Sternhold, THOMAS

Sternhold, THOMAS, one of the authors of the English version of psalms formerly attached to the Book of Common Prayer, was born about 1500 near Blakeney in Gloucestershire, according to Fuller and Wood, in Hampshire. He was Groom of the Robes to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and died in August 1549. The first edition (undated) contains only nineteen psalms; the second (1549), thirty-seven. A third edition, by Whitechurch (1551), contains seven more by J. H. [John Hopkins], probably a native of Awre in Gloucestershire, who died as rector of Great Waldingfield, Suffolk, in 1570; and the complete psalms appeared in 1562, and for nearly two centuries after formed almost the whole hymnody of the Church of England. When the rival version of Tate and Brady appeared (1696) it came to be known distinctively as the 'Old Version.' Of the complete psalter of 1562, forty psalms bear the name of Sternhold, and sixty that of Hopkins. The rest were the work of William Whittingham (d. 1579), husband of Calvin's sister and Dean of Durham; Thomas Norton; William Kethe, most probably author of Psalm c. (not, however, printed here till 1563, though already in Daye's Psalter, 1560-61, and the Anglo-Genevan, 1561); J. Pullain; J. Marckant; and Archdeacon Wisedome of Ely (d. 1568). Sternhold and Hopkins' psalms are very faithful, but somewhat coarse and homely in phraseology. As Fuller well said, its authors' 'piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon.' See J. Julian's magistral Dict. of Hymnology (1892).