Bittersweet Christmas countdown #4

Coventry Carol

Our second bittersweet Christmas offering sees us paying homage to the most haunting horrific and incongruous of Christmas carols.

Cuckolding the same nest as ‘Away in a Manger’ and ‘Hark the Herald angels sing’, we have the Coventry Carol, a Mothers lament for her murdered child.

History

Dating from the 16th century. The carol was traditionally performed in Coventry in England as part of a mystery play called The pageant of the shearmen and the tailors.

Mystery plays were depictions of Christ’s life and an attempt to bring the Gospels, in this case Mathew’s, to life for as wide an audience as possible. We have Robert Croo to thank for recording The Coventry Carol to manuscript in 1534 before Henry the Eighth made Catholicism and the mystery plays not just unfashionable but politically and personally dangerous.

A dagger to the heart

As a kid this carol used to raise the nape hairs and hack open my heart. Even before I was consciously aware of the words and story, the melancholy was suffocating. An all encompassing sob that would wrestle me to the ground — the dark angel to my young Jacob.

Then there are the words depicting the loss of innocent infants under Herod’s edict and a Mothers inconsolable yet somehow dignified inner scream, transmuting into something beautiful despite its horror. There go the nape hairs again….

There seems to be a reasonable consensus amongst theologians and historians that Herod’s murder of the innocents was to some extent a thing. It captures the imagination to this day in a way that is bled dry of ghoulishness and that celebrates the all prevailing human spirt and the concepts of love and loss and good versus evil that unite us all regardless of faith.

Unsurprising then that the Coventry carol has been covered by amongst others Charlotte Church, Alison Moyet, Sinead O’Connor, Tori Amos and Annie Lennox.

Painfully prescient

Fast forward two thousand years and the slaughter of innocents in the Middle East is still tragically endemic. Occasionally an image of a dust caked toddler being extracted from rubble cuts through the noise and we collectively hold our own to our hearts a little tighter. Then its back to business as usual.

During the season of goodwill and beyond, let’s do all that we can to raise a generation that does a better job than we have of making a meaningful contribution to the lessening of the slaughter and suffering of innocents.