Our Advent piece for today, “Past Three O’Clock”, is a carol set to a traditional tune called “London Waits”.
And the “Waits” being referred to is a category of watchmen
common in England and Scotland from Medieval times up until the 19th Century.
City waites (the early spelling) patrolled the streets using musical
instruments to mark the hours. (Carrying something musical also distinguished
you from other bands of night-crawlers.) It’s not clear to me how they knew,
precisely, what hours they were sounding, but apparently it worked quite well
as a system for a number of centuries.
So, “London Waits” as a melody captures the functions of
the waits of that city, and George Ratcliffe Woodward put words to it around
the turn of the last century. It’s in The Cambridge Carol-Book, Being
Fifty-Two Songs for Christmas, Easter, and Other Seasons, published in
1924, so it’s still somewhat new on the Christmas carol continuum,
although—because of the provenance of “London Waits”, it sounds much older.
This recording is from The Bells of Dublin, by The Chieftains, and it features along with them the Renaissance Singers.
©2025 Bas Bleu
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