The primary purpose of Henry V and the Earliest English Carols: 1413–1440 is to re-examine the carol repertoire in relation to the dating of its key sources. The title of David Fallows's book connects his material to the reign of Henry V (1413–22), but the chronological frame extends through the first two decades of that of Henry VI (first reign 1422–61), in alignment with the copying of key sources. The connection with Henry V is most important to Fallows's arguments. Throughout the book, Fallows builds his case for a strong and causal relationship between the political situation surrounding the English military victory at Agincourt in 1415 and the invigoration of the carol as a unique, vibrant and newly polyphonic song used in contexts that included court propaganda. Additionally, Fallows outlines a new chronology for the four main sources of the carol.

The book functions in tandem with Fallows's revision of the important volume of Musica Britannica entitled Mediaeval Carols, first edited by John Stevens in 1952. Both publications are valuable contributions to the scholarship on carols, as well as ones that build gratefully and explicitly on earlier work, notably that of Stevens and also of Richard L. Greene. It is Fallows's wish that his book might serve to stimulate further examination of carols, the justification for which is not only their interest as a repertory but also the central place that he argues they played in the history of European music. The opportunity to summarise and reappraise previous work on carols – a substantial if sometimes dated literature that the author scrutinises throughout – means that Fallows spends much of his book going back to first principles on questions of genre, terminology, style, form, metre and rhythm, and individual sources or pieces.

The terminology used to describe the song form itself, and its constituent parts, is appropriately discussed at length. None of the main manuscripts that contain this repertoire use the word ‘carol’ to describe their contents; in fact, only two poetic sources use the term ‘carol’ at all: John Audelay's poetry collection (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 302, c.1426) and Richard Hill's commonplace book, compiled in the early sixteenth century. The word ‘carol’ also appears in medieval literature as a metonym for ‘song’, and one fifteenth-century Latin dictionary describes a carol only as a song with an element of repetition.Footnote ¹ The wintertime court performances of ‘counductes of Krystmasse and caroles newe’ in the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (line 1655) provide evidence of carols as songs for Yuletide, but the word seems to have been selected equally for its alliterative potential, and though many carols take up a Nativity theme, others are not proper to the season.Footnote ² Even the distinguishing presence of one or two ‘burdens’, rather than a ‘chorus’, relies on a sixteenth-century term that essentially means chorus. There was no standardised term, and the more familiar ‘chorus’ and – in one source – ‘fote’ were used (Henry V, pp. 16–17). Although Fallows acknowledges that ‘burden’ was essentially ‘an invention of Greene’, he finds it convenient and useful in distinguishing burdens from refrain material within stanzas, not least since many carols carry both (p. 15). One problem of using the word ‘chorus’ is that it is used as a label for both types of repeated material across the four main sources (pp. 17–18); additionally, some scribes seem to have used ‘chorus’ with implications for performance practice – the invitation for a full chorus of singers to join the soloists performing each stanza, for example – rather than only to indicate structure. The modern reader benefits from Fallows's consistency of terminology, even though it is fairly clear from the sources that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century musicians used such words in less prescriptive ways. On such slim and often confusing evidence, one could imagine that the carol has been conveniently invented as part of nationalistic searching for an English song tradition of equal intellectual substance to the fixed-form songs of the trouvères. However, Fallows argues that in spite of the poor contemporary documentation of ‘carols’, the main sources betray a remarkable consistency of layout, poetic form and musical style, which together are more than sufficient to allay any fears of this kind. Following Stevens, Fallows also includes fully Latin-texted songs whose formal and stylistic features are indistinguishable from the vernacular or macaronic counterparts that were the limit of Greene's purview.Footnote ³ He further suggests that monophonic carols have ‘nothing at all to do’ with the four main manuscripts, and ‘are best kept apart from the polyphony (though their importance is prime)’ (p. 1).

The corpus of carols to have survived with musical notation has not changed very much since the 1950s. It is found within four larger collections, known as the Trinity carol roll (Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.3.58), the Selden manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian MS Arch. Selden B. 26), the Egerton manuscript (BL Egerton MS 3307) and the Ritson manuscript (BL Add. MS 5665). In addition, two smaller sources are part of this group: BL Add. MS 5666, c.1410, includes parts of four carols, and Bodleian MS Ashmole 1393, c.1420, includes just one carol and one polyphonic song. Fallows's analysis of these sources makes important adjustments for our understanding of their relationship with one another and with other insular song sources (notably the Old Hall manuscript, BL Add. MS 57950). His discussion also connects the repertoire to sources on the continent, some of which contain pieces that are of insular origin. The detailed scrutiny of composition and copying dates is perhaps the most significant contribution of the book, positioning the creation of most of the music found in the main sources in the reign of Henry V (with Ritson carols a decade or so later, during the 1430s), a time in which they may have caught the attention of continental musicians. Here, Fallows's view is an important departure from the inwardly facing notion of carols presented by Greene and Stevens, whose perspective Fallows argues was ‘quite wrong’ (p. 2).

