‘Lewd and immoral’: Inside the centuries-long war to sanitise Christmas carols Christmas carols have not always been considered harmless fun – far from it

If you ever got the giggles in school assembly because you changed the lyrics of ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night’ to “while shepherds washed their socks by night all watching ITV, the Angel of the Lord came down and switched to BBC” (or to a much ruder version) then you’ll know that carolling can be a deeply subversive act. And if you ever got into trouble for doing this, it might surprise you to learn that you were actually part of an ideological war to sanitise the Christmas carol that has been raging for hundreds of years – though your parents may have failed to appreciate the historical significance of your actions after being hauled into school for a ‘chat’.

What would Christmas be without a good sing-song? From Fairytale of New York to The First Noel, singing is an essential part of our Christmas festivities, and it always has been. But it has not always been thought of as a bit of harmless fun. In fact, it’s the ‘fun’ part of it that caused so much trouble. The Catholic church didn’t start celebrating Christmas on 25 December until AD 336, during the reign of the emperor Constantine. Many historians and theologians have argued that this date was chosen, not for religious reasons, but in an effort to subsume the much older pagan festivals that marked the winter solstice on 21 December. But stomping out the pagan piss-up proved to be extremely difficult for the Church – and given the number of revellers who still prefer to spend their Christmas Eve in a pub, rather than in a pew, it is a fight that has been largely unsuccessful.

Carolling has its roots in the early medieval Christmas tradition of wassailing. The word ‘wassail’ comes from the Anglo-Saxon greeting ‘Wæs þu hæl’, which means ‘be in good health’. The correct response to a hearty ‘Wæs þu hæl’ is ‘Drinc hæl’, which means ‘drink in health’. Wassailing involved people going door-to-door, singing very loudly, and demanding gifts in exchange for a drink of something hot and mulled (called a ‘wassail’), from the wassailing bowl. You can see echoes of this tradition in carols like ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas’ that demands gifts of figgy pudding alongside threats of trespassing on private property. Wassailing still takes place all over the country and is a very boozy, fun affair. What it absolutely is not is a pious reflection on the miracle of the nativity.

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In a fitting testament to our ancestor’s determination to have a knees up at Christmas, the earliest carol written in English says very little about religion and is basically a drinking song. This carol is Anglo-Norman and dates to the 13th century. The final verse runs thus: ‘Lords, by Christmas and the host,

Of this mansion hear my toast –

Drink it well –

Each must drain his cup of wine,

And I the first will toss off mine:

Thus I advise.

Here then I bid you all Wassail,

Cursed by he who will not say,

Drinkhail! May joy come from God above,

to all those who Christmas love’.

Our earliest carols are all about eating, drinking, and making merry. They speak to the very customs the church was trying to get rid of. Not only was the church unsuccessful in curtailing Christmas festivities, the celebrations became doubly offensive as they now took place during a time when we were supposed to be quietly praising the birth of Christ. It was a sacrilege keenly felt by Phillip Stubbes in 1580 when he wrote, “That more mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides, what masking and mumming, whereby robbery, whoredom, murder and what not is committed? What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used, more than in all the year besides, to the great dishonour of God and impoverishing of the realm”.

The Puritans famously tried to ban Christmas precisely because it was not solemn enough. In 1643, UK parliament passed an ordinance requiring citizens to observe Christmas day with “the more solemn humiliation because it may call to remembrance our sins, and the sins of our forefathers who have turned this Feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights’.

The public’s response to this is best summed up in the anonymous pamphlet, ‘The Vindication of Christmas’ (1653). Here, a very sad Father Christmas has been exiled for 12 long years because of “some over-curious hot zealous Brethren, who with a superbian predominance, did do what they could to keep Christmas day out of England”. Father Christmas explains why it’s so important to let people enjoy themselves, and crucially, his tale ends on a wish for people to sing Christmas songs again. ‘Lets dance and sing, and make good cheer, / For Christmas comes but once a year’.

Once the merry monarch Charles II was reinstated in 1660, Christmas could be celebrated again, but the problem of bawdy carolling persisted. Boisterous songs about beer, wine, and wassailing were as popular as ever but were hardly dignified reverence. In 1725, the Reverend Henry Bourne of Newcastle wrote that carols were a ‘disgrace’ and ‘generally done, in the midst of Rioting and Chambering, and Wantonness’. Carols were regarded as being rather trashy, lacking in artistic refinement and generally confined to the hoi polloi.

In his 1732 ‘The Excellency of Divine Musick’, Vicar Arthur Bedford considered what could be done to about the popularity of ‘lewd songs’. He concluded that “the only way to prevent this mischief is by the dispersing of pious hymns, and encouraging the singing of them in the same manner”.

The publication of religious-themed carols certainly offered people an alternative to ‘lewd songs’ but they were still shunned by the middle and upper class as an inferior art form and published in penny chapbooks and broadside ballads.

In 1822, Davies Gilbert published his highly influential ‘Some Ancient Christmas Carols, with the Tunes to which They were Formerly Sung in the West of England’ with the intention of bringing the carol to the upper classes. Gilbert presents carols as important historical artefacts and distances himself from those published in the penny press as being “written by superstitious and illiterate persons”. The collection was reviewed by the London Museum, who wrote that “Mr. Gilbert has taken advantage of old Time, and made safe, for some centuries at least, a record of our ancient Christmas Carols; and for this good deed has secured the gratitude of Antiquaries yet unborn. These Carols are genuine national curiosities.”

Gilbert had succeeded in making carols respectable. Suddenly, carols were viewed as important relics from our past, in need of preservation. In 1833, William Sandys published his ‘Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern’, a work that included ‘God Rest You Merry Gentlemen’, Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ and ‘The First Noel’. A wave of carol collections soon followed, all claiming to preserve ancient songs while simultaneously rejecting popular carols as, to quote writer and bookseller William Hone (1780-1842), being “deficient of interest to a refined ear” and lacking in “morality and good taste”.

These collections gave carols the gravitas they had lacked and raised them above the lewd drinking songs they had been associated with. The Victorians gave us the modern carol and its thanks to them that carolling now has an air of respectability. In fact, we owe much of our current Christmas traditions to the Victorians, who revived, rebranded, and sanitised medieval customs. The Christmas tree, the yule log, and, of course, carols, were all made popular again in the nineteenth century. They also invented the Christmas card, the Christmas cracker, and gave us ‘A Christmas Carol’.

Carols are now sung throughout the country at Christmas and are central to our festive celebrations. Carols are noble, reified, and holy – though, if you’ve ever been in a pub at 11pm on Christmas Eve when Fairytale of New York comes on, you’ll know we’re not quite ready to lose the drunken Christmas sing-song just yet.