I. THE EARLIEST ENGLISH HYMN
Just as Gregory the Great did not create the music that bears his name, nor Luther the congregational hymnody, so Isaac Watts did not originate the English hymnody of which he is often termed the father. The Lollards, or Wickliffites, sang metrical psalms, and also hymns, in the Low Countries, as well as in England, long before Luther, or Marot, or Sternhold.
Moreover, the emphasis of the Psalms was an ecclesiastical, clerical attitude, while the people at large to whom the Scriptures had been a closed book, and the Psalms an unknown language, sang such vernacular hymns as sprang up among them; so, while we cannot doubt but that they sang some metrical psalms, based on the Wickliffe English Bible, the body of their singing was presumably hymnic.
Indeed, we must go back much farther to find the spring of religious song that was to become a great river of praise. Caedmon, a monk, originally a swineherd, of the early seventh century, supplied the earliest recorded English hymns:
“Now must we hymn the Master of heaven,
The might of the Maker, the deeds of the Father,
The thought of his heart.”
Undoubtedly the times before Caedmon were resonant with earlier songs, for the Venerable Bede (673-735) in the next generation records the fact of a great deal of singing among the people. Indeed, he himself wrote hymns in Anglo-Saxon, as well as in Latin. Patrick and Colombo sang psalms and hymns and made them a means of converting the pagans of Ireland and Scotland.