Origins: Corpus Christi Carol/Falcon Carol

Subject: Corpus Christi Carol
From: GUEST,holly
Date: 18 Nov 01 - 11:04 AM

What does the symbolism in the Corpus Christi mean? I've gathered that "corpus christi" is about the body of christ and the purple symbolizes royalty, with the maid being his mother, but beyond that I'm a bit slow.. what does the falcon and the orchard mean? Just familiar medieval symbols?

than

Subject: RE: Help: Corpus Christi Carol
From: nutty
Date: 18 Nov 01 - 12:10 PM

The earliest known version of this carol is c1400
Isn't it amazing that after more than 600 years it is still being reviewed and discussed. I suspect that many others have asked the question, Holly, but I'm not sure that there is a definitive answer.

Subject: RE: Help: Corpus Christi Carol
From: GUEST
Date: 18 Nov 01 - 12:18 PM

"Like many medieval carols, the song begins with the soothing words of a lullaby. The singer's mate has been carried off by a great falcon - perhaps symbolising death - into an orchard where autumn leaves are falling.

The hall is similar to the vault which appears in many mystical legends of the time - a kind of waiting room between the mortal world and the hereafter. The knight who lies bleeding there may symbolise Everyman, someone like the "verray parfit gentil knight" of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or the knights of Arthurian legend. The maiden who weeps beside his bed recalls the Virgin Mary who wept beside the body of Christ.

The scene symbolises redemption - Christ whose "woundes bleding day and night" dies for the sins of all mankind, and his blood redeems the souls of all who die in their turn and pass from this world into the next. Thus the stone at the end of the carol is both a gravestone, and a symbol of eternal life."

Taken from this page

Subject: RE: Help: Corpus Christi Carol
From: GUEST,holly
Date: 18 Nov 01 - 02:38 PM

thank you, it is quite a haunting tune and the images are so striking.

Subject: RE: Help: Corpus Christi Carol
From: masato sakurai
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 07:23 AM

The 16th-century text, with some modern ones, is in Richard Leighton Greene, The Early English Carols, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1977, no. 322 [p. 195]). The notes (pp. 423-427) are very detailed.
~Masato

Subject: RE: Help: Corpus Christi Carol
From: Wyrd Sister
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 02:00 PM

A version of this was collected by R Vaughan Williams in Castleton, Derbyshire (where the Garland is held) In the Oxford Book of Carols 1928 he suggests there is an "interweaving of the legend of the Holy Grail"

Subject: ADD: Falcon Carol
From: Joe Offer
Date: 05 Jun 23 - 04:17 PM

THE FALCON CAROL

    Burden
    Lully, lulley, lully, lulley,
    The falcon hath borne my make (sic) away.

1. He bare him up, he bare him down,
He bare him into an orchard brown. Burden

2. In that orchard there was a hall
That was all hung with purple and pall. Burden

3. And in that hall there was a bed,
'Twas hung around with gold so red. Burden

4. And in that bed there lieth a knight,
His wound do bleed by day and night. Burden

5. By that bedside kneeleth a may,
She weepeth sore both night and day. Burden

6. And by that bedside there standeth a stone,
With Corpus Christi written thereon. Burden

https://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/falcon_carol.htm

Source: Martin Shaw and Percy Dearmer, The English Carol Book, Second Series (London: A. R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd., 1913), Carol #39

Subject: RE: Help: Corpus Christi Carol/Falcon Carol
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 05 Jun 23 - 05:57 PM

For those who want to see the actual appearance of the sixteenth century version, the Bodleian has digitized the Richard Hill manuscript: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/e0d10554-db39-4b58-a944-45da5e66248e/surfaces/bc6e4db7-8026-4879-a689-5874dae7477c/. It's on leaf 165 back. Good luck reading the script. :-) (But, yes, that's normal script for the era. It's reasonably legible if someone teaches you how to read it. :-)

Joe's transcription is actually not correct; it has been modernized. The official transcription, so to speak, is Roman Dyboski, Songs, Carols, and Other Miscellaneous Poems from the Balliol Ms. 354, Richard Hill's Commonplace Book, Kegan Paul, 1907, #86, p. 103. I would guess you can find this on Google Books. This gives the first line of the first verse, e.g., as

He bare hym vp, he bare hym down.

