Welcome Yule

DESCRIPTION: "Welcome be thou, heaven king, Welcome born in one morning, Welcome for whom we sing, Welcome Yule, thou merry man, In worship of this holy day." Stephen and John's days, New Year, Candlemass, and guests are welcomed
AUTHOR: John Audelay the blind? (see NOTES)
EARLIEST DATE: c. 1426 (Bodleian MS. Douce 302); printed by Ritson 1790
KEYWORDS: Christmas MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN: Britain(England)
REFERENCES (11 citations):
Greene-TheEarlyEnglishCarols, #7, pp. 6-7, "(no title)" (2 texts)
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics CXXXIV, p. 232, "(no title)" (1 text)
Ritson-AncientSongsBalladsFromHenrySecondToTheRevolution, pp. 120-121, "Wolcum Yol" (1 text)
Rickert-AncientEnglishChristmasCarols, pp. 121-122, "Welcome Yule" (1 text)
Dearmer/VaughnWilliams/Shaw-OxfordBookOfCarols 174, "Welcome Yule" (1 text, 1 modern tune)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #3877
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #6189
ADDITIONAL: 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. 180-181, "(Carol 6. Day of the Nativity)" (1 regularized text)
Richard Greene, editor, A Selection of English Carols , Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series, Oxford/Clarendon Press, 1962, #2, pp. 55-56, "(Welcum, Yule, in glod aray)" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSSloane2593}, London, British Library, MS. Sloane 2593, folio 32
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302 (Bodleian 21876), folio 28
NOTES [1815 words]: This poses a real conundrum. On the one hand, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302 is a manuscript of the poems of the poet John Aud(e)lay (Audlay, Audley, Awdelay; not to be confused with the printer of the latter name who worked in the late sixteenth century) the blind, who churned out a great many pieces of this particular sort. On the other, it is also found (in rather different form) in British Library MS. Sloane 2593, an altogether better collection of carols with some folk links and no connection to Audeley. So did Audelay somehow slip something into Sloane, or did Audelay take a traditional piece and touch it up? There is really no way to tell. On the chance that the piece is traditional, I've included it.
Other than a few items found in a second copy, our entire knowledge of Audelay's work comes from the items in the Douce manuscript; even the few pieces which exist in other copies are listed as anonymous in those copies.
According to Audelay/Fein, pp. 4-5, the Douce manuscript was written by two scribes -- but in phases rather than the two scribes working on different parts of the book. One scribe, referred to as "A," wrote the basic text, leaving space for such things as titles and decorations. It would appear that he worked, to a significant extent, from already-written documents, not dictation, since there appear to be places where he left blank space for a better copy. The fact that blanks were left indicates that the overall arrangement of the work had been planned in advance by Audelay (and the arrangement, rather than the verse, seems to be what interests Middle English scholars the most, since there are few parallels to it; Robert J. Meyer-Lee, on p. 54 of FeinEtAl, calls it "the first fully conscious effort in English to triangulate authorship and authority).
Once scribe A had finished, scribe B took over the project, making corrections to the text, adding titles, incipits, and explicits in red, and initials and other illuminations in red and blue. He also perfected and proofread the book and added several final items. On the evidence, both scribes worked with Audelay, not just from his papers. Based on their roles, one suspects that, although both were monks at Haughmond Abbey, where Audelay worked, scribe B was more experienced and more senior.
Not only is the Douce manuscript the only source for Audelay's poetry, it is also almost the only source of information about him (Audelay/Fein, p. 6) -- and much even of that is probably missing because of the loss of the beginning of the manuscript.
Of Audelay personally, we find that he refers regularly to himself, and usually says he was blind -- e.g. one of his carols says that it was made by "Your broder, Jon, the blynd Awdlay" (Chambers, p. 88). Another says "Thus prophesis the blynd Awdlay" (Chambers, p. 94). One of the Latin colophons in the Douce manuscript describes Audelay; Fein offers this translation: "This book was composed by John Audelay, chaplain, who was blind and deaf in his affliction, to the honor of our Lord Jesus Christ and to serve as a model for others in the monastery of Haughmond. In the year 1426 A.D. May God be propitious to his soul" (Audelay/Fein, p. 1). The assumption, then, is that he died in 1426 (and so must have been born in the mid to late fourteenth century), although it is possible that it was simply the date of the manuscript. At the time he wrote, he was based at Haughmond Abbey, Shropshire.
Our only other information about him is a mention in another source that John Audelay was chaplain to Lord Richard Lestrange in 1417 when Lestrange made a visit to London -- during which Lestrange assaulted another peer and ended up in the Tower of London and was forced to pay a heavy fine (Fein/Audelay, p. 6; more detail is in Michael J. Bennett's article on Audelay's life on pp. 30-53 of FeinEtAl, especially pp. 33-37).
Audelay clearly stayed with Lestrange after that; when Lestrange founded a chantry for himself in 1424, Audelay became the chantry priest (Meyer-Lee, on p. 64 of FeinEtAl). It is reasonable to guess that this was to allow the priest, who presumably knew by then that he was losing his sight and perhaps his hearing, to live a less stressful life. One would also guess that it was then that Audelay began to assemble his book, although it is likely that some of the poems are older. The first part, from the colophon, was finished by 1426. Perhaps the whole book was; we cannot tell. And the colophon might have been written because Audelay had died, but again, we can't be sure -- after all, he talked about himself a lot while he was still alive!
