Early English Carols and the Macaronic Hymn

The mediaeval English carol is preeminently a gift of the fifteenth century. Indeed, as Carleton Brown suggested in his edition, Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century, very few carols are preserved to us from even the fourteenth century, while more than five hundred fifteenth-century texts survive. Of these, nearly a quarter, or 119 carols, are in a single manuscript of 166 lyrics attributed to James Ryman, a Franciscan friar of Canterbury. The character of Ryman's carols and the extent of his experimentation in vernacular hymnody suggest that increased acceptability of the popular carol form and its adaptability to the elaborate or "decorated" style of the macaronic hymn have combined to create in the fifteenth-century carol a significant evolution from the more "meditative" earlier English religious lyrics.