The original Italian text (Discendi, amor santo) was written by Bianco da Siena (ca. 1350–1434), a member of the Jesuati—a community of unordained laymen devoted to preaching and works of mercy, inspired by the spirituality of St. Francis. Ninety-two of Bianco’s laudi survived in a Vatican manuscript but remained unpublished until 1851. Richard F. Littledale translated it into English in 1867 for The People’s Hymnal, but the hymn languished in near-obscurity for another forty years. Its fortunes changed entirely when Percy Dearmer selected it for The English Hymnal (1906), whose musical editor, Ralph Vaughan Williams, composed a brand-new setting specifically for the text. Vaughan Williams named the resulting tune DOWN AMPNEY after the Gloucestershire village of his birth. It was this pairing of fourteenth- century Italian poetry with Vaughan Williams’s soaring twentieth-century music that gave the hymn its enduring place in the Church’s repertoire.
Sung at Our Saviour
2026