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The Saxilby fragment*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Margaret Bent  and
Roger Bowers
Margaret Bent
Affiliation:
Princeton University
Roger Bowers
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

The two folios which are the subject of this study are the property of the vicar and churchwardens of the parish of St Botolph, Saxilby-with-Ingleby, some six miles west of the city of Lincoln. The leaves are of parchment, are adjacent and may once have been conjoint, but are now disjunct. The overall dimensions of each leaf are approximately 430 × 325 mm; each has four good margins, leaving a music area of 358 × 247 mm. Each side is ruled with twelve five-line staves in red ink, apparently without the use of a rastrum; the staves are a little less than 20 mm high. On all four sides each of the two voices was supplied with an initial letter executed in blue paint with red tracery. Each initial is a single staff in height, and is similar in style to the subsidiary capitals of Old Hall and many other English manuscripts of the fifteenth century. In its surviving state the manuscript has undergone a sad mutilation: a rectangle four staves deep has been cut away from the top left-hand corner of folio 1v, removing the initial ‘E’ of the top voice complete with the red tracery trailing from it down the edges of the staves below. In so doing, the vandal also removed a good deal of music from both sides of the leaf.

Type
Research Article
Information
Early Music History , Volume 1 , October 1981 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 The Saxilby leaves were known to the late Dom Anselm Hughes and were briefly referred to in his ‘The Topography of English Mediaeval Polyphony’, In memoriam Jacques Handschin, ed. Anglés, H. and others (Strasbourg, 1962), p. 134Google Scholar. Dom Anselm kindly lent photographs of the fragment to Margaret Bent, and it was on these that her comments on the use of stroke notation in this source were based, in ‘New and Little-Known Fragments of English Medieval Polyphony’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 21 (1968), 149, no. 17Google Scholar.

2 On the similar fate of the Old Hall MS (now London, British Library, Additional MS 57950), see Bent, M., ‘Initial Letters in the Old Hall Manuscript’, Music and Letters, 47 (1966), pp. 225–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Other instances of stroke notation and of the two-symbol ‘strene’ notation are noted by Margaret Bent in the article cited in note 1, and by Andrew Hughes in the article cited in note 12. The manuscript Cambridge, University Library, Additional MS 2713, preserves, like Saxilby, fragments of a Mass cycle, also from the Credo and Sanctus. Unlike Saxilby, the Cambridge Mass is notated in score, in which sections for three voices, notated with one symbol (mostly longs) per beat, alternate with more florid duets in mensural notation. The surviving music is all clearly in perfect time; the mensural notation has a O signature, but the ‘stroke’ passages have none.

4 Benham, H., ‘“Salve Regina” (Power or Dunstable): A Simplified Version’, Music and Letters, 59 (1978), pp. 28–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For Cambridge, University Library, Additional MS 2713, see note 3. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 167, fol. 31v, has three monophonic tenors in stroke notation, one of which, designated ‘Quene note’ and ascribed to ‘Frank’, is also provided with a mensurally notated discantus, each of whose semibreves equals one tenor stroke. London, British Library, MS Harley 1512, is a Breviary of Salisbury Use, folio 2 of which (flyleaf) contains musical jottings including two tenors in stroke notation. One of these, labelled ‘Votre’, provides a closer correspondence than does the Binchois chanson to the Ritson setting of Votre tres douce, and was communicated to Stevens, John for inclusion in his recent edition Early Tudor Songs and Carols, Musica Britannica 36 (London, 1975)Google Scholar, as no. 17. The piece has since been discussed, without reference to the Harley tenor, in Kemp, W., ‘ “Votre Trey Dowce”: A Duo for Dancing’, Music and Letters, 60 (1979), pp. 37–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Harley tenor starts in stroke notation, changing to mensural notation with semibreve equivalence when notes of shorter duration than a semibreve (i.e. minims) are required. London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus a xxvi uses void semibreves as counting units.

