Songs of Doubt and Belief is a set of four accessible Christmas carols for upper voices and organ. The texts of the first and last movements – The Cherry Tree and Gle, Glo, Glory – are adapted from the N-town mystery plays. The Cherry Tree tells the story of Mary and Joseph stopping at a cherry orchard on their way to Bethlehem. When the pregnant Mary asks her husband to pick cherries for her, Joseph tells Mary to let the child’s father pick her cherries. Mary responds by asking God to lower a branch for her; when the branch is miraculously lowered, Joseph comes to believe that Mary really is pregnant with the son of God. Gle, Glo, Glory depicts the annunciation to the shepherds. The shepherds hear the angels sing ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ – but are initially confused because they don’t understand Latin. Between these carols are two settings of somewhat more recent texts. The Oxen sets a poem by Thomas Hardy which tells of the belief that, at midnight every Christmas Eve, oxen would kneel in homage to the infant Jesus. The narrator of the poem struggles to believe the legend, but nevertheless hopes it is true. The Shepherds Went Their Hasty Way is a setting of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and depicts the shepherds arriving at the manger. The twin themes of doubt and belief recur throughout the set; the doubt of Joseph in The Cherry Tree and of the narrator in The Oxen give way to more straightforward affirmations of faith in The Shepherds Went Their Hasty Way and Gle, Glo, Glory.