Light’s glittering morn bedecks the sky  

This hymn is based on the translation by John Mason Neale (1818-1866) of part of the Latin hymn Aurora lucis rutilat, "Dawn reddens with light."  The Latin hymn, for Lauds in Eastertide, is first recorded in the Frankish Hymnal tradition (8/9C), surviving in a manuscript from Murbach Abbey in Alsace now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.  The Latin text passed into the Benedictin "New Hymnal" of the 9th or 10th century.  It was formerly  attributed, without clear historical evidence, to St Ambrose, partly because both the Frankish Hymnal and the Benedictine New Hymnal are based on earlier collections of Ambrosian hymns and partly because It is “Ambrosian” in structure, i.e., quatrains  of 8,8,8,8.  Neale published the translation in The Hymnal Noted, his collection of hymns of the ancient English church as preserved in the Sarum Breviary.  This volume arose from Neale’s wish to recover the liturgy of the pre-Reformation English church; his co-founding of the Cambridge Camden Society—later the Ecclesiological Society—grew from the same impulse.  (Neale’s religious upbringing was evangelical, but both he and his sister Elizabeth were Anglo-Catholics.  Neale founded an order of nursing nuns, the Community of St Margaret, and Elizabeth founded the Community of Holy Cross, originally working in the docks of east London.)  Neale translated 105 of the hymns in The Hymnal Noted, paired with tunes derived from early musical notation by Thomas Helmore, Master of the Choristers of the Chapel Royal and a specialist on plainsong and mensural notation.  

 

Following the Sarum Breviary, Neale divides his translation into three parts.  The first (this hymn) is for use at Lauds from Low Sunday to the Ascension.  The other two parts are designated for other offices and occasions.  The hymn entered the first edition of A&M divided as in Sarum.  It is this version that we sing.  The A&M editors significantly altered Neale’s text, however. 

The tune was first published in the (Counter-Reformation) Jesuit hymnal Ausserlesene Catholische Geistliche Kirchengesänge (Selected Catholic Spiritual Church Songs), published in Cologne in 1623, setting the words Lasst uns erfreuen herzlich sehr (Let us rejoice most heartily).  Both tune and words are by the editor, the Jesuit priest Friedrich Spee or Spee von Langenfeld.   Spee based the tune on an earlier melody which also appeared as a psalm chant in the Geneva psalter.  In Spee’s composition each of four eight-note text phrases was immediately followed by a four-note Alleluia phrase, after which followed the final triple-Alleluia refrain, but in a 1625 revision the eight-note phrases are in pairs before the Alleluia. This version was adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams for The English Hymnal in 1906.  It is the version most used in Anglophone churches.  We sing this tune to several other hymns, including “All creatures of our God and King,” and “Ye watchers and ye holy ones.”