I have known the melody of this carol since I was a girl but very rarely got to sing it. I did, however, play various pretty arrangements of the melody and thus thought that it was a rather beguiling lullaby. It wasn’t until compiling this calendar and carefully reading the words that the ugly truth of this carol dawned on me. Very affected by this, and in reflection of the words, my own arrangement of this is rather unsettling – to my mind, at least, anyway.

The story of this carol comes from the story which is often called the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ found in St Matthew’s Gospel chapter 2; verses 16-18.

When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.  Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

We don’t have any conclusive evidence to tell us how many sons were killed and this is the only place where this horrific story is told but it certainly made an impression on the people who put together this Medieval liturgical drama.

There were four plays which are known as the Ordo Rachelis (of which this is one play) and these combined to tell a larger story about the massacre. In turn, these were amongst what were known as the Coventry Mystery plays or Coventry Corpus Christi Pageants which is how this carol gets its name. They happened annually for almost a couple of hundred years and were widely renowned, not just in their local area. Even royalty and possibly also Shakespeare went to see them.

This play was in tribute to what is known as Innocents’ Day which falls on December 28th although generally the plays were performed earlier in the year, around Corpus Christi Day which was in May or June. This story was in a pageant of the guild or company of Shearmen and Tailors (all probably working in the wool industry of the time).

The original manuscript of the play was lost in a fire, but prior to this was copied out in the early 19th century from a prompt book by an actor/manager called Robert Croo. This had claims to be an authentic copy so this is the source material for all settings or editions of the carol now. It was one of three carols occurring in the play and was sung by three women and is thus in three parts (though the women probably were portrayed by men) given the range of the two lower parts and the prevalence of males performing female roles on stage in those days – not to mention the fact that the Shearmen and Tailors would have been males.

I based my arrangement on the first version of the carol in Book 1 of Carols for Choirs. The Carols for Choirs versions note that ‘This song is sung by the women of Bethlehem in the play, just before Herod’s soldiers come in to slaughter their children’.

After the Blitz on Coventry in 1940 during WWII, a BBC broadcast service was made from there which ended with this carol and the carol became once again more popular, having fallen into neglect. Since then some notable artists have recorded this carol including Chet Atkins, John Denver and Annie Lennox. Once again, today it feels especially chilling.