The Holly and the Ivy

Holly and ivy before the carol. John Stow's Survey of London recalls that "against the feast of Christmas every man's house, as also the parish churches, were decked with holm, ivy, bays"; holm is an old and dialect name for holly ^{[12][7][30][31]}. Late medieval songs made the two plants rivals. In one, "Holver and Heivy made a grete party"; in another, in the commonplace book of Richard Hill, a Londoner of the early 1500s, the refrain tells the ivy "Nay, nay, Ivy! It may not be, iwis", "For Holly must have the mastry" ^{[9][25][26][10]}. In Hill's song holly has his "mery men" and ivy her "jentell women", and holly has been read as the men's plant, ivy as the women's ^[9][22]. In 1779 a letter to The Gentleman's Magazine from East Kent told of village girls burning a "Holly Boy" stolen from the boys, and the boys an "Ivy Girl" ^[11][9].

The Birmingham song sheets. The earliest known copies of the words are broadsides, single sheets sold in the street. The Bodleian Library holds two from Birmingham ^[2][3][15]. One was printed by D. Wrighton at 86 Snow Hill, paired with Twelve Articles ^[2][4]. The Bodleian's dates for it are broad, 1812 to 1830, but Roy Palmer, who studied the Birmingham ballad printers, names him Daniel Wrighton and found that he printed street ballads only from 1811 to 1813, which would make his sheet the oldest known ^[2][15][4]. The other was printed by T. Bloomer, who printed in Birmingham from 1817 to 1827, paired with "Herald Angels" ^[3][5][15]. Another Birmingham printer of the 1810s, Henry Wadsworth, issued it too; Sharp knew his sheet, and a copy is in Sharp's broadside collection at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library ^[4][1]. These sheets print six verses, the first repeated as the last, with the chorus written out after the first verse; Bloomer prints it only there, and Wrighton's sheet repeats it as "The rising, &c." ^[2][3].

A carol printed every year. In 1823 the London publisher William Hone listed 89 "Christmas Carols now annually Printed"; number 70 is "The holly and the ivy, are now both well grown" ^[6][1].

A sheet "a century and a half" old. In 1861 Joshua Sylvester printed the carol in A Garland of Christmas Carols, with a note that it came from "an old broadside, printed a century and a half since", which would mean about 1710 ^[7]. William Henry Husk repeated this in his Songs of the Nativity, adding that the carol was "still retained on the broadsheets printed at Birmingham" ^[8][9]. No sheet that old has been traced: the Gloucestershire Traditions notes call it "a possible untraced broadside of 1715" ^[15]. The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology dates the carol "certainly before the early 18th century" and allows that it "may be medieval" ^[19].

Mary Clayton's tune. Cecil Sharp (1859 to 1924) collected English folk songs from country singers ^[17][18]. On 13 January 1909, at Chipping Campden, a Cotswold town, he noted songs from Mrs Mary Anne Clayton, then about 64, of Sheep Street ^[13][14][16]. One was The Holly and the Ivy, a Christmas carol of which she remembered three verses ^[13][14][16].

English Folk-Carols, 1911. Sharp printed it as No. VII of the book, on pages 17 and 18, for voice and piano, in G and 3/4, marked Andante moderato; his contents list it as from Gloucestershire, and his note heads it "Sung by Mrs. Mary Clayton, at Chipping Campden" ^[1][15]. His note explains that he filled out her words with another set "recited to me by the late Mrs. Wyatt of East Harptree, Somerset" ^[1][16]. He changed only one line, in the second verse, where Mrs Wyatt's line seemed to him "obviously incorrect": he printed "the usual broadside rendering", "To be our sweet Saviour", instead ^[1][3]. Sharp's words differ from the broadsides: he has "When they are both full grown" where the sheets have "Now are both well grown", and "For to do us sinners good" for "To do poor sinners good" ^[1][2][3]. The Gloucestershire Traditions notes point out that Mrs Clayton's tune is unusual: most versions collected from singers are in 6/8, hers in 3/4 ^[15].

