Dr Julia Pitman

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night (Together In Song 299) is one of the oldest texts that can be reliably dated in the history of English church hymnody as it emerged after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1662. The hymn was first published in Brady and Tate’s, A Supplement to the New Version of Psalms in 1700. At that time, the impact of Watts and Wesley on congregational singing was yet to be felt. Following John Calvin, congregations sung metrical psalms from his Genevan Psalter (1551), or close paraphrases of psalms from the King James Version. They sang in unison, in the vernacular and with no musical accompaniment made by human hands. Gradually, church musicians introduced hymns such as ‘While Shepherds Watched’ to improve the literary quality of the authorised books of psalters. They applied the scriptural paraphrase to passages other than psalms and to contemporary life. The hymn was born. John Calvin would have been rolling in his grave!

‘While Shepherds Watched’ is one of three hymns in our hymnal by Nahum Tate (1652-1715), a Dubliner who moved to London in 1688 to adapt works for the theatre. He became poet laureate in 1692. Tate also wrote and published metrical psalms. Tate and Brady’s New Version (1696) of Sternhold and Hopkins’ ‘Old Version’ (1562) influenced psalmody well into the nineteenth century.