Father of Heaven, Blessed Thou Be (Make Ye Merry for Him That Is Come)

DESCRIPTION: "Salvator mundi, Domine, Father of heaven, blessed be thee, Thou greetest a maid with one Ave, Alleluya, Alleluya." The Lord sent the Son, Jesus, who became man. Great and small, all should be merry. They give blessings.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1600 (three MSS. of that era; see NOTES)
KEYWORDS: religious nonballad MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN: Britain(England)
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Greene-TheEarlyEnglishCarols, #86, pp. 54-55, "(no title)" (3 texts)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #3070
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #4774
ADDITIONAL: Carleton Brown, editor, _English Lyrics of the XVth Century_, Oxford University Press, 1939, #79, p. 117, "Make Ye Merry for Him that is Come" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSEngPoetE1}, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Poet. e.1 (Bodley 29734), folio 20
MANUSCRIPT: {MSSloane2593}, London, British Library, MS. Sloane 2593, folio 9
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 189 (Bodleian 6777), folio 107
NOTES [186 words]: The opening words, "Salvator mundi, Domine," mean "Savior of the world, Lord."
Although no longer found in tradition, this seems to have been popular in the sixteenth century. It is found in three manuscripts from around the fifteenth century:
- Sloane MS. 2593, an important collection which contains many folk songs
- Bodleian MS. Eng. poet. e.1 (folios 17v-18v), a collection containing many carols
- Ashmole 189 (Bodleian 6777), which according to Carleton Brown, editor, English Lyrics of the XVth Century, Oxford University Press, 1939, pp. 294-295, is a composite manuscript, with English poems only in the second section, folios 70-115, with several mentions of owners who lived in Somerset early in the sixteenth century; the likelihood is that the manuscript is from Somerset, perhaps c. 1500. It contains about a dozen other poems, but none of them look particularly "folky."
For more on manuscript Sloane 2593, see the notes to "Robyn and Gandeleyn" [Child 115].
For more about the famous anthology Bodleian MS. Eng. Poet. e.1 (Bodleian 29734), see the notes to "The Golden Carol (The Three Kings)." - RBW
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File: MsFoHBTB

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