The words are a paraphrase of Psalm 100 by William Kethe (b. unknown, d. 1594), probably Scottish-born, but active in England. He was first mentioned in the reign of Edward VI (1547-53) as a militant Protestant, author of poems attacking the Roman Catholic church.  At the accession of Mary Tudor he went into exile, along with other protestants.  Kethe was active among the Marian exiles, first in Frankfurt, where he was associated with John Knox and William Whittingham, and by 1557 with Knox in Geneva, where he was had some part in the translation of the Geneva Bible of 1560. (The “Breeches” Bible, so called because it says that Adam and Eve made breeches to cover their nakedness.) He returned to England after the accession of Elizabeth, in 1560 or 1561, and was rector in the village of Childe Okeford, Dorset, until his death, except for a brief period when he was a chaplain in the Earl of Warwick’s unsuccessful campaign to save Le Havre for the English.  Kethe contributed 25 psalm paraphrases to the 1561 Anglo-Genevan Psalter, translating from the French versions of the court poet Clément Marot and his successor, the theologian and poet Théodore de Bèze.  Kethe’s paraphrases, with others, were added to the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter which the English exiles in Geneva had brought with them, creating Four Score and Seven Psalmes of David in English Mitre [sic], 1561.  All Kethe’s paraphrases were then used in the Scottish Psalter of 1564-5 (The Forme Of Prayers . . . used in the English Church at Geneva, approved and received by the Churche of Scotland . . . with the whole Psalmes of David in English meter).  Ten of them, including this one, were used in the English Psalter of 1565.  Kethe somewhat alters the tone of the first quatrain with the word “fear” in the third line.  The French version has Réjouissez-vous (from the Vulgate’s laetitia).  Kethe’s Psalm 100 was so well known that later in the 16th century Shakespeare could refer to its metre in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

The tune, Old Hundredth, was probably composed by Loys [Louis] Bourgeois (c. 1510-1559), who had been responsible for most of the musical settings of the psalms in the 1551 edition of the Geneva psalter.   The first phrase, however, may have existed as a plainsong melody for several centuries before that.  Some scholars believe that Bourgeois adapted a tune composed by Guillaume Franc (c. 1505-1571), and it is certainly the fact that Bourgeois often edited earlier compositions.  He was sent to prison for changing the tunes for some well-known psalms "without a license."  John Calvin intervened to have Bourgeois released, but the town council ordered that his instructions for singing the psalms be burned.  In the Geneva psalter this tune was the setting for Psalm 134; Kethe adopted it for his Psalm 100, and it thus entered the Scottish and English collections.  It gained the name “Old Hundredth” after the publication of Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady’s psalter (1696) replaced the “Old Version,”  Sternhold and Hopkins’ psalter of 1562.  A doxology beginning, “To Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” printed separately with other closing formulas in Tate and Brady, is there said to be optional with Psalm 100.  It is not the doxology written by Bishop Thomas Ken.  Although sometimes attributed to Kethe, it was not attached to any of the earlier printings of his psalm and was probably in fact written by Tate or Brady. The first edition of Ancient & Modern added this doxology to the hymn; it is sometimes, but not always, printed in later hymn books.  A setting of Old Hundredth by RVW was sung for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the first congregational hymn ever to be sung in an English coronation.

Join us on Sunday, September 8 as we sing!