Henry Ramsden Bramley

Henry Ramsden Bramley (4 June 1833 – February 1917) was an English clergyman and hymnologist perhaps best known for his collaborations with the composer Sir John Stainer. Along with earlier 19th-century composers such as William Sandys and John Mason Neale, Bramley and Stainer are credited with fuelling a Victorian revival of Christmas carols with their 1871 publication of Christmas Carols, New and Old, which popularised carols such as "The First Nowell", "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" and "The Holly and the Ivy".

Bramley and John Stainer published the Christmas Carols, New and Old, with a total of 20 carols, sometime in the 1860s. By 1871, the second series of 22 carols came out bringing the total to 42. A third series - with 28 carols - was issued in 1878, expanding the collection to 70 carols, second only to R. R. Chope's Carols for Use In Church in the number of carols it contained.

Henry Ramsden Bramley was born on June 4, 1833 at Addingham in Yorkshire. He studied at Oriel College, Oxford (1852), and was later made a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1857. He was ordained as a deacon in 1856, and priest in 1858. He served as Vicar of Horspath in Oxfordshire between 1861 and 1889, and was later Canon and Precentor of Lincoln Cathedral between 1895-1905. Theologically, he is described in Professor Jeremy Dibble's biography of John Stainer as a "High Church conservative". He never married. His sister Ann lived with him at Nettleham Hall for 17 years following the death of her husband, the Rev. James Stewart Gammell, previously Vicar of Outwood (Yorkshire) where Bramley's parents were interred.

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