The italic m's mean a suspension -- that is, hym is actually written hy with a dash over the y to show that the next letter is an m (or n).

For a description of the Hill Manuscript intended for ballad scholars, you can go to http://balladindex.org/BalladIndexBib.html and find "MSRichardHill". I also have extensive notes on the song itself at http://balladindex.org/Ballads/L691.html.

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Corpus Christi Carol, The

DESCRIPTION: We find ourselves looking into a bower in a high hall. In the bower lies a sorely wounded knight surrounded by odd symbols -- dogs licking the blood, a stone on which "Corpus Christi" is written, etc.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1537 (Richard Hill MS., Balliol Coll. Oxf. 354, folio 165b)
KEYWORDS: injury religious carol knight MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN: Britain(England(Lond,North),Scotland) US(SW)
REFERENCES (26 citations):
Greene-TheEarlyEnglishCarols, #322, pp. 221-322, "(no title)" (4 texts)j
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics XXXI, p. 148, "(no title)" (1 text)
Hirsh-MedievalLyric-MiddleEnglishLyricsBalladsCarols #24, "(Lully, lully, lully, lully)"; "(Down in yon forest)" (2 texts)
Palmer-FolkSongsCollectedBy-Ralph-VaughanWilliams, #12, "Down In Yon Forest" (1 text, 1 tune)
Rickert-AncientEnglishChristmasCarols, pp. 193-195, "Lully, lulley, lully, lulley"; "All Bells in Paradise" (2 texts)
Leach-TheBalladBook, pp. 691-692, "Over Yonder's a Park (Corpus Christi)" (2 texts)
Quiller-Couch-OxfordBookOfBallads 100, "The Falcon" (1 text)
Dearmer/VaughnWilliams/Shaw-OxfordBookOfCarols 61, "Down in Yon Forest" (1 text, 1 tune)
Hodgart-FaberBookOfBallads, p. 38, "Corpus Christi" (1 text)
Stevick-OneHundredMiddleEnglishLyrics 99, "(Lully, Lullay, Lully, Lullay)" (1 text)
Bronner/Eskin-FolksongAlivePart2 41, "The Falcon" (1 text, 1 tune)
Morgan-MedievalBallads-ChivalryRomanceAndEverydayLife, p. 125, "The Corpus Christi Carol" (1 text)
Darling-NewAmericanSongster, pp. 42-43, "All Bells in Paradise (Corpus Chisti)" (1 text)
Silber/Silber-FolksingersWordbook, p. 382, "Down In Yon Forest" (1 text)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #1132
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #1820
ADDITIONAL: Roman Dyboski, _Songs, Carols, and Other Miscellaneous Poems from the Balliol Ms. 354, Richard Hill's Commonplace Book_, Kegan Paul, 1907 (there are now multiple print-on-demand reprints), #86, p. 103, "Lully, lulley, lully, lulley, The fawcon hath born my mak away" (1 text)
Richard Greene, editor, _A Selection of English Carols_, Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series, Oxford/Clarendon Press, 1962, #67, pp. 128-130, "(Lully, lulley, lully, lulley)," "(Over yonder's a park, which is newly begun)," "Down in yon forest there stands a hall)," "(The heron flew east, the heron flew west)" (4 texts)
Celia and Kenneth Sisam, _The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse_, Oxford University Press, 1970; corrected edition 1973, #247, p. 524, "Corpus Christi Carol" (1 text)
Douglas Gray, _The Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose_, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 173-174, "The Corpus Christi Carol" (1 text)
Karin Boklund-Lagopolou, _I have a yong suster: Popular song and Middle English lyric_, Four Courts Press, 2002, pp. 227-228, "(Corpus Christi Carol)" (1 text)
Karen Saupe, editor, _Middle English Marian Lyrics_, TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1998, #82, pp. 155-156, "(Lulley, lulley, lully, lulley)" (1 text)
Walter de la Mare, _Come Hither_, revised edition, 1928; #480, "Lully, Lulley" (1 text)
Bob Stewart, _Where Is Saint George? Pagan Imagery in English Folksong_, revised edition, Blandford, 1988, pp. 122-123, "Down In Yon Forest" (2 texts, although the formatting implies that it is only one)
David R. Parker, _The Commonplace Book in Tudor London: An Examination of BL MSS Egerton 1995, Harley 2252, Lansdowne 762, and Oxford Balliol College MS354_, , University Press of America, 1998, p. 63, "(The Corpus Christi Carol)" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSRichardHill}, The Richard Hill Manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354, folio 165
ST L691 (Full)
Roud #1523
NOTES [2127 words]: According to Greene, p. 230, "This carol has been subject to more discussion than any other in the whole canon." Stevens, p. 114, notes an odd similarity to the medieval romance of Yonec by Chretien de Troyes, observing "[The] heart... of Yonec [is that] which seems to survive in a well-loved folk-carol, the Corpus Christi carol. Among the shared images and motifs are the falcon, who 'bears away' someone else's 'make' (mate, sweetheart); the flight suggested by verse 1; the richly hung hall; the knight lying on his death-bed with bleeding wounds, the maiden weeping at his side....
"The words 'Corpus Christi' have given commentators rich matter for speculation. If the carol has anything directly to do with Yonec, they could be a garbled remembrance of the 'sacramental test' which the bird-lover has to take." Stevens does not argue for actual dependence; he simply offers the comparison to show the richness of the folkloric roots of this song.
"Corpus Christi" is Latin for "(the) body of Christ."
The feast of Corpus Christi (not necessarily connected with this ballad) occurs on Thursday of the week after Whitsuntide. According to Davies, p. 197, it is "The observance on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday of a commemoration of and thanksgiving for the eucharist. It was established by Rome in the thirteenth century, following the advocacy of Juliana of Liège, and became universal in the West in the fourteenth century, the service of the day being compiled by St. Thomas Aquinas who also wrote some of the hymns associated with the feast."