Myth and record. Often told: The Holly and the Ivy is a medieval carol, or a pagan song given Christian words. What the record shows: no copy of these words is known from before the Birmingham sheets ^[15][4], and the carol is not in Richard Leighton Greene's The Early English Carols ^[19]. The medieval holly and ivy songs are different poems ^[9], and the carol's own words are Christian from end to end ^[1][2].

Verse 1. When both are fully grown, the holly "bears the crown" of all the trees in the wood: it is the winner, as in the old quarrel of the two plants, in which "Holly must have the mastry" ^[9]. The ivy is named only here; the rest of the carol is about the holly.

The refrain. Four pictures of a Christmas morning follow: the sun coming up, deer running, the "merry organ" playing in church, and sweet singing in the choir. The early printings leave them unexplained, though Husk noted that Chaucer, too, called the church organ "merry" ^[2][7][8].

Verse 2. The holly bears a blossom as white as a lily, and Mary bore Jesus "to be our sweet Saviour". Holly does flower: small, dull white flowers in May and June ^[27][29].

Verse 3. The holly bears a berry as red as blood, and Mary bore Jesus to do sinners good. The red can be read as the blood of his death. Most holly trees are either male or female, and only those with female flowers bear berries ^[28][27][29].

Verse 4. The holly's prickle is as sharp as a thorn, and Mary bore Jesus on Christmas morning. A thorn brings to mind the crown of thorns the soldiers put on his head ^[32].

Verse 5. The bark is "as bitter as any gall". Gall is anything extremely bitter ^[30]; at the crucifixion, Matthew says, Jesus was given vinegar "mingled with gall" ^[32]. "For to" is an old way of saying "in order to" ^[30]. To redeem is to buy back or set free, as Paul writes that God sent his Son "to redeem them that were under the law" ^[32].

Verse 6. The first verse comes back. The carol moves through the holly's flower, berry, prickle and bark, and through Jesus's life from birth to death. Sylvester wrote in 1861 that the holly had long been seen as "typical of the mission of Our Saviour" ^[7].

When Sharp printed it in 1911 he wrote that Christmas carol singing "by parties of men and women in the village streets" was dying out, and that singers tied their carols to that house-to-house singing ^[1]. Hymnbooks print it too, though the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology calls it "a carol rather than a hymn" ^[19][20]. Hymnary.org gives its meter as 7.6.8.6 with a refrain, though the lines vary in length ^[20][1].

Our arrangement reads the tune and verses 1 to 3 of the six, each with the refrain, from Sharp's No. VII, in G and 3/4 as printed, with breaths written in for beginners ^[1]. The soprano sings Sharp's tune; the alto, tenor and bass are our own, and his piano part was read but not used. For 2 to 4 singers: two take soprano and alto, a third adds the bass, and the tenor makes four.

• Bramley and Stainer. Their Christmas Carols New and Old printed the words in 1871 to a different tune, with "Now both are full well grown" in the first verse ^[21][16]. Sharp names their version, and Chope's, as variants ^[1].
• The Sans Day Carol. A Cornish carol, "The Holly Bears a Berry", is named after the village of St Day, where it was taken down. It sings of holly berries of several colours, and the Roud Folk Song Index files it with The Holly and the Ivy as number 514 ^[23][24][15].

• Soprano: the tune, most often on G, from the low D to the top E. Each verse and refrain opens on G and leaps to that top E ("the" in "the ivy,", "the sun"). The third line falls to the low D on "wood," ("or-" in the refrain); the last rises to C, then settles on G.
• Alto: mostly a third or a sixth under the tune, most often on E. "holly" and "rising" at each start sit on E, a third under the tune's G. It reaches its top G wherever the tune is on its top E, and sinks to its low B at the end of each verse's third and fourth lines ("wood,", "crown.").
• Tenor: the middle of the chord, most often on G, then B. It rises to its top C wherever the tune is on its top E. Only the last word, "choir.", takes it down to its low D.
• Bass: the bass line, most often on its low G, which holds the first four notes of every verse and refrain ("The holly and", "The rising of") and ends each one. It climbs to its top G only on "all the", "Mary" and "playing".