The “Coventry Carol” is an English Christmas carol dating from the 16th century. The carol was traditionally performed in Coventry as part of a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors originally performed by the city’s guilds. The play depicts the Christmas story from Matthew chapter 2: the carol itself refers to the Massacre of the Innocents, in which Herod ordered all male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem to be killed, and takes the form of a lullaby sung by mothers of the doomed children.
The music contains a well-known example of a Picardy third. The author is unknown; the oldest known text was written down by Robert Croo in 1534, and the oldest known setting of the melody dates from 1591. There are alternative, modern settings of the carol by Kenneth Leighton, Philip Stopford and Michael McGlynn.
The exact date of the text is unknown, though there are references to the Coventry guild pageants from 1392 onwards. The single surviving text of the carol and the pageant containing it was edited by one Robert Croo, who dated his manuscript 14 March 1534. Croo, or Crowe, acted for some years as the ‘manager’ of the city pageants. Over a twenty-year period, payments are recorded to him for playing the part of God in the Drapers’ Pageant, for making a hat for a “pharysye”, and for mending and making other costumes and props, as well as for supplying new dialogue and for copying out the Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant in a version which Croo described as “newly correcte”. Croo seems to have worked by adapting and editing older material, while adding his own rather ponderous and undistinguished verse.
Religious changes caused the plays’ suppression during the later 16th century, but Croo’s prompt book, including the songs, survived and a transcription was eventually published by the Coventry antiquarian Thomas Sharp in 1817 as part of his detailed study of the city’s mystery plays. Sharp published a second edition in 1825 which included the songs’ music. Both printings were intended to be a facsimile of Croo’s manuscript, copying both the orthography and layout; this proved fortunate as Croo’s original manuscript, which had passed into the collection of the Birmingham Free Library, was destroyed in a fire there in 1879. Sharp’s transcriptions are therefore the only source; Sharp had a reputation as a careful scholar, and his copying of the text of the women’s carol appears to be accurate.
Within the pageant, the carol is sung by three women of Bethlehem, who enter on stage with their children immediately after Joseph is warned by an angel to take his family to Egypt:
