V. ENGLISH PSALM VERSIONS BEFORE STERNHOLD
There had been English versions of some of the Psalms before Sternhold undertook the task. Bishop Aldhelm of Sherborne, who died in 709 A.D., composed a complete psalter. Two versions were due to Lutheran influence. That of Miles Coverdale, Ghoostly Psalms and Spiritual Songs, appearing sometime between 1530 and 1540, used some of the German chorales, including the great “Ein’ feste Burg.”
The Wedderburn brothers of Dundee, Scotland, issued the Compendious Booke of Gude and Godlie Ballates, also known as Dundee Psalms, on the return of John Wedderburn, soon after 1539, from Wittenberg, where he had been under the influence of both Luther and Melanchthon. Latin psalms and hymns had no value with young people, he insisted in his preface; “but when they hear it sung into their vulgar tongue, or sing it themselves, with sweet melody, then shall they love their God with heart and mind, and cause them to put away bawdry and unclean songs.” While considerably better than the songs the collection displaced, the new book was too cheaply popular, and undignified in many of its religious parodies of popular songs, to satisfy the elders of the Scottish Kirk (!) and they tried to suppress it.
But the lines of religious, social, doctrinal, and political influence connected England and Scotland with France and Geneva so closely that it happened that the new English and Scotch psalmody was based on the work of Marot and Calvin and not on that of Luther. To human minds with some sense of literary dignity and style and of a more spontaneous expression of religious life and experience, it seems a great pity!
The first response in England to the new version of Marot was the Latin version of George Buchanan in 1548. Latin was an entirely dead language to the commonalty, but was quite generally familiar to people of scholarship and culture. This version, in the scholarly language of all Europe (like the Mandarin in China), found wide appreciation in intellectual circles and many editions of it were issued. Of course, the mass of the English people was not affected by it, and it had little or no influence on the development of English psalmody.
That there were vernacular versions already in use, is quite certain. Robert Cowley anticipated Sternhold and Hopkins in the versifying of the whole Psalter, issuing his work in 1549. In the preface to this collection he refers to previous versions which had passages “obscure and hard.” Probably they were Lollard or Wycliffite in origin, for these “sweet singers,” precursors of the Reformation to come, worked among the lower classes in the Low Countries as well as in England, singing the Gospel in the vernacular.