The Book That Set the Tune as Well as the Words

A hymnal succeeds or fails on whether congregations actually sing from it, and by that measure Hymns Ancient and Modern is arguably the most successful book the Church of England has ever produced. Estimates place its total sales somewhere north of 170 million copies across more than a century and a half of continuous printing, a figure that keeps climbing toward 200 million as later editions remain in use, numbers that put it in a category few hymnals from any tradition or country have approached. The name itself describes the balance the original editors struck, dividing the 1861 collection almost evenly between patristic and medieval hymns translated from Latin, Greek and German on the ancient side, and eighteenth and nineteenth century English hymn writing on the modern side, so that a single volume could serve a parish wanting continuity with the early church and a parish wanting newer evangelical and Oxford Movement hymnody at once.

Its influence extended well past its own pages. Later Anglican hymnals, including The English Hymnal of 1906 and The New English Hymnal of 1986, were built either to succeed it directly or explicitly to answer it, treating its structure and its practice of pairing a fixed tune to each text as the standard any successor had to reckon with. A book that began as a private attempt to end a hundred way split among parish hymnals ended up defining what an English hymnal was expected to look like for the century and a half that followed.