Davies adds, "The name of the feast, Corpus Christi, is perhaps too an unconscious reflection of the era in which it originated, for in the elevations of the eucharist and in the extra-liturgical cultus of the sacrament, it was always the bread (the body) that received much the greater emphasis, probably for the entirely practical reason that this is what could actually be held up for people to gaze upon [although I have also heard it explained on the basis of the cost of wine].... Its title in the modern Roman rite, Corpus et Sanguis, the body and blood, can probably be seen as a corrective to this."
Happe, p. 19, offers this history: "[Corpus Christi] was established at the Council of Vienne in 1311, and by 1318 it was widespread in Europe and Great Britain.... It occurred on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, and quickly attracted the attention of craft guilds, as well as stimulating the establishment of guilds of Corpus Christi. It is notable that the Feast had no specific reference to the calendar of the church, unlike other Feasts which which by tradition had their own liturgical offices with quotations from scripture, appropriate music, and dramatic episodes."
Happe adds, "The fact that the Feast occurred in June meant that the day was long and it no doubt gave opportunity for elaboration of the public ceremonies, and there seems to have been something very deliberate about the establishment of the Feast which may have led to the concentration of dramatic episodes on that day."
Benet, p. 244, offers a slightly different dating, referring to the creation rather than the church-wide adoption of the holiday: "It was instituted by Urban IV in 1264, and was the regular time for the performance of religious dramas by the trade guilds. In England many of the Corpus Christi plays of York, Coventry, and Chester are still extant."
This raises at least the possibility that the song derives from one of these pageants -- although it is hard to guess which one. It's not in any of the extant cycles, and I don't recall hearing of London cycles, even though Richard Hill, who preserved the oldest version, lived in London.
Most of the symbols in this song seem to come from pagan (or, at best, late Christian) myths, but in John 19:34 we read that, when Jesus's side was pierced, "immediately [there came out] water and blood." (Compare also 1 John 5:6-8.) I don't think there is any doubt but that the water and blood in the song derives from that.
Many other speculations about this song have been proposed. One source (cited anonymously on p. 425 of Trapp), apparently following Greene (p. 230), argues that it has to do with Henry VIII abandoning Catherine of Aragon for Anne Boleyn (Saupe, p. 267, quotes this interpretation although she does not stress it; Hirsch, p. 82, mentions it but considers it "unconvincing"). Parker, pp. 63-64, accepts and extends this idea, saying that the song is Catherine's lament and Anne Boleyn (who used a white falcon badge) the falcon, although he thinks the woman's "mak" is the eucharist (as opposed to it being Henry himself in Greene's interpretation) and the hall is the Church. Parker, p. 64, observes that Hill was a good Catholic, who in 1535 had condemned Henry's assumption of supreme power over the English church; Parker suggests that the song is a code for Hill's disapproval of the King. (But what good is secrecy here when Hill had already written his condemnation of Henry's act?)
That suggestion might explain the chorus, but the verses? It seems more than somewhat farfetched, given that the last dated entries in the Hill Manuscript are from 1536 and the songs thought to be much older. Henry VIII, after all, didn't get involved with Anne until the 1530s (Anne's daughter the future Elizabeth I was born in 1533, and Catherine of Aragon died 1536).
Another theory connects the song with the grail legend; this is particularly associated with the work of Annie Gilchrist (summrized by Fowler-Ballad, p. 59). This makes somewhat more sense; the wounded knight is then the Fisher King, whose wounds would not heal until a hunter for the grail came. That, perhaps, ties into Celtic legend. In this hypothesis, the hall is the Grail Castle, and the weeping woman is not Mary (as in some of the later texts) or one of the women at the foot of the cross but the servant of the grail, and the stone by the bed is to hold the Eucharist.
This would also explain the "purple and pall" reference in the song. Purple is of course the royal color; pall is a cover for objects in a church -- but specifically used of the velvet or damask which covers the coffin of a dead man (Davies, p. 423). Gilchrist's idea that the hound licking the blood is Joseph of Arimathea strikes me as less convincing.
Yet another theory connects it with the "body and blood" of Christ in the Eucharist; Stevens, p. 115, cites the liturgical words "Corpus domini aportot" -- "he brought our Lord's body."
Fowler-Ballad, pp. 60-61, thinks that instead the song is based on the common medieval image of Christ as a knight, and suggests the fine hall, the fine bed, and the hound come from the paraphernalia of knighthood; the "water and blood" is a reference to the crucifixion, and the "lullay" chorus with the birth of Jesus. In this, the maid by the bed is indeed the Virgin Mary (but Fowler claims the evidence of the later versions as support for this, even though it is not explicit in the earliest). He suggests on p. 62, "the Pietà in 'Corpus Christi' is envisioned propheticlly by the Virgin, and the [lullay] refrain reminds us that all this takes place while she is rocking the child." He also suggests a link with "The Three Ravens [Child #26]" that I frankly don't comprehend.
The weakness of Fowler's hypothesis is that the ornate images of chivalric knights that he cites... come from sources like Malory, which also gave us the grail legend; most actual knights didn't live lives anything like that! So I don't think we can really separate the legends Fowler consults from those Gilchrist cites -- to me, the knight really does seem like the Fisher King, but the rest could be hauled in from anywhere. Also, the Bible does not portray Mary as a prophetess, although she meets prophets in Luke's account.
Fowler-Bible, pp. 92-94, comes up with another hypothesis, partly alluded to in the preceding quotation: That it is a description of the pietà, the medieval image of the Virgin Mary embracing the body of Jesus after it is taken down from the cross (a scene not described in the Bible but not inherently unreasonable, since John 19:25 says that his mother was at the foot of the cross). But this again has the problem that the song, even the earliest versions, involves a lot of symbols that could not be part of the pietà.
What seems pretty clear is that most of those who preserved the song over the years didn't know what it was originally about. Fowler-Bible, p. 93, makes the reasonable suggestion that the more recent versions have become more strongly tied to the Nativity as the older symbols ceased to be understood by a non-medieval, mostly non-Catholic population. This seems likely.
Gilchrist (cf. Greene, p. 231) thought that the Hill MS. version, the oldest extant ("Lully, lulley, lully, lulley, The fawcon hath born my mak away. He bare hym up, he bare hym down...") originated in Glastonbury, although the Glastonbury thorn (see below) is not mentioned in that version. Greene adds a reference to "The Elfin Knight" [Child #2] and its mention of a thorn "that never bloomed blossom since [Adam/Christ/he] was born."
Unlike the Hill MS., many later versions speak of a thorn at the foot of the bed. This is presumably the Glastonbury Thorn, which has the peculiar property of blooming around Christmas; legend has it that it was descended from a sprout of Joseph of Arimathea's staff (for the folktale of its origin, which claims it is from the crown of thorns, see Briggs, p. 232. Hole, p. 52, summarizes the legend that Philip the Apostle had sent twelve missionaries under Joseph of Arimathea to Britain, and that they settled in Glastonbury; Lawton, pp. xxxix-xl, offers evidence that this legend was adopted some time between 1240 and the late fourteenth century). However, Lacy, p. 243, says that the first mention of the Glastonbury Thorn is from 1716. Thus it is likely that the omission of the thorn from the early texts is because the thorn was not then known.
Another alternative is that some of the material in this song has drifted in from other carols. Greene's #38, pp. 86-87, "Alleluya, alleluia, Deo Patrie sit gloria," is a song primarily about the coming of the Magi, but there are substantial similarities to this song. Three verses begin, "Ther ys a blossum sprong of a thorn, To save mankynd, that was forlorne"; "There sprong a well at Maris fote, That seemed this world to bote"; "From that well ther strake a streme, Owt of Egypt into Bedlam." Greene, p. 206, compares the blossom and thorn to the "Rod of Jesse" and "Root of Jesse."
This seems to be the hypothesis of Boklund-Lagopolou, pp. 230-231, regarding the Hill manuscript version: The original carol was secular but in general fit an allegorical religious pattern, so some anonymous writer added the "Corpus Christi" verse. The defect with this hypothesis is that it doesn't really explain the additional religious references in other texts.
The mention of the heron in the song is rather surprising. Biblical references to what is believed to be the heron call it an unclean bird (e.g. Leviticus 11:19). Folklore about herons seems to be limited (online sources say this is because it was often confused with cranes and pelicans), but what there is is not very positive. And in the Middle Ages in was considered a not very inspiring creature: "At a banquet [the exiled French noble] Robert [of Artois] goaded Edward [III] into rebellion [against the King of France] by presenting him publicly with a stuffed heron, a cowardly bird which, Robert sneered, 'always fled before hawks and, like the English, will not fight for its rights'" (Neillands, p. 75). On the other hand, Tresider, p. 92, mentions that it was associated with inquisitiveness, and a positive symbol in the Far East (hardly relevant to medieval England); the one thing that seems slightly relevant is that the heron was sometimes a symbol of "rising above the storms of life, as the heron surmounts rainclouds."
A facsimile of the Richard Hill manuscript is now available at the Balliol Library manuscripts resource at the Bodleian web site; go to http://tinyurl.com/tbdx-BalliolMSS and scroll down to MS. 354. This song is on folio 165.
According to Greene, p. 22, this is one of only three carols found in manuscript before 1550 to have been found in oral tradition in modern times, the three being "The Boar's Head Carol," "The Corpus Christi Carol," and the obscure song "Christ Is Born of Maiden Fair." Of these, "Christ Is Born..." is, by Greene's admission, a vulgarization, and "The Corpus Christi Carol" has also wandered far; "The Boar's Head Carol" is almost unchanged, probably because it was regularly referred back to earlier sources. - RBW
Bibliography


