John Mason Neale
Lovers of traditional Christmas carols, ecumenicism and church history are much in debt to this Anglican clergyman.
Neale was born in 1818 to a clerical family and was educated at Cambridge. He was ordained a priest in the Church of England but his career suffered because of his high church sympathies at a time when the Oxford Movement and the defection of prominent clerics to Roman Catholicism were causing turmoil in Anglicanism. He was removed from his parish by his bishop and became warden of an almshouse. Neale founded a religious nursing order for Anglican women, the Society of St Margaret, which provoked yet more controversy, and fostered connections between the Church of England and Eastern Orthodoxy. He was also an ecclesiastical historian of some note, producing a number of volumes on liturgy, the medieval church and Orthodoxy. However, it is as a hymn writer, collector and translator that he is best known.
In the early 19th century the singing of Christmas carols was dying and many of the old songs were long forgotten or sung only in remote parishes. Neale and a small group of musicologists helped to rescue many classics from oblivion. To him we owe translations of “Good Christian Men Rejoice”, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and (though not to everyone’s taste) “Good King Wenceslas”. The latter song has irritated music critics for over a century with its awkward combination of words and music, but this St Stephen’s Day song has proven to be an enduring favourite. Neale’s words, written in 1853, about the tenth-century Bohemian Duke Wenceslas were matched to a spring carol from the sixteenth-century collection Piae Cantiones with an 1871 arrangement by John Stainer. Why Neale should have chosen Wenceslas to embody the call to Christmas charity remains a mystery. Some claim that there was a long-standing legend about his generosity which English soldiers who fought during the Thirty Years War in Bohemia brought home, but, if there was, no trace of it remains. Neale would most likely have used “the feast of Stephen” because December 26 (St Stephen’s Day) was Boxing Day in England, a customary time for seasonal charity.
Neale died on August 6, 1868 but is honoured by Anglicans on August 7 because of the observance of the Transfiguration the day before.
I have always had a deep affection for Good King Wenceslas, not the least for the fact that, when he was a boy, my younger brother insisted the lyric was “Good King Vince, the louse, met his friend named Stephen…”
At any rate, at their best Christmas carols seem to us a bridge between a vanished world of the past and our contemporary lives while retaining a lyric loveliness. Good King Wenceslas fits, I believe, both of those promises by detailing the legend of a little-remembered saint, telling a tale with the simplicity of a fable and a wonderful musicality. Despite being in a minor key, the melody of King Wenceslas remains bright, cheerful and pleasing.
During the holidays, this is the tune I use as my phone ring tone, and also the song I find myself singing most often. Added points for celebrating the holiday ‘after’ the Day itself, which keeps the season alive a little longer these days.
I love the song too, especially the medieval vibes that it gives off.