When I first leafed through this book, I was delighted to see that the author had not fallen for the old clanger of purporting carole to be derived from kyrie; nor had he recycled ideas about rhythm propounded by misguided but influential writers such as John Stevens, or the equally problematic misuse of the word ‘burden’ by various of Stevens's predecessors and epigones. Had I written my review then and there, my mind unprejudiced (more or less in concord with Sydney Smith's dictum) by having read it, I would have done so with unalloyed enthusiasm, particularly as the book is comparatively slender.

As to the derivation of carole, there are many pages of Latin and Greek etymology, but Mullally's eventual conclusion is that it was a French dance (p. 101) and ultimately derived from the Greek choraulēs (p. 17), a word strangely presented in accentless Modern Greek capitals. How the oddly pendent aulete plays his part is not explained; also, it might be wondered who, in this post-Carolingian period, knew such obscure Greek at the time (apart from Arabic scholars, perhaps). Mullally dismisses the inherently more probable derivation from a Celtic word, cor, which besides being cognate, better fits connections with Breton and other sources such as the Anglo-Norman Wace (it is odd that the more recent edition of the Brut by Judith Weiss is passed over, and remiss of the author not to have consulted du Cange, who gives both Latin charolare and French charolles, for example, dispensing with the problematic piper but confirming the aspirate). Mullally makes much of the lack of distinction in the usage of some authors as to whether the carol, chorea or its congeners, was primarily a particular kind of dance, or lyric, or something with an often imprecise meaning (p. 20). Given today's use of the word ‘anthem’ to mean some paltry pop song and ‘horn’ to mean various jazz instruments, the obvious conclusion is Quot homines…. In any event, Graecising a more mundane word by dint of popular etymology is hardly a rare phenomenon: despite the redundant aulete in the word, some precious soul seems to have clothed a vulgar (Celtic?) word in Aegean dress, much as the Victorians liked to pass off ‘rime’ as being derived from rhythmos and ‘quire’ from choros.

Let us pause on the question of rhythm, for Mullally writes of the evidence of manuscripts notated ‘mensurally’ and that the system which they used was based on the ‘patterns known as modes’ (p. 80), properly a description of polyphonic music found in ecclesiastical sources, but whose rhythmic theories are the cart in regard to the horse of the manuscripts containing monodic song. He is seemingly embarrassed at having to refer to ‘mode 1 with upbeat’ (p. 83); needless to say, this had to be written as ‘mode 2’ in polyphonic notation, but gave no difficulty to secular songsters, who were unaware that late Greek metricians had confused such patterns as down-beat iambic with trochaic (a word here inexplicably spelt ‘trocaic’ throughout) which might commence (as with other rhythms) anacrustically. In his chapter on rhythm, Mullally heroically adds to the confusion which has grown up from the tares of the theoretical ‘modes’ (especially that most pernicious of weeds, the series of fictitious ‘melodic modes’) broadcast by medieval theorists. True, some monodic sources adapt polyphonic scribal methods using the ‘rhythmic modes’ of the theorists; many others use different forms of measured notation, often sui generis, such as the early use of doubled notes and of liquescents in a rhythmic denotation. Nevertheless, as many chansonniers show (and indeed the Alfonsine Cantigas which Mullally does not mention, thereby ignoring the picture of a ‘carole’ dance-formation in one of its manuscripts), the rhythmic modes were merely an epitome of diverse patterns which had long existed in the unrecorded vernacular repertory. Modesty precludes mentioning some extensive writings upon such subjects which apparently have not been seen by our author.

It is unfortunate that the work of Iona and Peter Opie, whose studies of the repertory of schoolchildren unfold one of the most important sources of the shadows of unwritten history, especially in their The Singing Game, is entirely ignored. Together with Mullally's failure to detect the significance of the Alfonsine Cantigas, this is an alarming oversight, especially as the Opies’ researches, both in the field and in their study of written sources untapped by Mullally, have much to do with the various problems concerning the carol and its related singing-dances. The difficulties which Mullally notes on his pp. 47, 66–7 and 115, regarding such phrases as ‘carol-wise’ and so forth, together with problems concerning the singing by the girls and the direction of the dance (the important word ‘widdershins’ seems not to be mentioned), are greatly illumined by the Opies.

Occasionally, however, Mullally dons the gown of more enlightened scholarship, as on p. 116, where he correctly upbraids Greene for mistaking the absence of various verse forms in surviving records as evidence of their existence in the tradition. Wisely, too, the ‘burden-refrain’ terminology of Greene is eschewed, but Mullally does not tell us why: the word does not mean ‘refrain’ until after Shakespearean times; and the insistence upon the initial position of the refrain by Greene and his followers is simplistic. Yet the argumentum ex silentio, for which Greene is rightly taken to task, is frequently assumed by Mullally (‘there is no evidence’ appears repeatedly). And when the phrase un fait avéré is boldly bandied about (p. 24), the natural reaction to such language (in both implications of the word) is flat disbelief.

