• The Airmen's Hymn
• At the Name of Jesus (tune : King's Weston)
• Blake's Cradle Song
• A Call to the Free Nations
• Come down, oh Love Divine (tune : Down Ampney)
• The English Hymnal (1906, revised 1933)
• Fierce raged the Tempest (tune : White Gates)
• Five wartime hymns
• For all the Saints (tune : Sine Nomine)
• God be with you till we meet again
• The Golden Carol
• Hail thee, Festival Day (tune : Salve feste Dies)
• He who would valiant be (tune : Monk's Gate)
• A Hymn of Freedom
• Into the woods my master went
• I vow to Thee my Country
• Let us now praise famous men
• The night has come
• Saviour, again to Thy dear name
• Servants of God
• Servants of the great adventure
• Snow in the Street
• Songs of Praise (1925, enlarged edition 1931)
• The Oxford book of Carols (1927)
• Wither's Rocking Hymn

The English Hymnal

The original English Hymnal (edited by RVW and Percy Dearmer) was published in 1906; a revised edition was published in 1933. The 1933 edition kept a similar format and numbering (the plainsong accompaniments were revised, and one or two other adjustments were made throughout the book - look at page xx of the EH 1933 and you'll see what RVW says about it). You may know that the Appendix of Tunes at the back of the book is known in the trade as the Chamber of Horrors, where RVW consigned some of the tunes from the original edition and replaced them with others in the body of the book. It may well be that RVW called it that himself.

The New English Hymnal, published by Canterbury Press in 1986, doesn't have specifically named editors, it seems, but rather it was a Committee effort - the English Hymnal Company itself, as it were. There are seven names as signatories to the Preface. At that time Father George Timms, former Archdeacon of Hackney, was the Chairman of the Hymnal Committee and the Chairman of the English Hymnal Company. I don't think any of the Committee names would mean much to anyone from overseas - no recognizable composers or poets. A great deal of old EH material is included, plus a proportion of what was in English Praise (the supplement to EH which we published for the EH Co in 1975). The NEH is `only in a very limited sense an experimental book' by the editors' own admission, in the Preface.

There was also the English Hymnal Service Book which OUP brought out in 1962; not newly edited in any way, but an abridgement of the parent book, giving fewer hymns (numbering related exactly to EH, so inter-usable, except for the addition of a few carols) and adding Matins & Evensong Responses, Creed, Confession, etc, the Canticles and Psalms with pointing, and the Merbecke setting of Holy Communion, thus supposedly providing a complete hymn and service book in one.

Thanks to Oxford University Press for this information.

Other Background Information

Despite composing many items of "religious" and spiritual music, Vaughan Williams considered himself an agnostic.

RVW named the tune "Sine Nomine" using the Latin translation of the hymn's name, because he couldn't think of a better name. The tune can also be heard on several occasions in the 5th symphony.

The version of the hymn "I vow to Thee my Country" using part of "Jupiter" from Holst's "The Planets" Suite is better known.