• Benet: William Rose Benet, editor, The Reader's Encyclopdedia, first edition, 1948 (I use the four-volume Crowell edition but usually check it against the single volume fourth edition edited by Bruce Murphy and published 1996 by Harper-Collins, but this entry was deleted)
• Boklund-Lagopolou: Karin Boklund-Lagopolou, I have a yong suster: Popular song and Middle English lyric, Four Courts Press, 2002
• Briggs: Katherine Briggs, British Folktales (originally published in 1970 as A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales), revised 1977 (I use the 1977 Pantheon paperback edition)
• Davies: J. G. Davies, The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship (originally published in Britain as A New Dictionary of Liturgy & Worship), Westminster, 1986
• Fowler-Ballad: David C. Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, Duke University Press, 1968
• Fowler-Bible: David C. Fowler, The Bible in Middle English Literature, University of Washington Press, 1984
• Greene: Richard Greene, editor, A Selection of English Carols, Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series, Oxford/Clarendon Press, 1962
• Happe: Peter Happe, editor, English Mystery Plays, 1975 (I use the 1985 Penguin Classics edition)
• Hole: Christina Hole, English Folk Heroes: From King Arthur to Thomas a Becket, 1948? (I use the 1992? Dorset Press reprint)
• Lacy: Norris J. Lacy, Editor, The Arthurian Encyclopedia, 1986 (I use the 1987 Peter Bedrick paperback edition)
• Lawton: David A. Lawton, editor, Joseph of Arimathea (an edition of the Middle English romance of that name), Garland Medieval Texts, #5, 1983
• Niellands: Robin Neillands, The Hundred Years War, Routledge, 1990
• Parker: David R. Parker, The Commonplace Book in Tudor London: An Examination of BL MSS Egerton 1995, Harley 2252, Lansdowne 762, and Oxford Balliol College MS354, , University Press of America, 1998
• Saupe: Karen Saupe, editor, Middle English Marian Lyrics, TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1998
• Stevens: John Stevens, Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches, 1973 (I use the 1974 Norton paperback edition)
• Trapp: J. B. Trapp, Medieval English Literature (a portion of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature), Oxford, 1973
• Tresider: Jack Tresider, The Watkins Dictionary of Symbols, originally published 1997 as The Hutchinson Dictionary of Symbols; I use the 2008 Watkins edition