6 Three-part Masses with no tenor participation in duets do not, of course, permit varied duet scoring, though a late-fifteenth-century source of the Mass Quem malignus spiritus rescores the duets to include the tenor which otherwise only states the cantus firmus. The four-voice Mass Veterem hominem reproduces a varied pattern of duet scoring, without the tenor cantus firmus, in each of its first three movements, but the different pattern adopted for the Sanctus and Agnus includes the tenor in a brief duet. For editions and discussions of both these Masses, see Bent, M., Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music, ii: Four Anonymous Masses, Early English Church Music 22 (London, 1979)Google Scholar.

7 Hannas, R., ‘Concerning Deletions in the Polyphonic Mass Credo’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 5 (1952), p. 155CrossRefGoogle Scholar; of the English Masses listed in her Chart iii (pp. 183–5), only the Mass Sine Nomine, there attributed to Dunstaple but more probably by John Benet, omits the ‘Crucifixus’. Hannas's chart includes an ‘Anon. fragment of Saxeby’ (p. 185); almost certainly this refers to the present Saxilby fragment, since much of the material for this chart was derived from Hughes, Anselm, ‘The Text-Omissions in the Creed’, Collins, H. B., ed., Missa O quam suavis (Burnham, 1927), pp. xxxiii–xxxviGoogle Scholar, where Hughes lists the Saxilby fragment as his item 43. Hannas follows Hughes in omitting to note the deletion of text sections 5 and 9 from the analysis of the Saxilby Credo.

8 Bowers, Roger, ‘The Performing Pitch of English 15th-century Church Polyphony’, Early Music, 8 (1980), pp. 21–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ibid. The earliest English composition yet known to exceed an overall compass of seventeen notes is John Dunstaple's Descendi in ortum meum, a piece that shows every sign of being his latest work to survive complete; see John Dunstable: Completé Works, ed. Bukofzer, M. F., Musica Britannica 8, rev. 2nd edn by M. Bent, I. Bent and B. Trowell (London, 1970), no. 73Google Scholar. For an intimation that an incomplete and anonymous setting of Gaude flore virginali, which employs a compass of twenty-one notes, might also be a late work attributable to Dunstaple, see Bent, M. and Bent, I., ‘Dufay, Dunstable, Plummer – a New Source’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 22 (1969), pp. 399–403, 415–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Examples include a choirbook of c. 1420–30 reconstructed in Bent, M., ‘A Lost English Choirbook of the Fifteenth Century’, Report of the Eleventh Congress of the International Musicological Society, ed. Glahn, H., Sørensen, S. and Ryom, P., 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1974), i, pp. 257–62Google Scholar; Cambridge, University Library, MS Pembroke College 314 (c. 1430); Oxford, Christ Church, MS Okes 253 (c. 1450) (Bent, ‘New and Little-Known Fragments’, pp. 143–56); and London, Public Record Office, MS e 163 22/1/3 (c. 1450–60) (discussed in Bowers, R., ‘Choral Institutions within the English Church: Their Constitution and Development, 1340–1500’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of East Anglia, 1975), pp. 5078–9)Google Scholar.

11 This was the choir of the collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall, Lincolnshire; see Bowers, ‘Choral Institutions’, pp. 5007–8, 5062–5, 5077, 5080–1.

12 Five sources of this style of notation are discussed in Hughes, Andrew, ‘The Choir in Fifteenth-century English Music: Non-Mensural Polyphony’, Essays in Musicology in Honor of Dragan Plamenac, ed. Reese, G. and Snow, R. J. (Pittsburgh, 1969), pp. 127–37Google Scholar; to these can be added Durham, Archives of the Dean and Chapter, MS Endpapers and Bindings 25. This bifolium, apparently from a superius partbook of c. 1450, contains a single voice measured out in plainsong symbols, of which each component note represents one beat. The texts are Agnus Dei, Kyrie Fons bonitatis, Gloria and Credo – perhaps the end of one complete Ordinary cycle and the beginning of another. Chant paraphrase occurs in the Kyrie, and triple grouping of the notes predominates. The intervention of rests in this voice for whole sections of the text confirms that the complete polyphonic texture was of at least three voices.

