"Joseph was an old man," is based on an old legend which is related in
the Coventry mystery plays. "I saw three ships come sailing in," and
"The Camel and the Crane," though of more modern date, preserve curious
legends. Numerous entries in the household accounts of the Tudor
sovereigns show that carol-singing was popular throughout the 16th
century, and the literature of Christmas was enriched in the next
century by poems which are often included in collections of carols,
though they were probably written to be read rather than sung. Milton,
Crashaw, Southwell, Ben Jonson, George Herbert and George Wither all
produced Christmas poems, but the richest collection by any one poet is
to be found in the poems of Herrick, whose "Come, bring with a noise" is
a typical carol of the jovial kind, and may well have been written to a
dance tune. Among 18th-century religious carols perhaps the most famous
is Charles Wesley's "Hark, how all the welkin rings," better known in
the variant, "Hark, the herald angels sing." The artificial modern
revival of carol-singing has produced a quantity of new carols, the best
of which are perhaps mostly derived from medieval Latin Christmas hymns.
Among the many modern Christmas poems one of the most striking is
Swinburne's "Three Damsels in the Queen's Chamber," which is, however, a
ballad rather than a carol.

The earliest printed collection of carols was issued by Wynkyn de Worde
in 1521. It contained the famous Boar's Head carol, _Caput apri defero,
Reddens laudes Domino_, which in a slightly altered form is sung at
Queen's College, Oxford, on the bringing in of the boar's head. Modern
collections of ancient carols are derived chiefly from three tracts
belonging to the collection of Anthony a Wood, preserved in the Bodleian
library, from a 15th-century MS. (Sloane 2593), a 16th-century MS. with
the music (Add. 5665), and other MSS. in the British Museum, and from
oral tradition. In the 15th century T. Bloomer of Birmingham published a
number of carols in the form of broad-sides. Among the numerous
collections of French carols is _Noei Borguignon de Gui Barozai_ (1720),
giving the words and the music of thirty-four _noels_, many of them very
free in character. The term _noel_ passed into the English carol as a
favourite refrain, "nowell," and seems to have been in common use in
France as an equivalent for _vivat_.

Among the more important modern collections of Christmas carols are:
_Son