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Subject: RE: Help: Corpus Christi Carol/Falcon Carol
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 05 Jun 23 - 06:04 PM

A follow-up to my own post: The Richard Hill manuscript is quite a source of songs. I ended up including entries for 32 of its poems in the Ballad Index. A lot of these are things that I believe were traditional then but do not appear to have survived in tradition until modern times, but there are several that either did survive or that have been taken up by modern composers. Among these are

A Babe Is Born All of a May
The Boar's Head Carol
The Corpus Christi Carol
Gabriel of High Degree
The Holly and the Ivy (or, at least, one of the many holly-and-ivy songs of the period)
Joly Wat
The Nut-Brown Maid
O Mary Mother
Of a Rose, a Lovely Rose
This Endris Night

Subject: ADD: Down in Yon Forest
From: Joe Offer
Date: 06 Jun 23 - 03:13 AM

DOWN IN YON FOREST

1. Down in yon forest there stands a hall:
The Bells of Paradise I heard them ring
Covered all over with purple and pall:
And I love my Lord Jesus above anything.

2. In that hall there stands a bed: (chorus)
Covered all over with scarlet so red: (chorus)

3. At the bed-side there lies a stone.
Which the sweet Virgin Mary knelt upon:

4. Under that bed there runs a flood:
The one half runs water, the other runs blood:

5. At the bed’s foot there grows a thorn:
Which ever blows blossom since he was born:

6. *Over that bed the moon shines bright:
Denoting our Saviour was born this night:

Oxford Book of Carols (1928, 1964) #61

Subject: Origins: Corpus Christi Carol/Falcon Carol
From: Joe Offer
Date: 06 Jun 23 - 03:17 AM

The Digital Tradition lyrics are on the left. The lyrics on the right are from page 115 of A.L. Lloyd's Folk Song in England (1967) >

CORPUS CHRISTI CAROL (DT Lyrics) Down in yon forest there stands a hall, The bells of Paradise I heard them ring; It's covered all over with purple and pall [so tall] And I love my Lord Jesus above any thing. In that hall there stands a bed, It's covered all over with scarlet so red. At the bedside there lies a stone Which the sweet Virgin Mary knelt upon. Under that bed there runs a flood [river] The one half runs water, the other runs blood. At the foot of the bed there grows a thorn Which ever blooms [blows] blossoms since He was born. Over that bed the moon shines bright, Denoting our Saviour was born on this night.

CORPUS CHRISTI (from A.L Lloyd) Down in yon forest there stands a hall, The Bells of Paradise I heard them ring, It's covered all over with purple so tall, And I love my Lord Jesus above any thing. In that hall there stands a bed, It's covered all over with scarlet so red. At the bedside there lies a stone Which the sweet Virgin Mary knelt upon. Under that bed there runs a river, The one half runs water, the other runs blood. At the foot of the bed there grows a thorn Which ever blows blossoms since He was born. Over that bed the moon shines bright, The bells... Denoting our Saviour was born on this night. And I love...

