172. All People That on Earth Do Dwell

The Story Behind the Hymn

William Kethe was a Scottish clergyman who spent a period of his life in exile on the European continent during the reign of the Catholic English queen Mary I, part of a broader community of English and Scottish Protestant exiles who fled to cities like Geneva and Frankfurt to escape religious persecution at home during the 1550s.

While living among this exile community, Kethe contributed to the Genevan Psalter, a project undertaken by English-speaking Protestant exiles to produce metrical, singable English translations of the biblical Psalms for congregational use, closely following the model already established by French Reformed congregations under John Calvin's influence in Geneva. Kethe wrote this hymn's text in 1561 as a paraphrase of Psalm 100, one of his contributions to that larger psalter project.

The tune commonly paired with the text, known as 'Old 100th,' was composed by Louis Bourgeois, a French composer working directly within Calvin's Geneva, a decade before Kethe wrote his English words, originally set to a different French psalm text before later becoming permanently associated with Kethe's own English paraphrase of Psalm 100.

The hymn returned to England once the persecution that had driven Kethe and his fellow exiles abroad ended with Mary's death and the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth I, and it has remained in continuous congregational use for more than four and a half centuries since, making it, alongside relatively few other hymns, one of the oldest English-language hymn texts still in regular use anywhere in this entire collection, its origins tracing directly back to a community of persecuted religious refugees rather than to any settled, comfortable parish ministry.