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n You know when you listen to a song but you don’tnquite catch the lyrics properly – an example of this was used in an advert fornMaxell audio cassettes a good few years ago when the title line from DesmondnDekker’s hit Israelites was subtitled as ‘Me ears are alight’.nThese mis-hearings are called Mondegreens, a word coined in 1954 bynSylvia Wright and derived from a seventeenth century ballad, The Bonny EarlnO’Moray, the first verse of which is,
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n“Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,n
nOh,nwhere hae ye been?n
nThey hae slain the Earl O’ Moray,n
nAnd laid him on the green.”n
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nWright wrote that some people have mis-heard that last line as ‘And Lady Mondegreen’,nfrom which she coined the term for this phenomenon. Another example can benfound in the Christmas song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, when the line ‘Allnof the other reindeer’ becomes ‘Olive, the other reindeer’. When Inwas a boy, my tin ear turned ‘Good King Wenceslas looked out’ into ‘GoodnKing Wenslass last looked out’, which kind of makes sense if there ever wasna Good King called Wenslass who looked out for a last time, which there wasn’t,nand so it doesn’t. It was just me getting it wrong.
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nAnyway, Wenceslas did hisnlooking out on the feast of Stephen, which is feast-day of St Stephen, thenfirst Christian martyr, held on December 26th, the day afternChristmas Day. Stephen was an early Christian deacon who found himself at oddsnwith the Jewish authorities not long after the crucifixion of Jesus and wasnstoned to death by them for his troubles, with that self-serving opportunistnSaul of Tarsus (who later styled himself Paul) holding their cloaks for themnand looking on whilst they killed Stephen, (I side with the opinion of ThomasnJefferson, who thought Paul was the first corruptor of the teachings of Jesus.nI have no truck with this Saul or his obnoxious theo-blatherings).
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nSo, who was thisnWenceslas chappie, anyway? Václav I (Václav is Czech, and translates intonEnglish as Wenceslas) was a Bohemian Duke, born in about 907, to Wratislaw (anChristian Duke) and Drahomira (a tribal pagan), and after his father’s death,nthe young Wenceslas was raised and educated by his grandmother, Ludmilla.nDrahomira resented Ludmilla’s influence over her son and arranged to have hernstrangled, an act that appalled Wenceslas, who wrested power from Drahomira andndeclared himself Duke. He supported the spread of Christianity in his realm andnsoon acquired a reputation for personal piety and charity to the poor.nDrahomira plotted with her son Boleslav, Wenceslas’s younger brother and, onnthe Feastday of Saints Cosmas and Damian, September 28th 935, asnWenceslas was making his way to church, he was attacked and killed by threenfollowers of Boleslav, who then assumed his brother’s title of Duke.
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| Gathering Winter Fuel |
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nAfter hisndeath, Wenceslas was soon declared to be a martyr and given the posthumousntitle of King by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, a cult quickly grew up aroundnhim in both Bohemia and England, and by the eleventh century he was declarednthe Patron Saint of Bohemia. In the many hagiographies of his life, there are accountsnof his numerous acts of kindness, generosity and mercy and he was soon regardednas the model of the Righteous King.
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| John Mason Neale |
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nIn 1853, John Mason Neale, an Englishnhymnologist (he also wrote Good Christian Men, Rejoice), published ancarol Good King Wenceslas, which tells how the King went out on StnStephen’s day to take food, drink and fuel to one of his poor subjects andnencourages his faltering servant to follow in his footsteps in the deep snow.
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| Piae Cantiones – Tempus adest floridum |
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nNeale took the tune from a thirteenth century spring carol, Tempus AdestnFloridum (Spring has Now Unwrapped the Flowers), published in a raren(and possibly unique) Finnish song collection Piae Cantiones of 1582, ancopy of which was given to Neale by G J R Gordon, Queen Victoria’s minister innStockholm, (a verse with a similar beginning can be found in Carmina Buranan(CB 142), although this quickly becomes rather more carnal than spiritual).
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| Carmina Burana 142 |
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nThenwords are Neale’s translation of a poem by the Czech poet Václav Alois Svoboda,n(and bear no relation to the text of Tempus Adest Floridum); Neale hadnbeen aware of the legend of Wenceslas previously and had included a prosenversion of it in his Deeds of Faith (1849), a children’s book about thendeeds of the martyrs.
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| J M Neale – Deeds of Faith – 1849 |
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nGood King Wenceslas is now a very popular Christmasncarol, although it has not always been so, as some snooty contemporaryncommentators questioned the matching of Neale’s ‘doggerel’ with annEaster hymn and looked forward to the carol falling into early oblivion. Butnfingers had always been pointed at Neale; although he was thought to be thenfinest Classical scholar in his year at Cambridge University, he was denied anFirst due to his deficiency in mathematics.
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| Mark My Footsteps, My good page |
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nHe was ordained as an Anglicannpriest but was forced to resign a position following arguments with a bishop whennhe took a wardenship in East Grinstead. In 1854, Neale co-founded an order ofnAnglican nursing nuns, the Society of St Margaret, also at East Grinstead butncame into opposition with some who questioned his High Church affinities,nfeeling that he was seeking to undermine the Anglican Church from within andnturn it towards a more Roman Catholic form. Anti-Catholic feeling was runningnhigh in England at the time, and any move towards a more ritualistic system ofnworship was viewed with great suspicion.
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| Thou and I shall see him dine |
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nNeale’s position wasn’t helped whennone of the young nuns died from an infection of scarlet fever contracted whilstnnursing the sick. Her father believed she had been deliberately placed inndanger by the order, a belief strengthened by her having altered her will afternentering the order and leaving it a sum of money. At her funeral, the fathernattempted to disturb the ceremony and a mob gathered around, threatening thennuns and throwing Neale to the ground. The police were called in and thensituation degenerated into an open riot, with threats made on Neale’s life andnhis house being stoned.
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nEven after the funeral, the nun’s father caused furtherntrouble in the press and Neale received further threats that his home was to benburned down. Eventually, the situation eased, not least because of Neale’sninnate goodness, although he continued to be viewed with suspicion and he died,nworn out through hard work, at the young age of forty-eight.
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