Tonight, being Christmas Eve, many will indeed be welcoming in Christmas and hopefully much joy, as captured in the jolly carol recorded by W.T. Stead as “A Christmas Song”: Now thrice welcome Christmas! Which brings…
The tale unfolding in verse today, centred upon Adam disobedience in plucking an apple from the tree, is preserved in just one manuscript. Happily, that manuscript is our old friend ms Sloane, and Wright has duly…
Though early modern students at St Andrews were expected to live beneath one college roof, and eat at a common table, the presbyterian tradition, and students and masters pleading poverty, precluded any great Christmas…
Today’s advent door opens onto winters of yesteryear spent in University Hall, the University of St Andrews’ first residence for women students. The records of the “Dinna Forget” club, an informal social group of…
“It is most remarkable”, declares an aghast J.R. Planché in his ‘Cyclopædia of costume’ (1876 – 1879, rf GT510.P5), “that these most graceful and effective ornaments appeared to have been utterly ignored by all races…
Reving up at the starting line of the whacky-carol races is this bawdy drinking song, titled simply “Old Norman Carol”. Included in the collection by W.T. Stead, the editor does not give us any further context for…
Taken from a late-fifteenth century book of hours, this beautiful illustration shows the annunciation, the scene recounted in the gospel of Luke when Mary is visited by an angel and told she would give birth to God…
For our next contender in the oddball category, we return, again, to the marvellous world of Sloane ms 2593, and its store of alternative carols. In this instance, that store should perhaps be a grain-store, for…
In Scotland, at least, ‘tis the season of all things wool – woolly sweaters, hats and gloves, to keep the chill at bay, and this carol, “The Shepheards song: a caroll or hymne for Christmas” (author Edmund Bolton,…
Today’s pick is another plucked from the basket of oddball carols. To the modern layperson’s ear, “Mary and the cherries” does not immediately conjure up any of well-known stories of the season. Donkey, oxen and manger…