Merry It Is While Summer Lasts

Eight hundred years young: Why does the earliest surviving English folk song still feel so alive?

My previous post on medieval musicology leaned heavily into cosmic, metaphysical, and spiritual ideas that informed the philosophy of music in the Middle Ages. That essay was mostly theoretical and spent quite a bit of time up among the celestial spheres. I want to continue the musical discussion while also bringing us back down to earth—and more specifically, to the emotionally charged earth of late summer, when the weather is still warm and the harvest is still underway, but an occasional falling leaf or chill breeze brings memories of cold days, long nights, small meals, and great sorrows.

Many years ago, someone in England found a stray piece of parchment and decided to write down the words and musical notes of a simple song about the joys of summer and the hardships of winter. Maybe it was a monk who heard some peasants singing it as they were reaping grain or mowing hay, and then couldn’t get the strangely enchanting melody out of his mind. Perhaps the monks themselves sang it as they worked in the fields—theirs was a life of continual song, and surely they did not scruple to mingle their rural labors now and then with the pleasure of a vernacular ditty.

In any case, that leaf of paper ended up in a book of Psalms, and that book of Psalms somehow survived for eight centuries, eventually entering the era of digitized manuscripts, sophisticated textual scholarship, and recorded music. As a result, people all over the world can now see that piece of parchment, reflect on its words, hear its music, and wonder why something so old and so simple can still move their hearts and open their minds.

This manuscript, known as MS. Rawl. G. 22, is held by the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

This image has much to say. It speaks of scholars whose expertise and dedication can bring clarity to manuscripts as indistinct, damaged, and visually foreign as this one. It ponders the mystery of time, and the way that artistic artifacts collapse past, present, and future into one everlasting moment. It tells us that when you create something beautiful—something that resonates with those sacred, hidden notes whose harmony unites body and spirit—you just never know when someone else might find it, and cherish it, and give it new life.

Knowledge of medieval folk music is scarce, for the simple reason that it was rarely written down. It wasn’t lofty enough to justify the expense of paper, and most of the people who played it and sang it couldn’t read anyway. Furthermore, as music scholar Susan Boynton explains,

Medieval musicians learned by imitation, repeating by ear what they heard. Entire repertories … were long transmitted orally. Even after notation became common, oral tradition persisted and interacted with the written record.

Folk songs of the Middle Ages must have been innumerable, wonderfully diverse, and deeply rooted in the aesthetic terroir of the villages, towns, and regions where they were sung. Passed down and preserved from generation to generation, they were woven into the very fabric of life. They were also an indispensable source of pleasure, emotion, and solidarity amidst the long, hard labors of the rural year. No doubt we hear vestiges of them in the many surviving folk songs that, having no identifiable author, seem to have grown like perennial wildflowers in the communal meadows of the past.

The oldest English folk song for which we have lyrics and music is known by its first three words: “Mirie it is.” It dates to the first half of the thirteenth century. The original Middle English lines are given below, followed by literal English translations.

Mirie it is while sumer ilast
Merry it is while summer lasts

wið fugheles song;
with bird’s song;

oc nu neheð windes blast
but now neareth wind’s blast

and weder strong.
and weather strong.

Ei, ei! what þis niht is long!
Ay, ay! how this night is long!

And ich, wið wel michel wrong,
And I, with very much wrong,

soregh and murn and fast.
sorrow and mourn and fast.

This is all the manuscript gives us. Additional stanzas, if they existed, are buried somewhere in the unwritten chapters of history.

The meaning is pretty clear except in the second-to-last line. The phrase “with very much wrong” means “most unjustly”: the speaker not only foresees the sufferings of winter but insists that such sufferings are “most unjust,” that is, not deserved. It’s tempting to make a quip here about how medieval people were just as inclined as modern people to view the weather as some sort of malign being who deals out personal insults and deviously interferes with our lives.

But I hesitate to trivialize something that really is quite serious. The scourges of severe weather were salt in the wound of a culture that sought, with unequalled fervor, to reconcile the harsh realities of human life with the ideals of Christian spirituality. Ordinary folks were exhorted to trust in divine Providence, to believe that a virtuous life will bring happiness, to pray for protection to their guardian angels. Such faith comes more easily during the sunny days of summer abundance, when the birds are singing and vegetables are growing and the milk pail is full to the brim. It doesn’t come so easily during the bitter chills and ill winds of winter, when hardships and privations creep into life like cold air into a drafty cottage, and when the icy fingers of suffering and death tickle the throats of all—the healthy and the sick, the old and the young, the guilty and the innocent.

You’ll find many recordings of “Mirie it is” on YouTube. The one linked below is the best of all the renditions I’ve heard—and not because it is the most “faithful” to the original manuscript, which gives us only a bare outline of a song whose true life was as deep and diverse and passionate as the lives of the hardy peasant folk who sang it.

I like this rendition quite simply because for me, it’s the most real. When I listen to it, I see the cottages, the fields, the well-worn footpaths, and a few late-summer leaves falling from the ash trees. I hear the youthful voices, rough but sonorous, like the stones of which the village church was made. I feel the strong, resonant tones of a bygone life that was raw, and poor, and rich, and beautiful.