Hymns Ancient and Modern

Hymns Ancient and Modern
Commissioned by	William Denton, Francis Murray, Sir Henry Williams Baker, 3rd Baronet
Approved for	Church of England
Released	1861
Publisher	Canterbury Press
Editor	William Henry Monk
Number of Hymns	273

Hymns Ancient and Modern is a hymnal in common use within the Church of England and resulted out of the efforts of the Oxford Movement. Over the years it has grown into a large family of hymnals. As such, the Hymns Ancient and Modern set the standard for the current hymnal in the Church of England.

By 1830 the regular singing of hymns in the dissenting churches (outside the Church of England) had become widely accepted due to hymn writers like Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley and others. In the Church of England hymn singing was not an integral part of Orders of Service until the early nineteenth century, and hymns, as opposed to metrical psalms, were not officially sanctioned. From about 1800 parish churches started to use different hymn collections in informal service like the Lock Hospital Collection (1769) by Martin Madan, the Olney hymns (1779) by John Newton and William Cowper and A Collection of Hymns for the Use of The People Called Methodists (1779) by John Wesley and Charles Wesley.

A further impetus to hymn singing in the Anglican Church came in the 1830s from the Oxford Movement, led by John Keble and John Henry Newman. Being an ecclesiastical reform movement within the Anglican Church, the Oxford Movement wanted to recover the lost treasures of Breviaries and Service Books of the ancient Greek and Latin churches. As a result Greek, Latin and even German hymns in translation entered the mainstream of English hymnody. These translations were composed by people like John Chandler, John Mason Neale, Thomas Helmore, Edward Caswall, Jane Laurie Borthwick and Catherine Winkworth. Besides stimulating the translation of medieval hymns, and use of plainsong melodies, the Oxford Reformers, inspired by Reginald Heber’s work, also began to write original hymns. Among this hymnwriters were clergy like Henry Alford, Henry Williams Baker, Sabine Baring-Gould, John Keble and Christopher Wordsworth and laymen like Matthew Bridges, William Chatterton Dix and Folliott Sandford Pierpoint.

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