The curious language of Christmas carols

I could never understand as a little girl why we sang: ‘Away in a manger, no crib for a bed.’ I knew what a manger was, and I knew that people set up cribs at home and in churches with the Child Jesus in the manger and the animals, shepherds and all the trimmings.

It turns out that I was right to be puzzled, for crib has the primary meaning of ‘a manger’, not ‘a baby’s cradle’. It’s a good old English word. Richard Rolle wrote in the 14th century of Jesus ‘born and laid in a crib between an ox and an ass’. The ox and the ass do not come from the Gospels, but from the prophetic words of Isaiah (1:3): ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib,’ as it’s translated in the Authorised Version.

So the carol would be better as: ‘Away in a manger, a crib for a bed.’ Who was to blame for the silly version is hard to tell. The carol in its earliest known published form, in the magazine The Myrtle for May 1884, came with the quite false assurance that Martin Luther ‘composed the following hymn for his children; and it is still sung by many German mothers to their little ones’.

It’s funny that the various other meanings of crib all derive from the word meaning ‘a manger’. It can be a hovel, ‘a smoky crib’ in Henry IV Part 2. In thieves’ slang it was a place to crack or burgle. In American slang it was a saloon or low dive, even a brothel. In Cornwall and Australia it was a packed lunch. From early times it meant a basket, and thus an apparatus for draining salt in salt-making, or for catching salmon.