Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861)

Before 1861 the Church of England had no hymnal of its own, only a chaotic field of more than a hundred competing collections, each parish or diocese choosing its own, with no expectation that a hymn sung in one church would carry the same tune anywhere else. The idea for a fix came out of a chance 1858 meeting on a train between two Oxford Movement clergymen, William Denton and Francis Henry Murray, who found they each already held a hymnal of their own and began discussing whether the two might be merged into one book good enough that other parishes would simply adopt it rather than keep compiling their own. Sir Henry Williams Baker took up the project and assembled a committee of roughly twenty clergy, who came to be known simply as the Proprietors, with William Henry Monk serving as music editor. A trial edition circulated in 1860 with diocesan approval before the first complete edition, 273 hymns strong, appeared from the publisher Novello and Co on 20 March 1861.

What made the book more than one more entry in an already crowded field was a decision that sounds obvious now and was not obvious then, printing the words and the tune together in a single volume rather than leaving congregations to match a text against whichever tune their own organist preferred. Baker called the finished work a companion to the Book of Common Prayer, and parishes agreed with him fast enough that a survey conducted barely three decades later, in 1892, found nearly seventy six percent of Church of England parishes already using it.

A hymnal succeeds or fails on whether congregations actually sing from it, and by that measure Hymns Ancient and Modern is arguably the most successful book the Church of England has ever produced. Estimates place its total sales somewhere north of 170 million copies across more than a century and a half of continuous printing, a figure that keeps climbing toward 200 million as later editions remain in use, numbers that put it in a category few hymnals from any tradition or country have approached. The name itself describes the balance the original editors struck, dividing the 1861 collection almost evenly between patristic and medieval hymns translated from Latin, Greek and German on the ancient side, and eighteenth and nineteenth century English hymn writing on the modern side, so that a single volume could serve a parish wanting continuity with the early church and a parish wanting newer evangelical and Oxford Movement hymnody at once.

Its influence extended well past its own pages. Later Anglican hymnals, including The English Hymnal of 1906 and The New English Hymnal of 1986, were built either to succeed it directly or explicitly to answer it, treating its structure and its practice of pairing a fixed tune to each text as the standard any successor had to reckon with. A book that began as a private attempt to end a hundred way split among parish hymnals ended up defining what an English hymnal was expected to look like for the century and a half that followed.