksey Culwick, professor of music in Dublin. He wrote: ‘I have certainly not heard this for the past forty years. I have written it from memory of my mother’s singing.’ The first line was actually: ‘On Christmas night the joy-bells ring’, but otherwise it is the same song. Culwick noted the carol was sung by ‘Colliers in South Staffordshire’ (see below figure). Culwick’s father was a vicar choral at Lichfield cathedral and he himself was a chorister for a time there until he moved to Dublin in the 1860s, but his mother Rebecca hailed from South Staffordshire. Perhaps she was musical too and her carol tune was preserved within the family. She was born in 1816 at Coseley, just north of Dudley in the West Midlands.¹³ Rebecca was the daughter of a miner, John Cooksey, and no doubt as a girl Rebecca attended miners’ Christmas entertainments. This would put the date of this tune back into the 1830s at least.