The carol 'Ding Dong Merrily on High' uses a French dance tune originally called what?

The tune used for “Ding Dong Merrily on High” was originally called Branle de l’Official.

It began not as a Christmas hymn but as a French secular dance tune printed in Orchésographie, a late-16th-century dance manual by Thoinot Arbeau, the pen name of Jehan Tabourot. A branle was a type of Renaissance dance in which participants moved with coordinated side-to-side steps.

The English Christmas words were written much later by George Ratcliffe Woodward. They were first published in 1924 in The Cambridge Carol-Book. Woodward’s text combines English verses with the Latin refrain “Gloria, Hosanna in excelsis,” creating the carol’s distinctive macaronic style.

The age of the melody can cause confusion: the tune is Renaissance, but the familiar Christmas carol is a 20th-century adaptation. Charles Wood supplied the commonly performed harmony, and later arrangers—including David Willcocks—helped establish the piece in modern choral repertory. The long, rising “Gloria” melisma is especially recognizable in performances.