We plough the fields, and scatter

Section 9a concludes with a hymn which would enrich the European Union. If Jane Montgomery Campbell’s words, crucially partnered by the tune, have provided the archetypal hymn for an English (19th-c) harvest, much original credit must go to the German Commissioner of Agriculture and Manufacture, also newspaper editor and bank auditor, whose Christian faith recovered from 18th-c liberal humanism and gave his generation Wir pflügen and wir streuen/ den Samen auf das Land. This was Matthias Claudius, whose 17 four-line stzs and refrain, with a different opening line, appeared as a peasant song in a 1782 dramatic sketch, set in a farmhouse, called Paul Erdmann’s Feast. It featured in a newspaper published in the Hanover area, over the author’s usual pseudonym ‘Asmus’. Jane Campbell’s English paraphrase, which covered 6 of the original stzs, was published in 1861 in C S Bere’s Garland of Song. Her 3.5,7 (‘No gifts have we to offer … / but that which thou desirest’) have generally been changed to allow the possibility of more visible or even countable offerings when the hymn is sung. Some have made rather heavy theological weather of the change. In the very light modernising here, 3.7 is the only difficulty. Less patient writers and editors have published ‘We plough the fields with tractors,/ with drills we sow the land …’; earlier ones had ‘We plough the fertile cornfields’. But most of the text, interpreted poetically, is biblical enough, with Psalms and Gospels in equal evidence. And whatever we do with the stzs, the chorus is valuable as a timeless reminder of James 1:17, and an easily-learned all-age grace before meals.

The tune is anonymous in Hoppenstedt’s 1800 Melodien für Volksschulen (‘Songs for state schools’), where it is set to Claudius’s text with a changed chorus. By 1818 it was being credited to Johann A P Schultz, and its harvest use in England anticipated the now-familiar words by 15 years. It was set in 1847 to a hymn by M F Tupper, and in 1854 to a translation from Claudius by S F Smith. The range of the tune is wide but singable; the flow of its melody has been happily if fortuitously compared with that of the English
folk-song The Farmer’s Boy; and its name WIR PFLÜGEN uses what have become the first two words from the German: ‘We plough’.

b Paddington, Middx (C London) 1817, d Bovey Tracey, Devon 1878. After her early years in London, where she taught singing in her father’s parish school of St James, Paddington, she moved to Bovey Tracey nr Newton Abbot, and remained there until her death from a tragic carriage accident on Dartmoor. As well as a ‘musical enthusiast’ she was a gifted linguist and German scholar whose translations appeared in 1862 in A Garland of Songs: or, an English Liederkranz. This contained the text which became a classic as the quintessential harvest hymn for Victorians and their successors. It was followed by Children’s Chorale Book (1869). Both these collections were compiled with her assistance by Charles S Bere. Her own Handbook for Singers comprised musical exercises based on her teaching experience. ‘Montgomery’ was a family name. No.919.

b Reinfeld in Holstein, nr Lübeck 1740, d Wandsbeck nr Hamburg, Germany 1815. Univ of Jena. He made his home at Wandsbeck, having been diverted by the prevalent German rationalism from his original study of theology with a view to ordination. He turned instead to journalism and law; influenced in his 30s by Goethe and the freethinkers in the Darmstadt area, he moved even further from any faith until a severe illness brought him to a new understanding and recommitment to Christ. He edited a Christian journal The Wandsbecker Bote, or the Messenger; a financial crisis (for his family of 11 children) overlapped with his spiritual one, but eventually in 1788 he obtained the post of auditor to the Schleswig-Holstein Bank at Altona, an appointment in the gift of the Crown Prince of Denmark. In 1808 he retired to live with his daughter in Hamburg. He was known for his normally cheerful and humorous spirit and love of nature; although he never set out to write hymns as such, his verses were praised by Longfellow for their ‘strong, primitive and sympathetic Christian feeling’ and their nationwide influence (as quoted by Kenneth Parry). No.919.