And did those feet in ancient time

• 1. Introduction

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  "And did those feet in ancient time" begins with a question, not a declaration. Written by William Blake as the preface to his epic Milton: A Poem in Two Books, the poem asks whether Jesus himself once walked on England's green hills, and whether Jerusalem was briefly built among what Blake called the "dark Satanic Mills". The plates were probably begun in 1804, but the poem as printed dates to around 1808. For most of the century that followed, almost no one read it. Then, in 1916, a composer named Hubert Parry set it to music at the request of the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, and everything changed. The questions the script sets out to answer are worth holding on to: What did Blake actually mean by "dark Satanic Mills"? Who carried this song into public life, and why? And how did a preface to a mystical epic become a candidate for England's national anthem?

• 2. The Poem's Hidden Sources

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  Most listeners assume Blake was celebrating the legend that Jesus visited England before his ministry. That assumption turns out to be shaky. British folklore scholar A. W. Smith found little reason to believe any oral tradition about such a visit existed before the early twentieth century. Blake was drawing instead on an older story, repeated in Milton's History of Britain, that Joseph of Arimathea travelled alone to preach to the ancient Britons after the ascension of Jesus.

  The poem's theological architecture runs deeper still. Its imagery connects directly to the Book of Revelation, where God's vengeance falls on the "destroyers of the earth" by means of his "sword" and "arrows", and where horses, chariots, and the winds of Israel all carry specific scriptural weight. Blake's four stanzas do not assert the historical truth of Christ's visit. They pose four questions, leaving the listener to sit with the uncertainty. Christians have long read Jerusalem not as a literal city but as a metaphor for Christendom, spiritually present anywhere on Earth, and Blake folded that tradition into a demand for something to be built or rebuilt in England itself.

  The line Blake inscribed beneath the poem after the final stanza comes from Numbers 11, verse 29: "Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets". Scholar Christopher Rowland read that as Blake calling everyone into the task of speaking out about what they see, not as predicting the end of the world, but as the honest act of telling the truth with insight and the conviction that personal struggle can improve things.

• 3. Dark Satanic Mills

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  The Albion Flour Mills in Southwark was the first major factory in London, built by the firm of Boulton and Watt and capable of producing 6,000 bushels of flour per week. In 1791, fire destroyed it. Rumours of arson circulated, but the most likely cause was a bearing that overheated, combined with the explosive properties of flour dust. London's independent millers celebrated with placards reading: "Success to the mills of Albion but no Albion Mills." Opponents had already called the factory satanic and accused its owners of adulterating flour and using cheap imports. A contemporary illustration of the fire shows a devil squatting on the building. The mill stood a short distance from Blake's own home.

  Yet the phrase resists a single reading. Peter Porter noted that many scholars argue the mills are churches, not factories. In 2007, the Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, explicitly acknowledged the view that "dark satanic mills" could refer to the "great churches". The critic F. W. Bateson, writing in 1967, found it darkly amusing that churches and women's organisations had adopted what he called an anti-clerical paean of free love, apparently without reading it carefully.

  A third interpretation reaches further into Blake's own mythology. In the main poem Milton, Satan's "mills" are described as "built beneath the earth and waters of the Mundane Shell", as something invisible and incomprehensible to mortals. Stonehenge and other megaliths also appear in Milton, suggesting that the oppressive force Blake feared was neither industrial nor ecclesiastical alone, but something older and more abstract: a spiritually and physically repressive ideology rooted in a quantified, measurable view of reality. Blake saw the cotton mills and collieries of his time as mechanisms for the enslavement of millions, but he always insisted the concepts reached wider than any single mill or church.

• 4. Blake's Revolutionary Mind

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  In 1803, Blake was charged at Chichester with high treason for "uttered seditious and treasonable expressions". He was acquitted. The charge did not arise from his published writings but from remarks made in conversation, including the phrase "Damn the King!". The poem was written during the Napoleonic Wars, yet Blake was an outspoken supporter of the French Revolution, and he saw Napoleon as continuing it.

  This was a man who spent his life cloaking social idealism in Protestant mystical allegory because direct political speech carried real danger. His poems and paintings return repeatedly to the idea of universal humanity: "As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various)". For Blake, prophecy meant not predicting the future but telling the truth about the present as clearly as one could, fortified by honest persuasion and a belief that things could be improved. He wanted to stir people from intellectual slumber and the daily grind of toil, to show them that the culture around them served the interests of the powerful.

  Blake wrote much of Milton while living in Felpham in Sussex, in a cottage now known as Blake's Cottage. Amanda Gilroy has argued that the poem reflects his evident pleasure in the Felpham countryside. Local tradition in Lavant, near Chichester, holds that Blake wrote the poem specifically in an east-facing alcove of the Earl of March public house.

• 5. Parry and the Suffragists

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  Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, included the poem in his 1916 patriotic anthology The Spirit of Man as morale in Britain was eroding under the weight of World War I casualties. He then asked Hubert Parry to set it to music for a Fight for Right campaign meeting at London's Queen's Hall. Bridges specified "suitable, simple music to Blake's stanzas" that an audience could join in singing, and noted that if Parry could not manage it, George Butterworth might be asked instead.