Despite pondering on minutiae which are either already settled or not worth arguing about, Mullally is sometimes imprecise in matters such as the translations of words denoting instruments. A tambour is a drum unless proven otherwise (p. 94: ‘timbrel’ is what we would call a tambourine), a cornemusa (p. 105) might indeed be a bagpipe, but the word might signify several other reed instruments, often bereft of bag and (or) drone. There was no need for the trumpets to have fallen silent ‘before the dance began’ (p. 94: there is evidence that they could have taken part in the instrumentarium from time to time) and the saltier being translated as ‘harp’ begs a multitude of questions. If taken in the Anglo-Saxon sense, it might have been a lyre, which would correctly render the Hebrew kinnôr by coincidence (but not NBL=?nablu); yet the Septuagint and other Greek versions of the Bible are not so precise concerning the identity of the psalterion, so one cannot be too hard on the Latin translators or upon their vernacular dependents at the end of the carol-wise chain.

The discussion of the contrafaction ‘Peperit Virgo’, modelled on the Middle English ‘Maiden in the mor lay’ (printed in Appendix C), fails to mention Dobson and Harrison's bizarre forced marriage of this lyric to the tune of their bowdlerised ‘Brid one brere’ (the manuscript of which is in a rhythmical notation entirely misinterpreted by Dobson and Harrison, as were some of the pitches; moreover, its text had not been properly edited by them). Whichsoever of the malefactors of this miscegenation held the shotgun I do not know, but the results of this ill-assorted pair apparently blinding each other with their misbegotten fantasies have also done much to mislead the unwary, who rightly expect sensible editions of the precious remnants of such medieval English lyrics as survive with music, rather than a ghastly travesty of scholarship.

As with other so-called formes fixes, Mullally is only partly correct in implying that rondels, ballads and the like began a social climb from the bucolic couplings of the village green, upwards through the sophisticated courtly dance, via gentrified static songs, finally appearing to achieve the status of purely literary forms. But this is the orderly yet incomplete impression left by the sources. Why should Handlyng Synne forbid ‘Karolles, wrastlinges or somour games … Yn cherche oþer yn chercheзerd’ if the Dancers of Colbek were unique among the peasantry? And what about the important evidence of Gerlew in this poem, when he ‘endyted what þey shuld syng’? The irony of the history of the carol is that Christianity took over many a pagan site (in Welsh, llan, which as opposed to eglwys, does not necessarily mean ‘church’) – the territory of these dances; but the church also took the tunes of many of these lewd games and made contrafactions in the guise of Benedicamus substitutes (Harrison's brilliant suggestion, this time to his untainted credit). These paraliturgical additions to the daily round (including ‘liturgical dramas’) were especially popular at the Christmas season. Midwinter, a significant part of the pagan calendar, forced prelates to pander to its unwelcome memory by sanctioning the Feast of Fools, the junketings of the Boy Bishop, and other sops to an obviously tenacious tradition. So when we sing ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ (obviously Middle English in its riming, and clearly much older as to the sexual symbolism of its refrain) we behold that the ecclesiastical suppression of such charades was by no means an unmitigated success.

As a possibly frivolous addendum, might the tresche be the subject of a bad pun in a macaronic lyric beginning ‘A soun tres chere et special, fer ant ner and overal, in mundo’? Chaucer's Somonour ‘bare to hym a stiff burdoun’; his Foules likewise celebrated St Valentine's Day when they began to sing (to a French tune) their rondel ‘Now welcom somer’ (not high summer, of course); and the same English pun on ‘Nowell’ was employed by the anonymous lyricist of ‘Now wel may we myrthys make’, at the head of his first stanza after the refrain Letabundus. Although Mullally does not mention it, Greene's theory about the variable seasons applicable to what he called The Early English Carol was erroneous: all the Latin tags displayed by this type of carol relate to Christmas texts, or to those for (or arrogated to) Advent, the latter explaining the origin of his supposed ‘Passion Carol’. And the Franciscan Audelay, whom Mullally quotes, endorsed his carols as being for singing at Christmas, whatever their subject. But on the village green and in the playground, Maypoles and May-songs were sometimes mildly, sometimes overtly, sexual in nature. Their descendants survived in game-songs such as ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May’ (i.e. knots of May – posies of hawthorn flowers to be woven into the girls’ chaplets which their forebears hoped to cast into the mulberrry bush, together with their virginity). Such frolics are a far cry from the execrable ‘Ding dong merrily on high’, whose original tune was a lively brawl, but now, clothed in a parsonical parody of Mocke-Myddle-Englishe, is performed as though it were an effete slow-motion pillow-fight in some posh prep-school dormitory. For once, the ecclesiastical establishments, led by those of the misty and unhealthy Cherwell and of the murky insanitary Fens, seem to have won. Will folk tradition nevertheless fight back, and the children's games keep up these venerable, if now less venereal, customs? Or will the carol be the victim, as with much else, to pod and pop?