1. In 1803, William Blake was charged with high treason, for supposedly having uttered the seditious words, “Damn the King, and damn all his subjects”. He was tried at Chichester, West Sussex, but acquitted.

2. Blake’s final graphic work was a set of 21 illustrations to the Old Testament Book of Job, produced when he nearly 70 and in failing health.

3. It was the then Poet Laureate Robert Bridges who first suggested to Sir Hubert Parry that he might consider setting Blake’s poem to music.

4. Among the choral groups assembled for Fat Les’s recording of Jerusalem, the official anthem for the Euro 2000 England football team, were the London Community Gospel Choir, the New London Children’s Choir and the London Gay Male Choir.

5. The Irish-born singer-songwriter Van Morrison has always been fascinated by the mythical tradition on which Blake drew in the poem. The strains of Jerusalem can be heard at the close of a track on his 1986 album No Guru No Method No Teacher, entitled A Town Called Paradise.

6. Blake regularly claimed to have visions of the long dead, whose portraits he drew and painted. His spirit visitors included Richard the Lionheart, Socrates, “the Man who Built the Pyramids” and the “Ghost of a Flea”.

7. In 1825, Blake, sitting with friends at a table in a cottage in Shoreham, West Sussex, suddenly announced that the artist Samuel Palmer was on his way to meet them. His friend Edward Calvert said, “Oh Mr Blake, he’s gone to London; we saw him off in the coach.” Blake replied, “He’s coming through the wicket.” Moments later, Palmer, whose coach had broken down, entered the house.

8. Blake once wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” The line was used by Aldous Huxley as the title for his 1954 book on hallucinogenic drugs, The Doors Of Perception. This, in turn, gave Jim Morrison the name for his 1960s rock band – the Doors.

9. In 1988, Mark E Smith of the Fall rewrote Jerusalem, adding new lyrics in which he describes slipping on a banana skin, and then hitting his head on the way down on a protruding brick chip. “It was the fault of the government,” declares Smith. “I was very let down.”

10. Jerusalem is the school song of Akroyd Place Junior School, Halifax. There is a local theory that Blake wrote the words in Halifax as he stood on Godley Bridge watching the smoke rising from the town’s chimneys.