Ovine Metathesis

I play in a Salvation Army band, and I have on and off for sixty years.

At band rehearsal this week we warmed up with Lois Bourgeois’s 16th century hymn tune known as “Old Hundredth”. Nowadays churchgoers sing the doxology “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” to Old Hundredth but mostly associate it with William Kethe’s paraphrase of Psalm 100, “All people that on earth do dwell”. Hence its name.

In his devotional thoughts just before we started playing, my friend Gord mentioned the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational, which asked readers to take a well known word and alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition (examples). That tied in nicely with the tune the bandmaster had chosen as one word of Kethe’s paraphrase has been famously altered in this way.

Here is the oldest known version of the hymn (from Day’s Psalter, the metrical edition of the Psalms by T. Sternhold and J. Hopkins, printed by John Day from 1562 onwards):

Al people yt on earth do dwel,
sing to yc lord, with chereful voice
Him serve wt fear, his praise forth tel,
come ye before him and reioyce.

The Lord ye know is God in dede,
with out our aide, he did us make:
We are his folck, he doth us fede,
and for his Shepe, he doth us take.

Oh enter then his gates with prayse
approche with ioye, his courtes unto:
Praise, laude, and blesse his name alwayes,
for it is semely so to doe.

For why? the Lord our God is good,
his mercy is for euer sure:
His trueth at all tymes firmely stood
and shall from age to age indure.

What interests me is why

We are his folck, he doth us fede,
and for his Shepe, he doth us take.

became

We are His flock, He doth us feed
And for His sheep He doth us take.

Surely the word is folk? Yet in many hymnals the tautologous word flock is used.

Checking the psalm in the English translation of the Bible closest to the version Kethe would have been familiar with, we find “we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture”. Because his paraphrase so closely follows the psalmist, this makes it clear that Kethe’s “folck” means “folk” (people) and not “flock”. The collective noun for sheep is not mentioned in the psalm.

Kethe wrote in the days before standardised orthography, but even so it is unlikely that the folk would have metathesised into flock. Especially for a Scotsman like Kethe, who would have pronounced the liquid ‘l’ after the ‘o’ with as much loving care as a rhotic speaker his ‘r’s. No more could forcke have become frock.

So was it a case of humility or simple misreading that gave us flock instead of folk? Or, possibly, a conspiracy to make labourers during the industrial revolution more servile by having them sing on Sundays that they were sheep? I’d like to think it was the result of the church’s equivalent to the Washington Post’s Mensa challenge. If so, another example in our Salvation Army poetry could be: ‘darken’d paths to brighten’, which might originally have been ‘darken’d paths to Brighton’, written by someone who lost his way getting on the A23 somewhere around Crawley.

Four or five generations after Kethe’s version Isaac Watts paraphrased the same verses of Psalm 100 thus:

His sovereign power, without our aid,
Made us of clay, and formed us men;
And when like wandering sheep we strayed,
He brought us to His fold again.

So the metaphorical metathesis of folk into flock becomes an ovine simile — “like wandering sheep” — and all is made clear.