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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from [VerseNotes][vn]. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re talking about Coventry Carol.
[vn]:
Before we get into it, I should tell you, today’s carol is pretty heavy. Beautiful, but heavy.
If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.
This is a short song, always sung in this gorgeous, haunting three-part harmony, and most of us, including me, only pay attention to the “bye-bye, lully, lullay” part. Honestly, until today, I thought “bye-bye” was just nonsense syllables, not the actual words, “bye-bye.”
There are amazing arrangements by people like Loreena McKennitt and Pentatonix and giant choirs, and they all seem to lull us into ignoring the words. But the words are anything but gentle.
This carol is the lament of Bethlehem’s mothers during the Massacre of the Innocents. That’s the name for the moment when Herod killed all the male children in Bethlehem and anywhere near it, Matthew 2:16 spells it out quite starkly. He killed all the males under two years old, except Jesus.
And here’s the thing, the carol starts with this little tiny child, and I’ve always believed that that must be Jesus, because Jesus is the child of Christmas. But no, every child in this song dies. I’m sorry.
The carol is sung either after Herod’s order has been carried out, or in dreadful anticipation of it, depending on how the play the song comes from, is staged. But either way, there’s no escape. These families can’t flee. There’s no comfort. In the world of the song, their children will die.
And there’s no hope inside the text itself either. It ends in loneliness and despair and grief. This is one of the saddest songs in the entire Advent tradition.
The text says the mothers will ever mourn, never again singing their lullabies. There’s no tidy resolution. There’s no theological bow. There’s no swelling anthem or light-breaking major key change to remind us that Christ is Lord and light is coming.
Nope. It just ends with,
for thy parting, neither say nor sing. Bye-bye, lully lullay.
What?
Sometimes Christian art needs to let grief be grief. Remember that at Lazarus’s tomb, even knowing that he was about to bring him back to life in a few minutes, Jesus wept with his friends.
Paul, in Thessalonians, tells us to mourn with those who mourn. Grief, as I said, is allowed to be grief. [Note: I misspoke; this is Romans 12:15, not 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 as I was thinking.]
I’m not sure there’s much to say about this carol except that it is absolutely crushing. It’s short. And it’s sad. And I honestly considered not including it at all.
But here’s why I left it in. Scripture gives us hope outside the carol. We don’t have to remain within these words, and today I refuse to.
Revelation 21:4 tells us God will wipe away every tear. Paul in 2 Corinthians 1:20 tells us that Jesus is the yes to all of God’s promises. Romans 8:26 says that the Spirit groans with us when we have no words.
And these mothers have no words. Only lamentations.
Advent lets us hold grief and hope together, just like Easter weekend, without rushing either one. The darkness is real, but the light is coming.
For a moment, let’s leave that darkness and shift to the history. The text of Coventry Carol comes from the early 1500s, attributed to a guy named Robert Croo in 1534, a man who also played the role of God in the pageants where this carol appeared.
It comes from medieval mystery plays performed in Coventry, England, specifically one called “The Pageant of the Shearmen and the Tailors,” which I’ve never heard of, but it apparently retells the story of Matthew 2.
The song is sung by three women of Bethlehem, sometimes with children on the stage, which means that none of the familiar Christmas figures appear here. There’s no Mary, there’s no Jesus, no shepherds, no magi, no angels, just three unnamed women and their sorrow.
In 1817, a historian, really a Coventry nerd, named Thomas Sharp, published Croo’s script exactly as written, which turned out to be a really good thing because in 1879, all of the originals were destroyed in a fire, so Sharp’s copies are all we’ve got.
The melody was written many years later, 1591. Sharp also preserved that melody perfectly.
It’s called Coventry Carol because, you know, shocker, these mystery plays were performed in Coventry, England, and references to these plays go back to 1392, even though this carol only appears later.
And when the plays ended in the late 1500s due to religious suppression, the song wasn’t heard again, mostly, for hundreds of years. It only survived because of Sharp’s preservation.
So all of this raises the question, How did this lament of grief and horror and sadness and death become a Christmas carol? I mean, it’s kind of like I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day, right? It takes place at Christmas, but why are we listening to it?
In this case, fast forward to World War II. November 14th, 1940. The Germans bombed the city of Coventry all night long, into the morning of the 15th.
A few weeks later, the BBC’s Empire Christmas broadcast ends with Coventry Carol sung in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. And suddenly the story of the song, loss and grief and mothers mourning their children, came to life in the midst of that war. It felt suddenly real and modern and today.
And it was Christmas. And so it entered the Christmas canon, now carrying the weight of both Bethlehem and Coventry.
I said I almost left this one out, and I did. But it’s here because Advent isn’t only candles and coziness. Week one of this series has been about darkness and longing and looking for a light. Advent reminds us why we need a Savior.
That’s why this carol stays on the list.
And that’s why we sing.
Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out Advent Commons at versenotes.org/commons. And we’ll be back tomorrow with another carol of Christmas.
If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].
And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.