Happy Holiday Morning, everyone.

It's worth noting that, until this morning, we hadn't seen a post on this thread for eleven years, so perhaps all questions had been answered. :-) But, in light of events in Bethlehem right now, since the thread has been revived... I'll insert some background.

First off, the Coventry Carol is not a traditional song (unless it became one in the twentieth century). The only source is the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors. Its exact date of composition cannot be known; a lot of sources argue for a fifteenth century date, but all we can say is that the only copy had a colophon date of 1591 -- which was after Mystery Pageants had mostly been suppressed, so it was either post-dated or it was a copy of an older manuscript.

And that sole copy no longer exists. It was burned in a Birmingham Library Fire of 1879. All we have are bad eighteenth century transcripts. I emphasize bad. And they are transcripts, not facsimiles -- there isn't anything for paleographers to work on. Which explains some of the variations noted here. Other variations arise from conjectures about the spelling -- that is, what Modern English word is meant by the spellings in the two bad transcripts.

For those who actually want to know about the history and context of the song really need to consult the only proper edition of (what is left of) the Coventry cycle, Hardin Craig, editor, Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, second edition, Early English Text Society, 1902, 1957, 1967. I suspect the second-best source is probably my own summary, http://balladindex.org/Ballads/OBC022.html.

In trying to understand the song, it's worth noting that the medieval image of the Massacre of the Innocents made it a large-scale tragedy -- a Gaza Massacre scale tragedy, with thousands of infants killed. In reality, if it happened at all... well, Bethlehem probably had about 500 people. If Herod's men killed all of them under two years old, it might have been 30-50 people. By Herodian standards, that's bad but certainly not without precedent. If it actually happened, it was minor enough that no other chronicler recorded it. But let's remember that this story occurs only in the Gospel of Matthew, not in the parallel in the Gospel of Luke, and that Matthew was trying to make the story of Jesus's birth to be parallel to the story of Moses's infancy, and the massacre of Israelite children in Exodus would have been known to every Jew.