Origin of the Hymn

Having be­gun work on his ep­ic poems Mil­ton, a Po­em in Two Books and Je­ru­sa­lem, on mov­ing to Felp­ham, Sus­sex, in 1800, Blake com­plet­ed his Pre­face to Mil­ton in 1804, ap­par­ent­ly while await­ing tri­al in Chi­ches­ter for high trea­son (he moved back to Lon­don af­ter be­ing ac­quit­ted).

Charles Par­ry set Blake’s Pre­face to Mil­ton to mu­sic for a ral­ly of the Fight for the Right move­ment in Queen’s Hall. It be­came more ge­ne­ral­ly known as Je­ru­sa­lem when Par­ry con­duct­ed it in 1918 at a con­cert to mark the fi­nal stage in the Votes for Wo­men Cam­paign, af­ter which it was adopt­ed by the Na­tio­nal Fed­er­ation of Wo­men’s In­sti­tutes (WI) (and is still sung at meet­ings of WI Groups all over Bri­tain).

Edward El­gar add­ed an or­ches­tral score to Par­ry’s ra­ther som­ber tune in time for the Leeds Fes­ti­val of 1922, turn­ing it in­to a po­pu­lar na­tion­al hymn which tra­di­tion­al­ly ends the last night of the an­nu­al Sir Hen­ry Wood pro­me­nade con­certs at the Roy­al Al­bert Hall. This work al­so made an ap­pear­ance in the Aca­de­my Award win­ning mo­vie Char­iots of Fire (1981).

The theme is unique­ly Eng­lish, and there is an un­der­tone of 19th Cen­tu­ry po­li­tics. The lyr­ics may re­fer to folk­lore that says Je­sus vis­it­ed Bri­tain as a teen­ag­er with Jo­seph of Ari­ma­thea, who was said to be a dis­tant re­la­tive and had a stake in Cor­nish tin mines. How­ev­er, there is no hi­stor­ic­al da­ta sup­port­ing this sto­ry.

This hymn was sung at the wed­ding of Bri­tain’s Prince Will­iam and Ca­the­rine Mid­dle­ton in West­min­ster Ab­bey, Lon­don, Ap­ril 29, 2011.