A semi-regular column by Peter Humphries
“For All the Saints” (CP 276) was written by Bishop William Walsham How. Known as the poor man’s bishop and the children’s bishop, How was Suffragan Bishop in east London (subordinate to the metropolitan or diocesan bishop) and, eventually, Bishop of Wakefield (no longer a thing), recognised for his work with London’s poor and (also poor) west Yorkshire factory workers. In addition to writing about the Oxford Movement, he was an editor of Psalms and Hymns (1854) and Church Hymns (1871), wrote around 60 hymns, himself, and was the founder of Oswestry’s first public library. Some of his hymns and other poems can be found in his own collection, Poems and Hymns (1886). He published 54 of his hymns on their own in another collection; a prolific poet, he wrote 10 hymns in 1871, alone! His interests extended to botany, and he was a founding member of the Oswestry and Welshpool Naturalists’ Field Club and Archaeological Society and president of the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union. One unusual claim to fame for How is that he appears in The Elephant Man, the 1979 play by Bernard Pomerance.
Our tune, called Sine Nomine, was composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. There are a lot of tunes “called” Sine Nomine, which means “without name,” because it was the practice to name a tune “Sine Nomine” if it was not the setting for an already existing tune (that is, it was a brand new tune). The phrases, “sine nomine” and “sine loco,” also used to be used in publishing all the time, but, sadly, with the advent of the Resource Description and Access standard, “publisher not identified” and “place of publication not identified” are the terms that you will see, now. Getting back to our story, though, during the Renaissance, it was typical to use existing music to create new settings and to acknowledge that in the name of the tune; so, if you created an entirely new composition, it was, naturally, without a name. However, the story goes that this tune’s “Sine Nomine” refers to the saints without name, to honour saints known and unknown on the Feast of All Saints. Vaughan Williams wrote four original hymnal settings for the 1906 English Hymnal; the tune that this one replaced, Sir Joseph Barnby’s Sarum (the Second Tune, called Pro Omnibus Sanctis, in The Hymn Book from 1938), was included in “an appendix at the end of the book, which we nicknamed the ‘Chamber of Horrors.'” (Ouch!) We get eight verses with Alleluias, but there were, originally, eleven verses — the original verse 3, for the apostles, verse 5, for the evangelists and verse 6, for martyrs, are omitted.