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.

This hymn is a rare example from the early eighteenth century of a paraphrase of scripture that was not a psalm. It was borrowed from a Scottish paraphrase of the same text. The hymn rehearses line by line the angels’ appearance to the shepherds in Luke 2: 8-15. While many carols offer reflections on the season, few follow the scriptural text closely. The hymn includes the poetic device of anadiplosis, words to end one stanza and to start the next, in the use of the word ‘glory’ which appears in the last line of the first verse and the first line of the last verse.

The use in Together in Song of WINCHESTER OLD follows the Australian practice of appropriating British tunes. WINCHESTER OLD was first published in Thomas Este’s Whole Book of Psalmes (1592) and may have been an adaptation of the second half of Christopher Tye’s music to chapter 8 of his Acts of the Apostles (1553). The words were finally fixed to the tune in Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861).