The first nowell   

The earliest written record of this hymn/carol is in a manuscript notebook written down in the first quarter of the 19th century.  It may have been sung, however, as early as the 14th century .  The manuscript, now in the Kresen Kernow (Cornwall Centre) archive in Redruth, Cornwall,  contains both the words and a form of the melody. It was either collected or, more probably, transcribed by John Hutchens, about whom almost nothing is known, although he may have been a singer of traditional songs.  Hutchens wrote the song down for Davies Gilbert (1767-1839), a Member of Parliament and President of the Royal Society; Gilbert printed the text, but not the music, in the second edition of his Some Ancient Christmas Carols (1823) without mentioning Hutchens.  The manuscript version has nine stanzas; in 1833 the antiquarian William Sandys (pronounced “sands”) published a version with nine stanzas but with some variations, and with a slightly different tune, in Christmas Carols Ancient & Modern.  He says that it is “For Christmas Day in the Morning.” Sandys collected in Cornwall, so he may have heard an alternative version.  The carol is actually for epiphany; although it begins with the annunciation to the shepherds (in one variation, three shepherds), most of the stanzas are about the three kings.  There is no star in the biblical account of the shepherds, but here it serves as a link between the angelic announcement and the journey of the magi.

 

We sing a version printed by Henry Bramley and John Stainer in Christmas Carols New and Old (1871), using the traditional melody with its somewhat odd thrice-repeated phrase in the first two lines and the opening of the refrain.  Some musicologists believe that the melody as we have it might originally have been a harmonic line for a lost melody.  Stainer’s harmonization is remarkable for the parallel thirds in the men’s voices in the refrain.

 

The word “nowell” is a Middle English spelling of the French noël, which is ultimately from Latin (dies) natalis, meaning “birthday.”  It came to mean “Christmas” in both French and English and then developed in specialized ways.   In Middle English “nowell” became a Christmastide greeting.  Chaucer uses it in this way in “The Franklin’s Tale,” and so does the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  It also appears in some Middle English lyric poems.  The word may have had some limited use with the meaning “Christmas song” in the 17th and 18th centuries.  In French, from the 17th century a specialized use of the word has referred to organ pieces improvised on Christmas melodies—often folk songs.  The publication of this hymn prompted a revival of use of the word in written English.