From Lloyd, Folk Song in England
note: The Corpus Christi Carol is so called, not because it was sung
at the Festival of Corpus Christi (celebrated the Thursday after
Whitsuntide/Pentecost) but because most versions, especially the
earliest, contained an explicit reference to the Corpus Christi
(Latin, the body of Christ."
The earliest known form of the text dates back to about 1500,
when it was taken down by Richard Hill of London. Many of the
details of the song still survive, although the song has changed
metrical form somewhat. For Hill's text, see CORPCHR2
By the nineteenth century, the text had evolved into various
forms of the "Down in Yon Forest" given here. Many mysterious
symbols worked their ways into these later texts: the flood of
water and blood given here (an obvious reference to John 19:34)
is drunk up by a hound in some versions. Various attempts have
been made to interpret these symbols (often in terms of Grail
legends); few have proved successful. RW

@Xmas @seasonal @religion @carol
filename[ CORPCHRI
TUNE FILE: CORPCHRI
CLICK TO PLAY
RG

Popup Midi Player

Subject: RE: Origins: Corpus Christi Carol/Falcon Carol
From: Joe Offer
Date: 06 Jun 23 - 03:19 AM

CORPUS CHRISTI CAROL (2)

Hill MS (DT Lyrics) Lully, lully, lully, lully, The faucon hath born my make away. He bare him up, he bare him down, He bare him into an orcahrd brown. In that orchard there was an halle, That was hanged with purpill and pall. And in that hall there was a bede, It was hanged with gold so rede. And in that bed there lithe a knight His woundes bleding day and night. By that bede side kneleth a may, And she wepeth both night and day. And by that bede side there standeth a stone, "Corpus Christi" wreten there on.

Hill MS (Oxford Book of Carols, p 134) (differences in italics are NOT corrections) CHORUS Lully, lully, lully, lully, The falcon hath born my make away. He bare him up, he bare him down, He bare him into an orchard brown. In that orchard there was an hall, That was hanged with purple and pall. And in that hall there was a bed, It was hanged with gold so red. And in that bed there lieth a knight His wounds bleeding day and night. By that bed's side kneeleth a may, And she weepeth both night and day. And by that bed's side there standeth a stone, "Corpus Christi" written there on.

The earliest version, taken down by R. Hill--see notes on
CORPCHRI;(An expanded version of this text is sung by
Archie Fisher on "Will Ye Gang, Love.")
glossary:
bede: bed
bleding: bleeding
faucon: falcon
halle: hall
kneleth: kneelet neels
lithe: lyeties (??)
make: mate
may: maid
purpill: purple (the royal colour)
rede: red
wepeth: weepeteeps (??)
wreten: written
@carol @religion @Xmas @seasonal
filename[ CORPCHR2
TUNE FILE: CORPCHRI
CLICK TO PLAY
RW

Subject: RE: Origins: Corpus Christi Carol/Falcon Carol
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 06 Jun 23 - 05:08 AM

I just have to note that the DT entry Joe quoted was supplied by me -- but that was a third of a century ago, and I didn't know anything then! I suspect I took most of that from the Oxford Book of Carols, and it's not very reliable.

In particular, Richard Hill added things into his commonplace book for many decades, and the Corpus Christi Carol entry is surely from some years after 1500. He lived into the 1530s, and was a devout Catholic who did not at all approve of what Henry VIII was doing. (No, his book is not a diary, but it's clear from his little comments and the material he included.)

He seems to have been curious about a lot of things. In addition to the various lyrics he took down, there are (semi-)scientific tidbits, and recipes for things like ink, and miscellaneous comments. Few books deserve the description "Commonplace Book" more than his book.

Subject: RE: Origins: Corpus Christi Carol/Falcon Carol
From: leeneia
Date: 07 Jun 23 - 12:41 PM

To me the most interesting thing about this poem is that it shows that the common people of medieval England had literature we know almost nothing about.   

Who's the knight? Who's the maiden? What's a falcon got to do with it? What does the stone with "Corpus Christi" on it signify? We shall probably never know.

Some people think the knight is Christ and the maiden is Mary, but neither of these humble people was ever in a luxurious hall. No doubt many a wounded knight was mourned by a woman during the middle ages, so the poem could be based on a long-lost saga of the time.

FYI, in medieval English, "mate" was sometimes "make".