The poem is clearly not made for ordinary persons, and ordinary persons hardly feature. Mary becomes a ‘woman of the nobility’, Joseph is a nobleman and the herald angels ignore the shepherds and talk to his grooms and sentries at the stables. The baby Jesus wears not swaddling clothes but jewels. When he grows up and begins to bring together the disciples, they reckon him a generous man, free with the gold and gifts, and also with the drink, or at least the mead; he does as Saxon nobles do, as Anskar learned to do among the pagans he wanted to convert. For Jesus, the disciples become in turn
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