Prior to the twentieth century, the Press at Oxford had occasionally printed a piece of music or a book relating to musicology. It had also published the "Yattendon Hymnal" in 1899 and, more significantly, the first edition of "The English Hymnal" in 1906, under the editorship of Percy Dearmer and the then largely unknown Ralph Vaughan Williams. Sir William Henry Hadow's multi-volume "Oxford History of Music" had appeared between 1901 and 1905. Such musical publishing enterprises, however, were rare: "In nineteenth-century Oxford the idea that music might in any sense be educational would not have been entertained", and few of the Delegates or former Publishers were themselves musical or had extensive music backgrounds.