Hymn: O Thou Who at Thy First Eucharist Didst Pray
Sung in Worship: Sunday, August 4

The words are by William Henry Turton (b. Peshawar, India 1856-d. Devon 1938), who retired a Lieutenant-Colonel from the Royal Engineers.  Educated at Clifton College, Bristol and at the Royal Military College, Woolwich, he was a noted conchologist and genealogist.  This is one of 12 hymns Turton published in A Few Hymns written by a Layman between the Festivals of All Saints, 1880 and 1881.  He subsequently published two other volumes, each containing  12 hymns, with the same title, but different years.   Turton’s other publications are The Truth of Chris­ti­an­ity (1902), The Plantagenet Ancestry (1928), and The Marine Shells of Port Arthur, (1932).  This hymn was included in the supplement to the second edition of A&M, where the first line was altered to “Thou who at thy first eucharist didst pray.”

The tune is Song 1 by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625), England’s leading composer in the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods.  Born in Oxford, Gibbons spent his youth  in Cambridge, where his father was a town wait.  Gibbons sang as a treble in King’s College Chapel, where his elder brother, Edward, was master of the choristers, in 1596-98.  At 14 or 15, in 1598, he enrolled at King’s and graduated Mus. Bac. in 1606. Gibbons was appointed a Gentleman Extraordinary (an uncompensated stand-by singer) in the Chapel Royal in 1603, and became a Gentleman Ordinary (on the death of Arthur Cook in 1603) and  salaried junior organist in 1605, holding that position until his death.

In 1606 Gibbons married and moved with his wife to the parish of St Margaret’s, Westminster. By this time Gibbons’s reputation as an organist was growing.  In 1612 he published his  First Set of Madrigals and Motets, which included The Silver Swan, and in the same year appeared Parthenia or the Maydenhead of the first musicke that ever was printed for the Virginalls, with keyboard music by William Byrd, then 70 and the Dean of British composers, John Bull, 51, Senior Organist of the Chapel Royal, and the 30-year-old Gibbons.  In 1619 he was appointed musician  “for the virginalles to attend in his highnes privie chamber,” that is, the Privy Chamber of the future Charles I.  He was granted an honorary doctorate of Oxford in 1622, and in 1623  was appointed organist at Westminster Abbey. (His son Christopher was organist there 1660-1664 and Master of the Choristers until 1666.)  The Chapel Royal was part of the royal household that went in May 1625 to Canterbury to meet Queen Henrietta Maria, whom Charles I had married by proxy earlier.  Gibbons suddenly became very ill on the journey, and he died of a hemmoragic stroke (called apoplexy) in Canterbury.”

Gibbons wrote 17 tunes for The Hymnes and Songs of the Church (1622-23), by  George Wither (1588-1667), a poet and Puritan pamphleteer.  (His best-known poem is “Shall I, wasting in despair.”)  This was the first hymn book of the English Church not entirely based on the psalms and was intended to counter Sternhold and Hopkins.   The collection is in two parts: first, paraphrases of biblical texts and second, original poems meant to be sung.  For the second section Gibbons wrote 17 tunes with bass lines.