The earliest printed collection of carols was issued by Wynkyn de Worde in 1521. It contained the famous Boar's Head carol, _Caput apri defero, Reddens laudes Domino_, which in a slightly altered form is sung at Queen's College, Oxford, on the bringing in of the boar's head. Modern collections of ancient carols are derived chiefly from three tracts belonging to the collection of Anthony à Wood, preserved in the Bodleian library, from a 15th-century MS. (Sloane 2593), a 16th-century MS. with the music (Add. 5665), and other MSS. in the British Museum, and from oral tradition. In the 15th century T. Bloomer of Birmingham published a number of carols in the form of broad-sides. Among the numerous collections of French carols is _Noei Borguignon de Gui Barôzai_ (1720), giving the words and the music of thirty-four _noëls_, many of them very free in character. The term _noël_ passed into the English carol as a favourite refrain, "nowell," and seems to have been in common use in France as an equivalent for _vivat_.
Among the more important modern collections of Christmas carols are: _Songs and Carols_ (1847), edited by T. Wright for the Percy Society from Sloane MS. 2593; W. Sandys, _Christmastide, its History, Festivities and Carols_ (1852); _Christmas with the Poets_ (edited by V.H., 4th ed., 1872); T. Helmore and J.M. Neale, _Carols for Christmastide_ (1853-1854), with music; R.R. Chope, _Carols_ (new and complete edition, 1894), a tune-book for church use, with an introduction by S. Baring-Gould; H.R. Bramley, _Christmas Carols, New and Old_, the music by Dr Stainer; A.H. Bullen, _Carols and Poems_ (1885); J.A. Fuller Maitland and W.S. Rockstro, _Thirteen Carols of the Fifteenth Century_, from a Trinity Coll., Cambridge, MS. (1891). See also Julian's _Dictionary of Hymnology_, s.v. "Carol"; E. Cortet, _Essai sur les fêtes religieuses_ (1867).
[1] In architecture, the term "carol" (also wrongly spelled "carrel" or "carrol") is used, in the sense of an enclosure, of a small chapel or oratory enclosed by screens, and also sometimes of the rails of the screens themselves. It is more particularly applied to the separate seats near the windows of a cloister (q.v.), used by the monks for the purposes of study, &c. The term "carol" has, by a mistake, been sometimes used of a scroll bearing an inscription of a text, &c.