Angels We Have Heard On High: A Song History

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This carol began in France, and its early history is known from printed collections rather than from a named author. The oldest version found so far appeared in Marseille in 1805, in a book of French and Provençal noëls edited by Père Roche, with a different opening line but the same Latin refrain; whether Roche wrote it or simply gathered it is uncertain.[1] A Montpellier variant followed in 1818, and the familiar French opening, “Les anges dans nos campagnes,” is found in a Paris collection of 1842 that labels it a noël of Languedoc and credits the music to “W.M.,” most likely Wulfran Moreau of Poitiers, then only about fifteen.[1] A story recorded by the carol historian William Studwell, that a second-century bishop of Rome named Telesphorus ordered the refrain sung each Christmas and that it later grew into the French carol, is a legend; Studwell himself judged it charming but untrue.[2]

Round stained-glass panel of an angel flying above shepherds, one playing bagpipes, with sheep and a town in the distance

North Netherlandish, Roundel with Annunciation to the Shepherds, colorless glass, vitreous paint and silver stain, 1500–1510. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The English words grew from a free rendering by James Chadwick, later Roman Catholic bishop of Newcastle,[3][4] first printed in London in 1860 and revised by others in Catholic collections over the following years; the trochaic version sung today differs from Chadwick’s original iambic meter.[1] The melody, known as GLORIA, appears in many hymnals in an arrangement by the American organist Edward Shippen Barnes (1887–1958), first published in the New Church Hymnal of 1937.[1][3] The same tune is also called IRIS, from its pairing with James Montgomery’s “Angels from the Realms of Glory.”[3][1]

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Sources

  1. Hymnology Archive (Chris Fenner with James R. Eggert): "Angels We Have Heard on High".
  2. Hymns and Carols of Christmas: "Angels We Have Heard On High".
  3. Hymnary.org: "Angels we have heard on high (Les anges dans nos campagnes)," Psalter Hymnal 347.
  4. Hymnary.org: "James Chadwick" (from Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology, New Supplement, 1907).