Peter CostelloWorld of Books
It must be down to the autumnal feeling in the air, or perhaps the subconscious absorption of the first advertisements for the Christmas season which are already appearing, but last week my mind adverted in its wandering way to the Wexford carols.
The south east corner of Ireland, the baronies of Forth and Bargy, cut off from the rest of Ireland by a ring of mountains to the north and west, have always been a region on their own. It was in this corner that the Normans invaded Ireland, and indeed others in prehistory. From here the boats, at least in St Patrick’s Day, ran to the continent.
In patterns of speech and attitudes, the very air the people breathe, has its own distinct flavour. The patois has been intently studied by linguists over the last two centuries, for its unique features.
The Wexford carols, though well known now, have only been collected in recent times by scholars. In 1982 Diarmaid Ó Muirithe published The Wexford Carols through the Dolmen Press – like so many of Liam Miller’s publications this is now a collector’s item.
The carols themselves were assembled and edited by Ó Muirithe; while the music was transcribed and arranged with a commentary by Seóirse Bodley. This brought them to the wider attention at last. The song represented a true Irish contribution to the music of worship, as well as the traditions of Christmastide.
The best known today is the Enniscorthy Carol, which is often referred to as if it were the only one. But this is not the case.
Collections
The Wexford carols have their origin, Ó Muirithe relates, in a little garland or collections of songs published by Luke Waddinge in Ghent in 1684. They were intended for use in his own Diocese of Ferns. Waddinge, though hard pressed in many ways to survive, had a small but select library. This included some of the Metaphysical poets, and Catholic poets of the same era in England.
The garland was reprinted twice in the 18th Century, and passed into common use, especially in Kilmore district. Another collection was later issued by a Fr Devereaux, and these too were commonly sung. These collections survived in manuscript booklets passed from hand to hand, and from generation to generation. Ó Muirithe was able to make use of two them still in private hands.
The music may have dated from early times, for many were sung to traditional airs, which was the common thing for songs and ballads at that time. Seóirse Bodley, however discusses all the technical points in his commentary added to Ó Muirithe’s essay.
The carols are still sung at Kilmore at Christmas by a choir of six men in two groups of three, who sing alternate verses. This tradition has been going on for some 300 years – “no small boast”, Ó Muirithe observes.
Cathedrals
The carols were sung in many place other than Kilmore in Victorian days. Rathangan was one of these. In January 1872 a letter appeared in The People, the Wexford newspaper, from a local man. “I have stood within many of the grandest cathedrals of Europe and under the dome of St Peter’s itself, but in none of them did I ever feel the soul-thrilling rapture sensation that I did as a boy listening to six men beneath the low-thatched chapel of Rathangan.”
But they were displaced by later priests who, Ó Murithe suggests, did not full appreciate their character and preferred something more Roman, so to speak. Such things were the fashion of the day; the local carols belonged to that persecuted past that the triumphalist Church of the Victorian era wished to put behind it.
“They died out in these parishes due to the neglect of priests who preferred the formality, the chiasmi and the dogmatic of hymnody. The religion of the heart had lost out to what Yeats has called the dead hand of decorum.”
But what died in Rathangan and elsewhere survives in the choir of six singer of Kilmore.
“Long may they live,” concluded Ó Murithe, “and long may their beautiful songs survive them.”