Little Child There Is Yborn, A

DESCRIPTION: "This night there is a child born, That sprang out of Jesse's thorn." "Jesus is that child's name, And Mary mild is his dame, All our sorrow shall turn to game." "Three kings came with their presence." "Now kneel we down upon our knee."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1537 (Richard Hill MS., Balliol Coll. Oxf. 354, folio 165b)
KEYWORDS: religious nonballad Jesus childbirth MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (8 citations):
Greene-TheEarlyEnglishCarols, #35, pp. 24-25, "(no title)" (2 texts)
Rickert-AncientEnglishChristmasCarols, pp. 42-44 "A Little Child There Is Yborn" (2 texts, not clearly distinguished)
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics LXX, p. 132, "(no title)" (1 text)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #63, #3635
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #93, #5740
ADDITIONAL: Roman Dyboski, Songs, Carols, and Other Miscellaneous Poems from the Balliol Ms. 354, Richard Hill's Commonplace Book , Kegan Paul, 1907 (there are now multiple print-on-demand reprints), #59, p. 49, "(All this tyme this songe is best)" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSRichardHill}, The Richard Hill Manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354,page 484
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1393 (Bodleian 7589), folio 69
NOTES [145 words]: There are only two manuscript copies of this, which usually would not be enough reason for me to include it in the Index, even though one of them is the Richard Hill manuscript, which seems to contain several folk songs. (The other manuscript, Ashmole 1393, is a tiny fifteenth century volume combined from five originally separate booklets. It contains just four pieces of poetry, so we can't say much about its origin.)
However, the two versions are very, very different. They have different burdens. Each has at least one verse not in the other. Even the stanzas in common have very different words -- e.g. in one Jesus is born in an ass's stall, in the other, in an ox's. These are not the sorts of changes that are likely to occur due to a deliberate rewrite; they look like the result of oral tradition. So I have indexed the piece to let you decide for yourself. - RBW
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File: MSALCTIY

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