All Glory, Laud and Honour

Lyrics

Refrain
All glory, laud, and honour,
To thee, Redeemer, King,
To whom the lips of children
Made sweet hosannas ring.

Thou art the King of Israel,
Thou David's royal Son,
Who in the Lord's name comest,
The King and Blessed One.

[Refrain]

The company of angels
Are praising thee on high,
And mortal men and all things
Created make reply.

[Refrain]

The people of the Hebrews
With palms before thee went;
Our praise and prayers and anthems
Before thee we present.

[Refrain]

To thee, before thy passion,
They sang their hymns of praise;
To thee, now high exalted,
Our melody we raise.

[Refrain]

Thou didst accept their praises;
Accept the praise we bring,
Who in all good delightest,
Thou good and gracious King.

[Refrain]

History

The hymn's words descend from a Latin processional, "Gloria, laus et honor", written by Theodulf, Bishop of Orléans, a scholar-poet who had served as a trusted adviser to Charlemagne. After Charlemagne's death, Theodulf fell under suspicion of conspiracy against the new emperor, Louis the Pious, and was banished to a monastery at Angers around 817-818, where he is thought to have written the hymn while in disgrace, and where he is believed to have died a few years later. A well-known legend, recorded some centuries afterwards, holds that Louis, passing through Angers on Palm Sunday, heard Theodulf singing the hymn from his confinement and was so moved that he ordered his release and decreed the hymn be sung every Palm Sunday thereafter. Hymnologists generally treat this as a colourful later embellishment rather than verified history; what is agreed is that Theodulf composed a much longer Latin text, of which only the opening lines passed into regular liturgical use.

The English text sung today is the work of John Mason Neale, the prolific Anglican priest and hymnologist responsible for translating much of the Latin and Greek hymn repertoire into English verse during the nineteenth century. Neale first rendered Theodulf's Latin as an unrhymed prose translation in his Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences (1851), then reworked it into the rhyming, metrical version familiar today for The Hymnal Noted in the mid-1850s. It was subsequently adopted into Hymns Ancient and Modern, the era's most influential Anglican hymnal, which secured its lasting place in English-speaking worship.

The tune now inseparable from the words, ST THEODULPH, began life as a setting by the German Lutheran cantor Melchior Teschner for an entirely different text, Valerius Herberger's farewell hymn "Valet will ich dir geben", published in the early 1610s. Once married to Neale's translation, the tune took the name of the hymn's original Latin author. Its strong, march-like tread and returning refrain suit its long-standing use as a Palm Sunday processional, sung as congregations re-enact Christ's entry into Jerusalem with palms, drawing on the Gospel narrative shared by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Performance

This recording is performed by St Martin's Voices, presented as a worship video with on-screen lyrics and running 3 minutes 50 seconds; it was published to YouTube in 2023, suited to congregational Palm Sunday use or quiet reflection at home.

Sources: hymnary.org · en.wikipedia.org · hymnologyarchive.com