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VII.—On an early Sixteenth Century MS. of English Music in the Library of Eton College

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2012

W. Barclay Squire Esq.
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Extract

The MS. exhibited this evening by the Provost and Fellows of Eton College belongs to a class of which very few now exist in this country. It consists of a collection of motets and magnificats for several voices, the music of each part being so written upon opposite pages that when the book is open the different parts can be sung by all the singers at the same time. This was the earliest method of writing part-music. It is found in the great collection of church music formerly preserved at Trent, a collection which contains numerous specimens of the English composers of the fifteenth century; it is also found in the Modena MS. (the chief source of our knowledge of John Dunstable) at Bologna, and, indeed, in all early MSS. of mensurable music. The system was even followed by the printers of the great editions of Orlando di Lasso and of Palestrina, the arrangement of the various parts being precisely the same as in those of the MS. now before us. Subsequently superseded by the use of part-books, from which each singer could sing his own part, it was not until the seventeenth century that full scores appeared; before then they are practically non-existent, even in MS. Though we know from the evidence of the Bologna, Trent, and Modena MSS., that the early school of composition of which Dunstable was the founder must have rapidly arrived at a high degree of elaboration, if not of perfection, the traces of it now to be found in this country are extremely slight. It is this fact which makes the Eton MS. so valuable, for the compositions it contains are without exception by Englishmen, several of whom, as I shall presently hope to show, were men of high reputation in their day. So rare have collections of this sort become, that I believe I am right in saying that there are now in England only two other MSS. of the kind which, for size and importance of their contents, can at all compare with the Eton volume. These are respectively preserved in the Libraries of Lambeth Palace and of Caius College, Cambridge, both dating from a little later than the Eton book.

Type
Research Article
Information
Archaeologia , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , 1898 , pp. 89 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1898

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References

page 92 note a In Ashmole MS. 1137, f. 115, is a description of the brass, with sketches of the shields then remaining. Two of them bore a fess between three stags’ heads cabossed, and two bore similar arms but with the stags’ heads upon escutcheons. Lipscomb in his History of Buckinghamshire (iv. 485) gives two divergent descriptions of the brass, and also an engraving of it, omitting the stags’ heads in the first shield and representing those in the second as maunches. In the brass as “restored “the maunches have been turned into bulls’ heads, and the same blundered arms have been assigned to Bost in the modern painted-glass windows hard by.

page 93 note a They are therein given as: Vert, on a fess argent betiveen three garbs or banded gules two boughs of whitethorn saltirewise enfiled with a coronet, between a royal orb and a robin redbreast; all within a bordure or pometty. See Bedford, W. K. R., the Blazon of Episcopacy, 2nd edition (London, 1897), 144Google Scholar.

page 93 note b Dr. James reads incorrectly “Hawkynes.”

page 94 note a Not in index.

page 95 note a “Minorascere eos potius tolleramus in musicalibus, quam in scripturam scientiis.” De virtutibus et miraculis Henrici VI., ed. Hearne, i. 296.

page 96 note a Printed in the Ecclesiologist for April, 1863 (xxiv. 102).

page 96 note b J. S. Brewer, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII., iii. pt. i. 245.

page 96 note c Bloxam, J. R., Register of Magdalen College, Oxford (Oxford, 1853–81), iiGoogle Scholar.

page 96 note d Bloxam, iv. 47.

page 98 note a Cole's MSS. xiii. 81.

page 98 note b Macray, W. D., A Register of the Members of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford, from the Foundation of the College (Oxford, 1894), i. 177Google Scholar.

page 98 note c History of English Music, 91.

page 98 note d Op. cit. iii. 70.

page 99 note a I am informed by Mr. G. E. P. Arkwright (to whom I am indebted for much valuable information) that in the Pepysian Library (MS. 1236) is a three-part “O quam glorifica,” by Fowler, in which one part only has words, the others being clearly intended for instruments. So far as can be judged from the fragment which remains, the same peculiarity occurs in Wilkinson's “O virgo prudentissima “(fol. d. 8) of the Eton MS.

page 99 note b Rotuli Parliamentorum, vi. 200, quoted by Nicolas, Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York, 185.

page 99 note c Bell's, Works of Chaucer (Edinburgh, 1782), xiii. 105Google Scholar.