Everybody here is standing, but that is not the case in the (proper) version of the well-known carol ‘While shepherds watched …’. What were they watching? – their flocks of course. Over decades of singing this carol, I have always unthinkingly imagined the shepherds were watching their flocks ‘all seated on the ground.’ But were they? Several years’ experience of helping look after sheep has taught me that the shepherd always stands to watch his sheep, thus raising the question whether the carol means that it was the sheep who were ‘seated on the ground.’

A sheep spends up to a third of its day seated on the ground while it ruminates, that is chews and properly digests the grass it has collected in the previous hours. This is the complement to the grazing part of the eating process. So it is distinctly possible, in fact more than likely, that the flocks were sitting down ruminating when an angel dropped in and ‘glory shone around’ in what was almost certainly a disruptive sort of way.

Doubtless others have always assumed that it was the sheep who were lying down in the carol, so cannot see my problem. The parsing of the carol does not help a lot since the adjectival phrase ‘all seated on the ground’ can apply almost equally to either the shepherds or their flocks. That the flocks were plural would sit readily with the single word ‘all’. But the words do not say ‘While shepherds, all seated on the ground, watched their flocks by night’; nor do they say ‘While shepherds watched their flocks, all seated on the ground, by night.’ Either makes the meaning clear, but does not scan. So we are left with the Sitting Enigma, an ambiguity in the opening lines of one of the best-known of carols. Baaaaa…