01695--carol

Carol is a song of religious rejoicing, usually associated with Christmas or Easter in the Christian calendar. In the Middle Ages, however, a carol could be a purely secular song of love or satire. A carol in this earlier sense is a song appropriate for a round dance, composed in regular rhyming stanzas with a refrain or burden: a common form was the four-line stanza rhyming aaab with a two-line burden rhyming bb.