It was first published in 1928 by Oxford University Press and was edited by Percy Dearmer, Martin Shaw and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Vaughan Williams was a noted composer and arranger of music in the Anglican Church and a founding member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

[1] Vaughan Williams had collaborated with Percy Dearmer on the production of the English Hymnal, which was published in 1906, and as with this hymnal, The Oxford Book of Carols favoured traditional folk tunes and polyphonic arrangements of carols, instead of the Victorian hymn tunes that Vaughan Williams considered to be over-sentimental and Germanic in tone.

Anthologists Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott make few references to OBC in their Introduction and their aim appears the same as Dearmer's in 1928.

The enormous task was shared by both sets of anthologists and Keyte and Parrott issued The Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols in 1993.