“If unmelodious was the song,
It was a hearty note and strong.”
Each succeeding year shows a falling-off in the number of houses where the practice is now admitted; and in many parts the carols are scarcely heard at all, people getting too refined, or—too good(?); the extreme west and north, and some of the manufacturing districts, being the most likely places to hear them, as they were, in former times, among the yeomanry of our land. The custom exists also in Ireland and Wales, there being many carols in the Welch language, some of which are of ancient date, and others recent; one David Jones, of Rhuddlan, having died about twenty years since, who for fifty-three successive years, sang at the church there, a new carol of his own composing every Christmas; a worthy poet laureat of his parish.
The practice of singing carols on the Continent is of ancient date. Crysostom, the unfortunate youth in Don Quixote, “was such a great man at composing couplets, that he made carols for Christmas Eve, and plays for the Lord’s Day, which were represented by the young men in our village; and every body said they were tip-top.”
The Spaniards, before their country got into so much confusion, used, in most respectable families, to set up a nacimiento, which was a rude imitation of rocks, with baby houses, &c., and clay figures, representing the Nativity, the Shepherds, the ox, and ass, kneeling to the Holy Infant, with Joseph and Mary in a ruinous stable. They had numerous collections of carols, and parties used to meet, dancing, reciting speeches, and singing carols to the sound of the zambomba, an instrument formed by stretching a piece of parchment, slightly covered with wax, over the mouth of an earthen jar, with a slender reed fixed in the centre, from which a sound was produced something like the tambourine, when rubbed by the finger. The only refreshments were Christmas cakes, called oxaldres, and sweet wines, and home-made liquors.
In France, the custom of carol singing was of very early date, and there are many collections of them, including several in the patois, or provincial dialect. They are called noël, or nouel, and sometimes nuel, derived evidently from the same source, as novell or nowell, used in some of our old carols, and references to Christmas, as in Chaucer, for instance.
“Janus sit by the fuyr with double berd,
And drynketh of his bugle horn the wyn;
Biforn him stont the braun of toskid swyn,
And nowel crieth every lusty man.”
The term is, however, sometimes used in the sense of news or tidings. Some writers have derived it from natalis, as signifying a cry of joy at Christmas, but this seems a doubtful etymology. It may have the same origin as yule, or gule, but it was not absolutely confined to Christmas time, though it was probably borrowed from its use then. It was frequently used as a sort of burden to carols. In a carol, or hymn, by Herrade de Landsberg, Abbess of Hohenbourg, as early as the twelfth century, saluting the holy “crêche,” or manger, she sings,
“Leto leta concio
Cinoël resonat tripudio,
Cinoël hoc in natalitio,
Cinoël, cinoël,
Noël, noël, noël,
Noël, noël, noël, noël, &c.”
In Normandy it is called nuel. In Burgundy the people pronounce noé for noël. A priest at Dijon, wishing to avoid this error, fell into the opposite extreme, and in one of his discourses repeated three or four times, “l’Arche de noël, et le patriarche Noé.” The Poitevins write nau; and in la vielle Bible des noëls, is found “chanter no.” Rabelais talks of “les beaulx et joyeulx noelz, en langaige poitevin,” and quotes the two last lines of the following commencement of one sung in Poitou, within the last twenty years, if not still.