While shepherds watched their flocks by night

With this Christmas hymn, Nahum Tate gave the world the NT equivalent of 375—that is, a Scripture paraphrase which made its way into Prayer Books and Psalters long before hymns as such were formally permitted. It tells the story of Luke 2:8–14, remarkably stopping short of what for most readers is the climax of the narrative in the following vv. The poverty of the shepherds ‘on the ground’ and of the babe ‘all simply [meanly] wrapped’ proved an ironic and world-famous memorial to an author who sank from national fame to largely self-induced destitution. Since 1700, when it first appeared in A Supplement to the New Version of the Psalms, countless other writers have used Luke 2 as their reference point, but none so simply and few so successfully as Tate. His work is the sole survivor from that supplement, avoiding its otherwise frequent and tortuous word-inversions. If it lacks the expected climax, his response might be that we who sing it know what is coming next, and the final stz (to which a descant is often added) is a sufficient and authentic conclusion. Among textual variations, ‘David’s town’ is clarified as Bethlehem (stz 3); 4.3 has known ‘swathing bands’, ‘swaddling clothes’ (from the AV Bible; cf 384) or ‘simple clothing’; this version tries to steer between the quaintly familiar and the intelligibly modern. In stz 5 ‘forthwith’ is changed, and the final stz avoids both the mistranslation and the masculinity of the original. ‘Seraph’ is retained for poetic reasons in stz 5. The Canadian Reformed Book of Praise (1984) offers a notably reformed text of stzs 2, 4 and 5: ‘He said to them, “Be not afraid,/ for I have come to tell/ good news of great and wondrous joy/ for all of Israel��? …’ (but not to ‘all mankind/people’?).

In the 1987 Carol Praise no fewer than 4 tunes are provided; only The Wedding Book (1989, from the same editors) seems quite so lavish with its options—in that case, for another text. One tune for this hymn is LYNGHAM (324); another is NORTHROP (as in EH); another, the celebrated ILKLEY MOOR (originally in 1805 a Methodist tune, known as CRANBROOK in the 1927 edn of The Companion Tune Book to Gadsby’s Hymns which set it to Grace! ’tis a charming sound); and a 4th, Herbert Chappell’s WHILE SHEPHERDS WATCHED. In The Oxford Book of Carols it is arranged as CMD, set to ‘the traditional tune proper to the words’ (Dearmer, 1928). Yet another in use was SERAPH=EVANGEL (33). But for many, as here, the inevitable music is WINCHESTER OLD, as set to a Psalm 84 paraphrase in Thomas Este’s Whole Book of Psalmes of 1592. This probably derives from Christopher Tye’s music composed in 1553 for his settings from the book of Acts, in Acts of the Apostles. But the music publisher Este (aka Est, East, etc) employed George Kirbye of Bury St Edmunds as a music-arranger for his book, and Kirbye may have given the tune its now familiar shape, though it was dropped from later editions. Thos Ravenscroft named it WINCHESTER in his 1621 Psalmes; the present name distinguishes it from 348. It was the 1861 A&M which joined the tune to Tate’s words.

(formerly TEATE), b Dublin 1652, d Southwark, London 1715. Trinity Coll Dublin. When he reported a revolutionary plot to the authorities, his Dublin home was burned down and 3 of his children were killed. He then settled in England, published Poems on Several Occasions in 1677, and rewrote several plays by others including a rewritten King Lear with a happy ending (which Dr Johnson defended and which proved popular, even normative, for over a century). In 1682 he contributed substantially to Pt II of Dryden’s classic political satire Absalom and Achitophel. In 1692 he became Poet Laureate, holding the post under 3 sovereigns but becoming an obvious target for Pope’s catalogue of ‘fools’ in The Dunciad. With Nicholas Brady (qv) he produced the New Version of the Psalms of David in 1696, intended to replace Sternhold and Hopkins ‘Old Version’; in 1702 he became Historiographer Royal, and in 1710 he wrote an Essay on Psalmody, defending it against current attacks. But becoming ‘dissolute and intemperate’ he died in a London Refuge for Debtors where he had gone to escape his creditors. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St George’s parish, Southwark. Nos.33*, 379, 768*.