CAROLS CORRECTION

Alexander Larman (“Sacred Cows”,

Dec/Jan) is quite wrong to date “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night” and “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” to the Tudor period. The former first appeared in 1700 and the latter is not found in any printed source earlier than the 1830s.

While it is true that there were a significant number of carols written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including “Adam lay ybounden” and “Lullay, lulla, my little tiny child”, nearly all of our most popular and most sung carols today date from the mid-nineteenth century, among them “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, “Away in a Manger”, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” (those three all coming from the USA), “Good King Wenceslas”, “In the Bleak Midwinter” and the English version of “Silent Night”.

In terms of carols, as in several other respects, the Victorians really did invent and define the modern Christmas, not so much in terms of commercialism and consumerism but as a sentimental celebration of Christian and family values. The Victorian Christmas is neither a myth, nor a sacred cow. Professor Ian Bradley (Author, The Penguin Book of Carols)

St Andrews, Fife