'Good King Wenceslas' is one of our most loved, though many would say hackneyed, Christmas carols. But why every year should millions of English people sing about the exploits of an early medieval Bohemian prince ? This programme sets out to answer the question.

Wenceslas is credited with bringing Christianity to Bohemia in the early 10th century. To do so he had to struggle against 'pagan' forces led by his own mother, and he was assassinated by his brother. Legends about his life were handed down from generation to generation, and were picked up by English writers. The leading Elizabethan English Catholic, Edmund Campion, wrote a eulogy on him.

Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, when Wenceslas became a hero for nascent Czech nationalism, a long poem about his life was read by a controversial young Anglican churchman John Mason Neale. He was close to the neo-Catholic Oxford Movement and the church hierarchy barred him from serving as a vicar. He berated the Anglican church for its complacency, for its social snobbery, and for failing in its duty towards the poor. He set up an Anglican convent in Kent whose nuns devoted themselves to nursing the poor in their own homes. The order thrives to this day. Neale wrote voluminously, especially hymns and religious stories that could be appreciated by ordinary people. And a volume of carols he produced in 1853 included 'Wenceslas'. For Neale the old Czech myth carried a sharp political message for his own day - the primacy of charity. Despite the editor of the Oxford Book of Carols dismissing it as "doggerel, poor and commonplace", 'Wenceslas' became immediately popular.