If you are a Christmas carol fanatic as I am, you have probably come across the name “The Sloane Manuscript” more than once in your Christmas carol loving.
You have probably wondered what this Sloane Manuscript is. The history of this manuscript, or manuscripts more appropriately, go back a long way. Their history includes being part of the founding of the British Museum, a profit of slavery, and a glimpse of Christmas long ago.
Who was Sloan?
Hans Sloane was an Anglo-Irish physician who served as physician to the governor of Jamaica during the late 1600s. Sloan was also a naturalist, an avid collector, and benefactor to the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum.
There is substantial information on Sloane online, including his entry on Wikipedia. When he died, he bequeathed his substantial collections to the above-mentioned entities.
Sloane had married an heiress who made Sloan very rich. It should be said that his wife was heiress to a sugar plantation in Jamaica, which of course profited from slavery, which in turn financed his collecting.[1]
It is said that Sloane collected over 70,000 objects including books, coins, drawings, and manuscripts. When he died, he left many of these items to the entities mentioned above, although it was not a free bequest. The bequest offered that his collection to the state to be bought a reduced price.
Eventually, an act of Parliament was passed to purchase the collection from Sloane’s executors although the payment was far less than the collection’s value.[2]
The Manuscript
Speaking of the manuscript that has to do with Christmas, when one says the Sloane Manuscript, one should really be saying the Sloane Manuscripts. When speaking of an individual one, one should say “manuscript.” The “manuscripts include thousands of archaic manuscripts on medicine, recipes, almanacs, and much more."[3]
Christmas
Sloane Manuscript 2593 is the one Christmas carol fanatics have interest. Held by the British Library, it is dated about 1400. This would be during the reign of King Henry IV (yes the same one with insomnia and finds his head heavy when he wears the crown).
The manuscript contains the text of some carols, three of them Christmas carols. However, the carols have no music. They include “I syng of a mayden," "Adam lay i-bowndyn," "Lullay, myn lykyng," and in addition, "Benedicamus Domino" and "A Babe is born al of a may." The carols/poems are anonymous.[4]
Manuscript 2593 is described as A collection of 14th and 15th century English poetry, including Christmas and other carols, without music.
In my readings of many Christmas carol historians, they mentioned the above-mentioned carols being “rediscovered” but never tell us when this rediscovery took place. Was it a discovery period or was a specific date? Was it after 1753 when Sloan died?
Getting direct access to Sloane Manuscript 2593 may have been difficult even then, and today needs a letter of introduction.
Was the rediscovery in 1836, when Thomas Wright published Songs and carols from a manuscript in the British Museum of the fifteenth century? (available online).[5]
From what I can gather from the editors of the New Oxford Book of Carols, it was the twentieth century composers that started this revival of going back to medieval text, especially those carols whose music had been lost.
Maybe the rediscovery was in the first two decades of the twentieth century. We know "Lullay, mine liking" and “Adam lay i-bowndyn” were included by Edith Rickert in her Ancient English Christmas Carols: 1400-1700 (1914).
"Lullay, mine liking" and "I syng of a maiden” were included in Richard Runciman Terry’s Twelve Christmas Carols (1914).
Holst’s “Lullay My Liking” (sic.) was published in 1916. Peter Warlock published his version of “Benedicamus Domino” in 1918, his version of “Adam lay ybounden” (sic.) in 1922, and his “I saw a fair maiden” (“Lullay, my liking”)[6] in 1927.
"Lullay, mine liking" (Gustav Holst, Edgar Pettman, and R.R. Terry)(“I saw a maiden”)(“Myn Lyking”) and “Adam lay iboundden”(sic.)(Boris Ord) are include in the New Oxford Book of Carols (1992).
Holst’s “Lullay My Liking” was included in the original Oxford Book of Carols (1927). “I sing of a maiden” (Martin Shaw) and “Adam lay ybounden” (Warlock) were also included in the original Oxford Book of Carols. The Oxford Book of Carols (1927) also has an entry for “Lullay, my liking” (Holst). The editors of both Oxford publications exclude “I sing of a maiden,” maybe for being too Marian of a carol. The original Oxford editors refer to it as “This famous little classic…”[7]
[1] https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/sloane-manuscripts. British Library. Accessed October 9, 2022.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] I maintained the spelling of the carols as spelled either in carol collections or the spelling used by the composer when his music for the carol was published.
[5] Thomas Wright, Songs and carols from a manuscript in the British Museum of the fifteenth century, (London: T. Richards, 1856), 46-47, 79-80, 94-95.
[6] “Lullay, my liking” is often titled by modern composers, “I saw a maiden,” or "I saw a fair maiden” after the first verse of the carol.
[7] See notations Dreamer, Percy; Williams, Ralph Vaughn. The Oxford Book of Carols, Oxford University Press, 1928, 183.