Chambers concludes (p. 94) that "On the whole I feel that Awdelay is rather remote from the main tradition of carol development." (I'd have to agree; what ordinary poet would write a carol about circumcision, even if it is the Feast Day of the Lord's Circumcision. Oddly enough, this appears to be Audelay's most popular carol with modern composers, Audelay/Fein, p. 17, mentions several settings and recordings.) FeinEtAl, p. 3, discussing his character, sees him "veering from prophet of doom to preaching egotist."
Robert J. Meyer-Lee calls his writings "profoundly ordinary" (FeinEtAl, p. 54) and calls his verse "rigorously uninteresting" (FeinEtAl, p. 55). "Trite" strikes me as a good word. Woolf, p 296, at least credits him with a "characteristic sweetness of imagination and feeling," and Fein (FeinEtAl, p. 4), calls him an "innovator in verse forms." Thorlac Turville-Petrie says he "overlaads his stanza with more compliating features than any poet could control with entire success.... [His poem 'Three Dead Kings'] can claim to be the most ornate in the language" (FeinEtAl, p. 252). One of his favorites was a thirteen-line stanza (FeinEtAl, p. 9) that would have been very hard to set to music.
In his carols, he was fond of an almost-as-difficult seven-line form, although his most usual form was a six-line stanza, aaabBB (FeinEtAl, p. 16), which obviously isn't especially common in surviving carols.
The Douce manuscript looks as if it was Audelay's original amanuensis manuscript; it contains many corrections and revisions that sound as if they came from the author (Chambers, p. 92). It is somewhat damaged; the beginning is lost, and it is estimated that a quarter to a third of it is missing (Audelay/Fein, p. 5). The manuscript as it now exists contains some 62 poems that claim to be his work, although five have been found elsewhere (Chambers, p. 93). In general his work is pretty pedestrian -- orthodox, metrically correct, uninspired and uninspiring.
On the other hand, Audelay had a most un-medieval tendency to slip his name into his writings (Audelay/Fein, p. 1 counts 16 uses of his name in 35 pages of manuscript), making it easy to identify those pieces as his. Robert J. Meyer-Lee writes that his "rate of explicit versified self-naming far exceeds that of any other medieval English poet, including those inveterate self-namers, Audelay's contemporaries [Thomas] Hoccleve and John Lydgate" (FeinEtAl, p. 55).
His name is not in this carol. But it looks to me as if Audelay used his name more often in the non-carols. (One possible reason for Audelay using his name so much, that I have not seen elsewhere: Wagner, p. 269, mentions a James Touchet, Lord Audley, who was justiciar of South Wales from 1423, later held other offices, and had lands in Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Cheshire. Lord Audley was clearly a Big Deal in the area where Audelay was writing his book. Spelling was a chancy thing in the 1400s; maybe Audelay wanted to make people think he was related to Lord Audley.)
Audelay's self-interest is so surprising (to me at least) to see one of his pieces clearly associated with the Sloane Lyrics (for this song) and other carol sources. Greene, p. 254, on this basis, says that "Audelay's original authorship of the carol is doubtful," suggesting that and the Sloane version are probably both modified versions of a (lost) original. Chambers, p. 93, thinks Greene is being "hypercritical." Julia Boffey thinks it likely that many of the carols were written by others and adapted by Audelay (FeinEtAl, p. 222). She also suggests that several that occur in both the Audelay manuscript and in Richard Hill's manuscript of a century later probably circulated as a group, since they occur close together in the Hill manuscript as well as the Douce manuscript.
It seems certain that Audelay wrote at least some of his carols, though, because who else would write a carol about Henry VI, or even about obscure saints such as Saint Winifred? (FeinEtAl, p. 223).
Audelay's book includes 25 carols, in a separate section -- considered to be the oldest collections of English carols (Audelay/Fein, p. 15). Certainly it has one of the earliest references to CHRISTMAS carols. The beginning of the section (which may be an addition by Scribe B) reads:
I pray yow, syres, boothe moore and la [I pray you, sirs, both more and less],
Syng these caroles in Christemas [FeinEtAl, p. 11].
For a collection of Audelay's work, see Audelay/Fein. Much of the material in this book is also available online.
As regards whether Audelay wrote (as opposed to redacting) this piece, Oliver Pickering says that "Audelay's poetic abilities declined as his urge to save souls increased" (FeinEtAl, p. 131). The carols aren't so devoted to soul-saving, so maybe he could have managed them.
Greene, p. 254, says that the two distinct manuscript versions of this carol, Sloane and Douce, indicate two different ways of looking at the Christmas season: the Audelay version runs only through New Year, and hence the Twelve Days of Christmas through Epiphany; the Sloane version runs through the forty days until Candlemas.
This is not, in terms of manuscripts, the most popular carol associated with Audelay. One of his pieces (the circumcision carol, verse beginning "A babe is borne of hye natewre"; burden begining "What tythingis bryngst vs, messenger"; Greene, #117, pp. 74-75; Fein/Audelay #11, pp. 10-11), occurs in three manuscripts, Douce 302 (of course) plus {MSArchSeldenB26}, Oxford, Bodleian Library Arch. Selden B.26, folio 15 and {MSCamTrinityO.3.58}, Cambridge, Trinity College MS. O.3.58. But the latter two share many pieces and are clearly related; they share the same four-verse subset of the Douce text, although with a minor change of order. And none of the three has the connection with tradition that the Seldon manuscript of this poem does.
Even more noteworthy is "A Babe Is Born All of a May," which is in two very important manuscripts, the Sloane Manuscript which also contains this piece and the Richard Hill manuscript, If anything from Audelay had a traditional vogue, I think it is either this or that piece.
For more on manuscript Sloane 2593, see the notes to "Robyn and Gandeleyn" [Child 115]. - RBW
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