Arthur Warrell helped popularize which English carol with a 1935 four-part arrangement?

Arthur Warrell helped popularize “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” with a 1935 four-part arrangement.

Warrell was a Bristol-based composer, conductor, organist, and lecturer at the University of Bristol. He arranged the West Country traditional song for his University of Bristol Madrigal Singers, giving it a more elaborate choral setting than the informal versions previously passed through oral tradition.

The singers performed his arrangement in concert on December 6, 1935. Oxford University Press published it that same year under the title “A Merry Christmas: West Country traditional song,” helping establish the version now familiar to broad audiences. Warrell’s setting uses “I wish you” in its opening line rather than the more familiar “We wish you.”

The carol’s precise folk origins are older and less certain than Warrell’s arrangement. Later collections, especially Carols for Choirs in 1961, helped spread the communal “we” version. Traditional variants also change the closing greeting to “Good tidings for Christmas and a happy new year.”