I do like history, as the truth is always more fascinating and amazing than fiction. The Coventry Carol is a centuries old Christmas carol written to commemorate the death of the babes slaughtered by Herod in his hunt for the Messiah. It's also quite beautiful.
The Gospel According to
Matthew, Chapter 2, verses 16 -
18
"Then Herod, when he saw that
he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and
killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all the region who were two
years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise
men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
"A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they were no more."
The Fair Child Lullaby(“ ffayr chylde, lullay ”)
In The Pageant of the Shearmen and
Tailors, this gentle lullaby was
sung by the women of Bethlehem to their babies, urging them to "Be still, be
still, my little child," just before the unwilling soldiers of King Herod came
to slaughter their infants in Herod's attempt to eliminate a competitor, the
newborn King of the Jews. In the liturgical calendar, those children are
commemorated on December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents.
The beloved “Coventry Carol” has one of the most
unusual of histories. It was a song from the 16th-century Pageant of the
Shearmen and Taylors, one of only two plays to have survived from the cycle
of late medieval mystery plays of which Coventry played a part (the other was
the Weavers' Pageant). The Pageant has roots to perhaps the
14th century, to morality plays that tradesmen mounted far the
entertainment of their monarchs and town officials, making this one of the
oldest of carols.
The Pageant covered the Nativity story from the
Annunciation to the Massacre of the Innocents.
The original copy of the play was always kept in the
possession of the town council for safe keeping. When a copy was needed, the
copyist went to the town council, but was charged a hefty fee for the privilege.
The town council copy of the Coventry plays has been lost.
The oldest copy of the play that we have knowledge of
was the one that was re-edited by Robert Croo, then the mayor Master Palmer, on
March 14, 1534. That manuscript was destroyed in the fire at the Birmingham Free
Reference Library in 1879. Fortunately, however, the Coventry antiquarian Thomas
Sharp had preserved copies in two volumes. The first was the printing in 1817 of
only 12 copies “for the purpose of bringing it more immediately to the knowledge
of his antiquarian friends.”1 The second
edition was the publication by Merridew and Son of Sharp's Dissertation
of 1825; the full title was Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries
Anciently Performed at Coventry, by the Trading Companies of that City.