  Parry had reservations about Fight for Right's ultra-patriotism, but agreed because his former student Walford Davies was to conduct. He wrote the music on the 10th of March 1916, handing the manuscript to Davies with the words: "Here's a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it." Davies remembered Parry's unwonted happiness that day, and particularly recalled Parry pressing his finger silently on the note D in the second stanza at the words "O clouds unfold", making clear without speaking that this was the one note and one moment he treasured. Davies arranged for the vocal score to be published by Curwen in time for the concert at the Queen's Hall on the 28th of March, and the song was a success.

  Parry's misgivings returned. By May 1917, he wrote to the founder of Fight for Right, Sir Francis Younghusband, withdrawing his support entirely. Concern grew that he might pull the song from public use altogether. What saved it was Millicent Fawcett of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. The Suffragists had taken up the song in 1917, and Fawcett asked Parry if it could be sung at a Suffrage Demonstration Concert on the 13th of March 1918. He was delighted, and for that occasion he orchestrated the piece, which had originally been written for voices and organ. When Fawcett asked if it might become the Women Voters' Hymn, Parry wrote back: "I wish indeed it might become the Women Voters' hymn, as you suggest. People seem to enjoy singing it. And having the vote ought to diffuse a good deal of joy too. So they would combine happily." He assigned the copyright to the NUWSS. When that organisation wound up in 1928, Parry's executors transferred the copyright to the Women's Institutes, where it stayed until the song entered the public domain in 1968.

• 6. From Suffrage to Stadium

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  The change of title from "And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time" to "Jerusalem" appears to have happened around the time of the 1918 Suffrage Demonstration Concert. Parry's own manuscript of the orchestral score has the old title crossed out and "Jerusalem" written in a different hand. Parry himself always used the original title. Sir Edward Elgar re-scored the work for a very large orchestra in 1922 for the Leeds Festival, and his orchestration has since overshadowed Parry's own, largely because it is the version used at the Last Night of the Proms. Sir Malcolm Sargent, who introduced the song to that event in the 1950s, actually preferred Parry's version.

  The poem's idealistic content made it serviceable across the political spectrum in a way few songs achieve. Clement Attlee invoked it in the 1945 Labour general election campaign, promising to build "a new Jerusalem". It has been sung at Conservative Party conferences, at the Glee Club of the British Liberal Assembly, and by the Liberal Democrats. In the 1973 progressive rock album Brain Salad Surgery, Emerson, Lake and Palmer included a rendition notable for its use of the first polyphonic synthesizer, the Moog Apollo; it was released as a single but failed to chart in the United Kingdom. Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson incorporated the full text of the poem into his 6:42 track Jerusalem, co-written with Roy Z, on his 1998 solo album The Chemical Wedding. In 2020, Errollyn Wallen, a British composer born in Belize, produced a new arrangement featuring different rhythms, dissonance, and a reference to the blues, sung by South African soprano Golda Schultz at the Last Night of the Proms. The departure from tradition caused considerable controversy.

  Rugby league adopted it as an anthem before the Challenge Cup Final and the Super League Grand Final, where it is introduced as "the rugby league anthem". Since 2004, it has served as the anthem of the England cricket team, played before each day of their home test matches. King George V, hearing the orchestral version for the first time, said he preferred it to the British national anthem "God Save the King". In a nationwide poll conducted by the BBC in 2019 to find the United Kingdom's favourite hymn, "Jerusalem" came first, pushing the previous favourite "How Great Thou Art" into second place.

• 7. The Anthem Question

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  England has no official national anthem of its own. For some national occasions, including international football matches, the British national anthem "God Save the King" is used instead. That gap has made "Jerusalem" a recurring candidate. In 2010, Team England, the English Commonwealth team, held a public poll to decide which anthem should be played at medal ceremonies at the Commonwealth Games. "Jerusalem" won with 52% of the vote, beating "Land of Hope and Glory", which had been used since 1930, and "God Save the Queen". Questions raised in Parliament have not resolved matters; successive ministers have deferred to individual sports to make their own decisions.

  The line "Bring me my Chariot of fire!" traces to 2 Kings 2:11, where the prophet Elijah is taken to heaven in a chariot of fire. That image gave the 1981 film Chariots of Fire its title, and the hymn is sung during the film's final scenes. In the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, "Jerusalem" was used and inspired several segments directed by Danny Boyle; it was included on the ceremony's soundtrack album, Isles of Wonder. The Verve reworked lines from the poem in their song "Love Is Noise", asking, "Will those feet in modern times / Walk on soles that are made in China?", alluding to "bright prosaic malls" in place of dark satanic ones. The Fall recorded a version in 1988. The phrase "green and pleasant land" entered common English usage as shorthand for an identifiably English landscape, appearing as a headline or subtitle in countless articles and books, and used ironically in the Dire Straits song "Iron Hand".