The enduring success of the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter

I recently came across a five-year-old article on the 16th-century Sternhold & Hopkins Psalter, which was used in the English churches for nearly two centuries and in some places even longer than that: The enduring success of the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter. This coincides with my reading of the sample chapters from Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins, and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547-1603 (Routledge, 2008), on which the author of this article draws. The essay's author is Dan Kreider, of Grace Immanuel Bible Church in Jupiter, Florida, a congregation responsible for compiling its own metrical psalter which I reviewed last year. Here is an excerpt:

The metrical psalter was one of the distinguishing marks of the Reformation that swept through England and northern Europe. [Isaac] D’israeli states that the history of psalm-singing is itself a key element in the formulation and growth of the Reformation, “that great religious revolution which separated forever, into two unequal divisions, the great establishment of Christianity.” The theological epiphanies of Luther and Calvin compelled their constituents to adopt a corporate worship that was vernacular, congregational, and above all, participatory–what Luther described as a “plain, simple, fair and square catechism.” Simple settings of the psalms in meter provided such an opportunity. [Hallett] Smith points out that the most obvious reason for a metrical setting of the psalms is that they were, in fact, poetry. [Horton] Davies explains that the great advantage of the metrical psalm was that it “provided for the people of the average parish church an easily memorized set of rhymes and tunes, thus returning to the common people the privileges snatched from them by professional choirs singing complex polyphonic motets and anthems.” . . .

Perhaps the single most notable trait of Sternhold’s settings was their meter: ballad (common or “Master Sternhold’s Metre” as it later came to be called), which Quitslund describes as “essentially a transitional form between fourteener couplets and iambic quatrains.” All except two were written in abcb form, with absolutely consistent text stress.  There is some discussion about whether Sternhold wrote in ballad meter because it was the popular metrical form, or if ballad meter was made popular because of Sternhold’s psalm settings. [Robin A.] Leaver asserts that the latter is likely true: Sternhold used a meter that was un-common and made it universal. [G. H.] Gerould argues instead that the ballad was a very common form, showing that out of a collection of 305 contemporary poems, 179 of these were in ballad meter. Whatever the case, it is certainly true that ballad meter at least had not previously been associated with private or corporate sacred songs.

Contemporary Anglicans may be unaware that their forebears once sang metrical psalms and that a metrical psalter was once bound together with the Book of Common Prayer for congregational use. While the 19th-century Oxford Movement sought to emphasize the catholic roots of the Church of England and may have contributed to the decline of psalm-singing, the author points out that "it was not only those of Puritan leaning that used the psalter, but also Royalists and other high-church groups."

Quitslund tells the story of Sternhold's influence on the boy king, Edward VI (1537-1553), a staunch protestant who, sad to say, did not live to adulthood. Sternhold's small collection of metrical psalms was part of a larger effort to catechize the young monarch in the ways of the Reformation and to encourage salutary political reforms. I hope to return to this topic in the near future, because it brings together my interests in politics and psalmody.