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.