A Man of a Thousand: Plimoth Plantation on Ainsworth's Psalter

An enjoyable blog post from Plimoth Plantation on Henry Ainsworth's Psalter.

Plimoth Plantation Worship Services

Plimoth Plantation has introduced a new half-hour educational program which will last through the summer of 2009 whereby visitors may learn about worship services as they would have been conducted by the Pilgrims during the 1620s.

The announcement reports:

Become part of the congregation, as guests are encouraged to follow the drumbeat to the Fort/Meetinghouse, for this brand new half-hour program providing visitors with a brief representation of early colonial worship in Plimoth Colony.

Led by Elder Brewster, this program is offered every Sunday and Thursday throughout summer. Plimoth Plantation colonial interpreters, assisted by contemporary museum guides, will provide a unique living history experience. Discover the distinctive features of worship practiced, and required in the 1620s; experience psalm-singing from the Ainsworth Psalter, and hear a short reading from the preferred “Geneva Bible.” Questions about the early Plimoth church are always welcome at these interactive services…and listen closely to the murmurs in the English Village; you might be surprised to hear that some families have been banished in the midst of doctrinal controversy and not everyone in Plimoth Colony shares the same religious views of religious reformation.

FREE with museum admission.

Ainsworth Psalter

Henry Ainsworth, English Congregationalist, wrote the psalter that was used on the Mayflower and at Plymouth, Massachusetts by the Pilgrims. Later, the first book published in America would be another psalter, the Bay Psalm Book, but when the Pilgrims first sang psalms in the New World, the lines came from the Ainsworth Psalter, titled The Book of Psalmes: Englished both in Prose and Metre with Annotations.

An extract from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Courtship of Miles Standish:

So through the Plymouth woods John Alden went on his errand;
Came to an open space, and saw the disk of the ocean,
Sailless, sombre and cold with the comfortless breath of the east-wind;
Saw the new-built house and people at work in a meadow;
Heard, as he drew near the door, the musical voice of Priscilla
Singing the hundredth Psalm, the grand old Puritan anthem,
Music that Luther sang to the sacred words of the Psalmist,
Full of the breath of the Lord, consoling and comforting many.
Then, as he opened the door, he beheld the form of the maiden
Seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool like a snow-drift
Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding the ravenous spindle,
While with her foot on the treadle she guided the wheel in its motion.
Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,
Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together,
Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard,
Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses.
Such was the book from whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem,
She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest,
Making the humble house and the modest apparel of home-spun
Beautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!

Psalm 100 in fact (along with Psalm 23) can be heard sung today on a cd from Plimoth Plantation. The words are as follows:

Shout to Jehovah, all the earth,
Serve ye Jehovah with gladness;
before him come with singing mirth
Know that Jehovah he God is.
It's he that made us, and not we;
his folk, and sheep of his feeding.
O with confession enter ye his gates,
his courtyards with praising:
Confess to him, bless ye his name.
Because Jehovah he good is:
his mercy ever is the same
and his faith, unto all ages.