The "Monks Gate" of the hymnals is named after the village near Horsham in Sussex where Harriet Verrall lived; it was her tune for Our Captain Calls that Vaughan Williams used for Bunyan's verses. He noted it in a mixture of 4/4 and 5/4. Cecil Sharp commented at the time that he had found a version in Somerset that was "as irregular in its rhythm".

Although collectors at that time were particularly pleased to find modal tunes, they were, on the whole, inclined to be perplexed by unusual rhythms. Those with more advanced musical training, like Sharp and Vaughan Williams, set it down as they heard it (generally getting singers to repeat the song a few times if circumstances permitted, in order to be sure that they had meant to sing it that way) but others, less confident of their own abilities, seem aften enough to have noted songs in conventional signatures that might have been better expressed otherwise.

Take Ella Bull, for example. She noted a number of songs from Charlotte Dann, who lived near her in Cambridgeshire (Lucy Wan appears in the Penguin book; the rest are unpublished). A proportion of them kept turning out to be in 5/4, and Miss Bull was quite worried about it; she thought that she must have misunderstood what Charlotte was doing. She turned for advice to Percy Merrick (mentioned above), who in turn put her in touch with Lucy Broadwood; who explained things for her.

Not all collectors had such informed advice, and even the heavyweights were not always sure, where complex variation was concerned. My suspicion is that 5/4 was more common than published examples as notated (there is a lot of material from the time which exists only in MS collections) might suggest; but I don't know that much work has been done on that.