Fallows argues compellingly for the carol's more central position in the history of music, from several perspectives. He connects the poetic form of the carol to those popular on the continent, such as the virelai and the cantiga, forms whose heritage were also rooted in oral, monophonic traditions, though the carol also includes some of the earliest examples of written, vernacular, sacred polyphony. He shows how the carol exploited fauxbourdon, and did so at an early date. His analysis of several carols builds the case that they were designed as part of the political propaganda at the court of earthly prince Henry rather than the being addressed primarily to Christ as Prince of Peace.Footnote ⁴ Provocatively, Fallows uses his earlier dating for much of the surviving polyphonic repertoire to argue that it was the carol that had the most profound influence on European music in the years associated with the notion of contenance angloise. He believes that composers such as John Dunstaple are likely well represented in the unattributed carols, though both the book and the edition note that there is too little evidence to consider I pray you all (one of whose sources carries the remark ‘quod J.d.’) as Dunstaple's work.

Perhaps in order to make such diverse topics accessible to the reader, the book is divided into twenty-six short chapters. The result is certainly manageable and focused sections, though in some places it feels that arguments have too little time to come to fruition before the next topic is introduced. The topic that forms Chapter 15 (‘Social Context, 2: Orality and the Polyphonic Carol’), for example, acknowledges that polyphonic carols were likely to have been performed in diverse institutions, and that their stylistic complexity argues against the role of improvisation. On the other hand, only two explanations are offered for the problematic nature of some written versions: either that the surviving copies present only a very limited picture of the breadth of early forms of polyphonic carols, or that ‘not all music-making at even the highest court of the realm was fastidiously written down in all its details’ (p. 110). It is hard to imagine who might argue to the contrary of either resolution, and in the end seven pages is inadequate to satisfy the further questions raised for the reader.

As a combined enterprise, the book and edition firm up our appreciation of the polyphonic form of English carols and their stylistic context. Similarly, the date of the Fayrfax book (BL Add. MS 5465, c.1502) is reflected in the ‘entirely different manner’ of its carols from those found in the big four, even though the musical form is held in common. Of topics that might be taken up by subsequent studies, performance seems an important one, whether in the fifteenth century or by later traditions. There is, perhaps surprisingly, relatively little in Fallows's book about the devotional context of carols, perhaps since he stresses their role at Henry's court but partly because the recorded evidence for carols in Christmas entertainments comes later than his chosen corpus. Nonetheless, most of the carols with music are by some means religious in ways that are not easily limited to liturgical use, and it would be interesting to consider these at greater length.

One of the ways in which Fallows's edition departs from Stevens's second edition (if not so differently from the first) is in his interpretation of how the various sections of a carol should be ordered, especially those carols with two burdens. This is achieved in the edition through the removal of those small structural diagrams from the main music pages, and the fuller consideration of structure in the endnotes (a performance order that now includes the first of any two burdens only at the very outset of the song, and which considerably alleviates tedium). The Musica Britannica volume has already undergone one revision: Stevens published his second edition (1958) with substantive improvements to aspects of rhythm and texts, in the light of criticism of the first edition from Manfred Bukofzer and Greene. As Fallows explains in his brief editorial note to this third edition, the present version offers an expanded textual commentary, but the main musical edition itself is largely unchanged; those familiar with the previous editions will recognise their layout, editorial conventions and modernised spelling. The decision to avoid a more wholesale change is one that sidesteps the risk of producing something that is only superficially different. That said, the commentaries in the rear of the volume are radically revised and much more user-friendly, and there are small-scale amendments to the musical or textual details of most pieces, changes that benefit from Fallows's deep appreciation of fifteenth-century song.

Resulting from the same careful reconsideration of the dating of key sources that Fallows outlines in his book, the edition carries an overhauled section on the sources, which adds to Stevens's six (here still grouped as the ‘main musical sources’) an additional group of thirty-one ‘secondary sources’. The secondary sources include those that carry only the text of a carol concordance, including the important lyric collection by Audelay, but some also include musical notation and polyphony. It is very useful to have these sources listed here with their relevant bibliography. Stevens's translations of the short Latin lines that punctuate vernacular carols are retained. One desideratum would be for a concordance to match these refrains with the most obvious place(s) in the liturgy that might have been in the minds of authors or singers. Although carols were not liturgical music, the use of a commonplace religious text such as ‘Ecce ancilla domini’ (‘Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord’), or ‘Res miranda’ (‘Marvellous thing’) was a part of the devotional connective tissue between liturgy and singer. The section of translations for carols entirely in Latin is generously updated, noting poetic structure, and producing more elegant translations than earlier editions in many places, including for the idiosyncratic polyphonic carol Comedentes convenite, which is addressed to women feasters.

The carols of medieval England are well served by these two projects, and Fallows's enthusiasm for their direct, expressive qualities, and for their place in communal singing, is consistently in evidence. Only a handful of these carols feature regularly in modern concert programmes, and it is possible that the rhythmic complexity of the style – perhaps in addition to Stevens's advocation of seemingly endless presentations of burden material – has discouraged singers from getting to know them better. Fallows remains pragmatic on matters of performance. His advice on fauxbourdon, which he shows has been widely misunderstood and should rightly derive from the tenor (mainly up a third, but up a fifth at cadences), has the potential to alter the sound of even the most familiar repertory. Perhaps we might take Fallows's note on the depressing fact that the carol's first revival was based on the ‘xenophobic Agincourt carol’ (p. 84) as a timely call to investigate this rich repertory afresh?