Tonight’s Christmas carol ushers us into a historical period in which I’m more or less at home (the early 10th Century, in which my current Work In Progress is set), though not so much as far as the turf is concerned. I’ve always assumed that Good King Wenceslas was a medieval English Christmas song, passed down through generations.
And that’s just what its author intended. The lyrics were in fact written in 1853 by an Englishman named John Mason Neale. This insidious semi-papist was a member of the Oxford Group, that Victorian and Edwardian movement that sought to turn the Anglican Church away from Pietism, back to its Roman Catholic roots. He set out to write a song that would honor a saint, sound medieval, and sing well. The tune he chose was “Tempus adest floridum,” (The Blooming Time Is Here), a 13th Century Latin hymn to spring. It worked brilliantly, and became a classic. I’m fond of it.
So what about the real King Wenceslas (full disclosure – I’m getting all this from Wikipedia. You could do as well yourself, but I’m putting it all in one place for you)? Well, first of all, Duke Wenceslas I of Bohemia (ca. 907-935) was not a king in his lifetime, though the title was bestowed on him posthumously by the Holy Roman Emperor. In spite of all the illustrations you’ve seen showing him as an old man with a white beard, he in fact died very young – before he was thirty, as you’ll see from his biography dates.
Wenceslas’ grandparents were the first Christian rulers of Bohemia. His mother, Drahomira, accepted baptism to marry his father, but apparently her heart wasn’t in it. After his father’s death, his grandmother Ludmila served as regent – until she was murdered by Drahomira, who then went on to persecute Christians. Wenceslas was brought to power in a coup against her.
He spent his short reign struggling against various enemies. The Magyars attacked from the east, and on the West, the Franks, the Saxons, and the Bavarians gave him trouble. He made it a policy to ally his Bohemian church more with Rome than Constantinople.
In September 935, Wenceslas was treacherously murdered by assassins paid by his brother Boleslav “the Cruel,” who had invited him to a feast. Boleslav is said to have delivered the killing blow himself. After Wenceslas’ death, legends of his sanctity spread, and he became patron saint of the Bohemians and Czechs, as he is today. (Saint Olaf of Norway would later follow a similar script.)
One of the Wenceslas legends says that it was his practice to leave the palace every night, accompanied by just one of his chamberlains, and go out, barefoot, to distribute charity to the poor. The carol immortalizes a variation of that story in which they set out on the feast of St. Stephen (Dec. 26) in heavy snow. The chamberlain (“page” in the song) complains that he hasn’t the strength to plow through the drifts any longer (I don’t know if he was allowed to wear shoes on these errands or not), and Wenceslas tells him to just walk in his tracks – and behold, it’s warm enough in those spots to melt the snow, enabling him to proceed in comfort.
“Wherefore, Christian men, be sure – wealth or rank possessing – ye who now will bless the poor Shall yourselves find blessing!”
Which, when delivered by a Christmas caroler, was an obvious hint that it’s cold out here and some hot food – or, even better a hot drink – would be welcomed and pleasing to God.
Thanks for this! And that seems a pretty jolly Wikipedia article: I somehow encountered the debt to Neale’s earlier Deeds of Faith: Stories for Children from Church History – and enjoyed reading it as scanned in the Internet Archive – and recently encountered and enjoyed Jeremy Summerley’s 2017Gresham College lecture on Piae Cantiones as linked by the article. But that 12th-c. reference was new to me. I’ve gotten fascinated by that ‘treading in the (warm) footsteps’ – of which Charles Williams uses a variant in his poem ‘Percivale at Carbonek’ in Taliessin through Logres (1938), about which poem I contributed a guest post at The Oddest Inkling in 2016. To quote myself there, “a saintly and Christological image with a long history in legend and liturgy” – one which I would still “like to know a lot more” about!
I just thoroughly enjoyed a browsing re-read of Neale’s story version in the scan of the Bodleian Library copy of the 1860 Second Edition of his Deeds of Faith, and heartily recommend it for all its additional details. An interesting difference is that it is set before Christmas. I don’t know his exact sources, but I wonder if his switch to the Feast of Stephen may include implicit serious play with things like the King being like Stephen in effectively doing diaconal work, in being set upon by those who might be considered his ‘brothers’ but who did not recognize Jesus as Messiah, and by the fact of one of them, a young man “whose name was Saul”, repenting and later coming to join him in His service. The “Boleslaus I, Duke of Bohemia” Wikipedia article has an interesting paragraph “saying that he “and his elder brother Wenceslaus were taught the Roman Catholic faith and to read the Psalms by their grandmother Ludmila. There is evidence that Boleslaus’s mother Drahomíra, who was pagan, might have influenced him against his brother and Catholicism, though he later repented.”
I suspect that Neale found it convenient to use the Feast of Stephen because it rhymed well with “even.”