While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks: A Song History

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This paraphrase of the shepherds’ story from Luke’s Gospel first appeared in 1700, in the Supplement to A New Version of the Psalms of David by Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady.[1][2] It is normally credited to Tate (1652–1715), the Dublin-born playwright who became Poet Laureate in 1692, although how the two collaborators divided the work is not clear.[1][2] From 1700 until 1782 it was the only Christmas hymn accepted in the Church of England; in 1782 it was joined by two others, one of them a version of Charles Wesley’s “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.”[3]

Gilded and enameled medieval plaque of an angel with a scroll greeting three shepherds and their animals, with angels above

South Netherlandish, Plaque with the Annunciation to the Shepherds, champlevé enamel on gilded copper, ca. 1165. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Because the text is in common metre, it fits an enormous number of tunes, and hundreds were attached to it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; country parish churches often sang them with small bands of singers and instrumentalists placed in their west galleries.[3] In Britain it is now usually sung to WINCHESTER OLD, a psalm tune from Thomas Este’s 1592 psalter, probably arranged by George Kirbye; the pairing became standard after Hymns Ancient and Modern printed it in 1861.[4][5] American congregations more often use CHRISTMAS, adapted from the opening of a soprano aria in Handel’s 1728 opera Siroe.[6][5]

CRANBROOK, by the Canterbury shoemaker and psalmodist Thomas Clark, was written for a different hymn, then taken up for “While Shepherds,” and later still became the melody of the Yorkshire song “On Ilkla Moor Baht ’at”—a case one scholar calls “an unusual reversal” of the usual borrowing from secular to sacred.[3][7] Around Sheffield, the pub-carolling tradition still keeps older settings such as “Old Foster” in use, and by one estimate some fifty different tunes are sung to these words there.[3][8] The Watersons recorded the carol in 1977 on Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy, using a tune they learned from the Norfolk singer Walter Pardon.[8]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks".
  2. Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology: "While shepherds watched their flocks by night".
  3. Hyperion Records (Peter Holman, liner notes for CDA66924): "While shepherds watched".
  4. Hymnary.org: "WINCHESTER OLD".
  5. Classic FM: "What are the lyrics to ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks’, and what’s the story?".
  6. Hymnary.org: "CHRISTMAS (Handel)".
  7. Hymnary.org: "CRANBROOK".
  8. Mainly Norfolk: "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks / Sweet Chiming Bells / Hail Chime On".