Lyrics
Masters in this hall,
Hear ye news today
Brought from over sea,
And ever I you pray:
Nowell! Nowell! Nowell!
Nowell, sing we clear!
Holpen are all folk on earth,
Born is God's Son so dear:
Nowell! Nowell! Nowell!
Nowell, sing we loud!
God today hath poor folk raised
And cast a-down the proud.
Going o'er the hills,
Through the milk-white snow,
Heard I ewes bleat
While the wind did blow.
Shepherds many an one
Sat among the sheep,
No man spake more word
Than they had been asleep.
Quoth I, 'Fellows mine,
Why this guise sit ye?
Making but dull cheer,
Shepherds though ye be?'
'Shepherds should of right
Leap and dance and sing,
Thus to see ye sit,
Is a right strange thing.'
Quoth these fellows then,
'To Bethlem town we go,
To see a mighty Lord
Lie in manger low.'
'How name ye this Lord,
Shepherds?' then said I.
'Very God,' they said,
'Come from Heaven high.'
Then to Bethlem town
We went two and two,
And in a sorry place
Heard the oxen low.
Therein did we see
A sweet and goodly may,
And a fair old man;
Upon the straw she lay.
And a little child
On her arm had she;
'Wot ye who this is?'
Said the hinds to me.
Ox and ass Him know,
Kneeling on their knee;
Wondrous joy had I
This little babe to see.
This is Christ the Lord,
Masters, be ye glad!
Christmas is come in,
And no folk should be sad.
Public domain hymn text (1860). Words by William Morris, set to a traditional French dance tune. Full 12-stanza text, per Edith Rickert, Ancient English Christmas Carols (1914).
The Story Behind the Hymn
William Morris, later famous as a designer, poet, and leading figure in the English Arts and Crafts movement, wrote 'Masters in This Hall' in 1860, setting his new English text to an existing French dance melody he had encountered and admired (the tune is documented in Feuillet’s 1703 Recueil de contredanse and may be older still).
Morris deliberately wrote the lyrics in an archaic, medieval-sounding English style, using words like 'holpen' (an old form of 'helped') and addressing an imagined great hall's 'masters' directly, evoking the feeling of a much older carol than the one he had actually just composed.
That choice reflected Morris's broader artistic interests during this period, well before his later, more famous work in textile design and printing, in medieval craft, literature, and aesthetics, which he saw as embodying a more honest, less industrialized relationship between work and beauty.
The carol's opening scene imagines a traveler arriving at a noble household's hall bearing urgent 'news… brought from over sea,' framing Christ's birth explicitly as breaking news delivered from a distance, arriving into an ordinary domestic setting rather than being announced from a pulpit.
Its refrain, 'Nowell! Nowell!,' uses an old English exclamation of Christmas joy, related to the French 'Noël,' that had largely fallen out of common use by Morris's own Victorian era, another deliberate touch of archaism meant to root the new carol in older tradition.
The second verse shifts the scene outdoors, describing the messenger's own journey 'through the milk-white snow' while hearing shepherds' 'ewes bleat,' briefly folding the shepherds' own experience of the Nativity into the carol's larger frame story.
The carol remains a favorite of English cathedral choirs and folk carol groups specifically because of its deliberately old-fashioned language and structure, a nineteenth-century composition that, through Morris's careful craftsmanship, convincingly wears the voice of a much older age.
