‘All skillful praises sing’: how congregations sang the psalms in early modern England

Abstract

AbstractThe tunes of The Whole Book of Psalms would become the foundation of congregational singing in England. But when Thomas Sternhold published his first collection of paraphrases (circa 1548) he expected them to be sung in a private domestic context, and the few extant Edwardian settings do not differ in character from secular songs and dances of the time. There is no record of congregational singing until it was adopted by the Marian exiles under the direct influence of Calvin. The first tunes were printed as part of the 1556 Anglo‐Genevan service book. They were clearly modelled on the grandly solemn tunes of the French Psalter, but the fundamental differences between French and English prosody created a conflict that was too much for anyone in the small English colonies to resolve satisfactorily. Nevertheless, congregational singing of ‘Geneva psalms’ was rapidly adopted in English churches from 1559 onwards. The tune selection was revised and enlarged, and had settled into a permanent ‘canon’ by the time the 1565 edition of The Whole Book of Psalms appeared. Metrical psalm‐singing soon became popular well beyond the Puritan faction, both in church and in private settings. The tunes, like the psalms, were reprinted with only minor changes for the rest of Elizabeth's reign. There is evidence, however, that by the 1590s many of them had been abandoned in practice as too difficult, or perhaps too tedious, as they slowed down year after year. They were largely replaced by a handful of short, simple tunes of unknown authorship, which became known as the ‘common tunes’ because they were not tied to specific texts. In some respects the common tunes were a return to the more popular idiom of Edwardian times. Many of them outlived the psalm paraphrases themselves and are still in widespread use as hymn tunes today.