Babe Is Born All of a May, A

DESCRIPTION: "A babe is born all of a may, To bring salvation unto us, To him we sing both night and day, Veni creator spiritus." The babe was born in Bethlehem. The three kings came from the east; the shepherds visited; the angels sang
AUTHOR: John Audelay the blind? (see NOTES)
EARLIEST DATE: before 1537 (Hill MS., Balliol Coll. Oxf. 354)
KEYWORDS: religious nonballad mother children MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN: Britain(England)
REFERENCES (10 citations):
Greene-TheEarlyEnglishCarols, #122, pp. 77-79, "(no title)" (3 texts)
Rickert-AncientEnglishChristmasCarols, pp. 52-53, "Conditor alme siderum" (1 text)
Dearmer/VaughnWilliams/Shaw-OxfordBookOfCarols 116, "A Babe is Born" (1 text, 1 tune)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #20; compare #3526
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #3
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), #18, p. 10, "Conditor alme siderum, eterna lux credencium" (1 text, with an additional text on p. 171)
John the Blind Audelay, _Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302)_, edited by Susanna Fein, TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2009, pp. 183-194, "(Carol 15. Day of Epiphany)" (1 regularized text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSRichardHill}, The Richard Hill Manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354, folio 221
MANUSCRIPT: {MSSloane2593}, London, British Library, MS. Sloane 2593, folio 27
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302 (Bodleian 21876), folio 31
NOTES [275 words]: Although no longer found in tradition, this seems to have been popular in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, surviving in two very important manuscripts. It is in the Hill MS. (Balliol College, Oxford, 354) and in Sloane MS. 2593, an important collection which contains many folk songs.
The third version, which the Index of Middle English verse files separately as their #3526 ( "þere is a babe born of a may, In saluacion of vs" -- "There is a babe born of a may, In salvation of us") occurs in This occurs in Oxford, Bodleian Douce 302, a manuscript assembled, and mostly written by, John Audelay the Blind, for whom see the notes to "Welcome Yule."
Such wide currency, to me, implies that this belongs in the Index, although it is not clear to me where the tune in the Oxford Book of Carols came from.
The question is whether the piece is originally Audelay's or if he rewrote it (for Epiphany?). In that connection, we know that Audelay was working on his book in 1426 (again, see the noted to "Welcome Yule." But the Sloane manuscript is thought to be from c. 1430. And the Audelay and Sloane texts are significantly different, sometimes in ways that might be accidents of copying and sometimes in ways that might be deliberate but often in ways that look like the effects of imperfect memory (e.g. the various Latin tags are different). If the time gap were greater, I'd be more inclined to accept that Audelay originated the text and it was changed over the years, but in this case, it seems much more likely that Audelay heard and reused it.
For more on manuscript Sloane 2593, see the notes to "Robyn and Gandeleyn" [Child 115]. - RBW
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