The morning reading today included the hymn "Jerusalem, my happy home," and I was not familiar with it, so I flipped to the bibliography and found even more I didn't know. The author was listed as FBP, 1583, meter CM (8686) and it's in the public domain (you don't have to have permission to use it). Who is FPB? I asked self. My three little hymn story paperbacks were silent that such a hymn was in use, but I did find the hymn in "Lutheran Book of Worship" which we use in our traditional services (from mid-1970s). It added the tune name American, Land of Rest. So I turned to the internet and after 2 tries with AI which was really out to lunch, I found: "F.B.P. These initials appear over the text of ‘Hierusalem my happie home’ (‘Jerusalem, my happy home’*) in a manuscript book in the British Library (Add. 15,225). The hymn is of 26 4-line stanzas, entitled ‘A Song Mad (i.e. ‘made’) by F:B:P. To the tune of Diana.’ The text is based on a passage from St. Augustine’s Meditations beginning ‘Mater Hierusalem, Civitas sancta Dei’. In the version ascribed to ‘F.B.P.’ the text suggests a Roman Catholic origin (as opposed to a Protestant text by W. Prid, for which see JJ, p. 581). There are references to ‘Our Ladie’ who ‘singes magnificat’, to Saints Augustine and Ambrose, and to Mary Magdalene: ‘There Magdalene hath left her mone’. The initials..." I don't have a subscription to that source, so it's all I got.
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