When was the first hymn book published?
The first HYMN BOOK.
The first HYMN BOOK in the vernacular was published at Prague by Severin for the Hussites of Bohemia on 13 January 1501. It contained 89 hymns in the Czech language, of which 21 were by the Bohemian divines Konvaldsky, Taborsky and Lucas Pragensis. The name of the hymnal is not known, as the only surviving copy lacks the title page. The first English hymn book was Miles Coverdale’s Goostly Psalmes and Spiritually Songes, London 1539. Besides paraphrases of 9 Latin hymns, it contained 15 others, of which at least 13, and possibly all, were translations from the German. This hymnal was never employed in regular Church worship, as it was prohibited immediately upon publication.
The first hymnal containing original matter in English was George Wither’s Hymns and Songs of the Church, for which Orlando Gibbons provided 16 of the tunes. On its publication in 1623 the King granted Wither a privilege by which a copy was to be bound up with every Bible printed. This aroused intense opposition from the Privy Council for the suppression of the hymnal. It is unlikely that Wither’s hymn book would have been employed in Anglican Church worship, as the singing of hymns at services was proscribed by an Act of Elizabeth I and remained so until the end of the 17th century.
The first religious body in England to adopt the singing of hymns as part of its regular form of worship was the Baptist congregation of Benjamin Keach at Horsley Down, Southwark, which introduced the practice of singing a hymn at the Lord’s Supper in 1673. Keach published the first Non-conformist hymnal, Spiritual Melody, in 1691. This collection of 300 hymns was the first to be adopted by an English Church. The Congregationalists began the use of hymns in worship the same year and published their first hymn book in 1694. The first Methodist hymn book was John and Charles Wesley’s Hymns and Sacred Poems of 1739. The first Church of England hymn book published in Britain for general use was Martin Madan’s A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, Extracted front Various Authors, London, 1760. Hymn-singing (as opposed to the rendering of Psalms and anthems) made little progress outside the cathedrals and more fashionable churches until the introduction of choirs into Anglican parish churches in the 1840s.