This is one of the arrangements that Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) made for The Oxford Book of Carols, first published in 1928. This tune for the Sussex Carol was noted by Dr. James Culwick in 1904 – who remembered his mother singing it 40 years earlier. When she heard it, in Dublin, there had been about ninety verses, sung by a ‘strong, rough and deep bass voice’ over the course of nearly an hour.