13 Some care is required in interpreting the evidence of divisi notes, since the Old Hall MS and other sources of earlier fifteenth-century English music include them in passages generally considered to be soloistic.

14 The nature, origin and incidence of pre-Reformation parish church choirs will be discussed in Roger Bowers's forthcoming monograph Church and Cathedral Choirs in Late Medieval England.

15 Lincoln, Lincolnshire Archives Office, MS Saxilby Parish 7.

16 The sixteenth-century accounts are printed in full in Gibbons, A., ‘A Transcript of the Old Churchwardens' Accounts of the Parish of Saxilby-cum-Ingleby’, Associated Architectural Societies' Reports and Papers, 19 (1888), pp. 376–90Google Scholar.

17 On folio 1v of the music appears also the following enigmatically conspiratorial graffito:

for to com to my hous to

acquant me with th thing that 1682

you wear teling mee of

18 It cost him 4d., which the churchwardens reimbursed in 1552/3: account-book, fol. 5r, ‘In primis for on qwyre of papur to make this booke iiij d’ (Gibbons, op. cit., p. 380).

19 His settings of Salve regina, Gaude flore virginali, Gaude virgo mater Christi and the Magnificat are in the Eton Choirbook (see Harrison, F. Ll., ed., The Eton Choirbook, Musica Britannica 10–12 (London, 1956–1961), nos. 10, 29, 52, 44Google Scholar); and his Kyrie O rex clemens is preserved among the York Mass fragments (see Baillie, H. and Oboussier, P., ‘The York Masses’, Music and Letters, 35 (1954), p. 24Google Scholar).

20 Lincoln, Lincolnshire Archives Office, Archives of the Dean and Chapter, MS a.2.33, fol. 18v; MS Custos Commune a/cs 1446/7–1450/1 (Bj 2/14, Bj 2/15, unfoliated; see under ‘Curialitates’). (In references to Lincoln Cathedral Archives the prefixes ‘a.2’ and ‘a.3’ indicate volumes of Chapter Acts, the prefix ‘Bj’ indicates Accounts; the system is explained fully in Williamson, D. M., Lincoln Muniments (Lincoln, 1956), pp. 19–31.)Google Scholar

21 Ibid., MS Custos Commune a/cs 1452/3–1457/8 (Bj 2/16, unfoliated).

22 Ibid., MS Custos Commune a/cs 1458/9–1460/1 (Bj 2/16, unfoliated).

23 Ibid., MS Custos Commune a/c 1460/1 (Bj 2/16, unfoliated).

24 Ibid., MS a.2.34, fol. 94r; MS a.2.37, fol. 15v; MS a.3.1, fol. 21v; MS Custos Commune a/cs 1461/2–1482/3 (Bj 2/16, Bj 5/6, Bj 5/7, Bj 3/1, Bj 3/2, unfoliated).

25 Ibid., MS a.2.37, fols. 15v, 16v; MS a.3.1, fol. 21v.

26 Ibid., MS a.2.37, fol. 57v; MS a.3.1, fol. 68v; MS Custos Commune a/cs 1483/4–1489/90 (Bj 3/2, unfoliated).

27 Ibid., MS a.2.37, fol. 57v; MS a.3.1, fol. 68v; MS Custos Commune a/c 1490/1 (Bj 3/2, unfoliated).

28 Ibid., MS Custos Commune a/cs 1491/2–1505/6 (Bj 3/2, Bj 3/3, unfoliated; Bj 3/7 (1), fols. lr (signature), 7 v, 13v); MS a.3.2, fol. 110v.

29 Appointed 29 March 1477, ibid., MS a.2.36, fol. 96r. Died by 27 March 1484, MS a.2.37, fol. 16v. There is no trace ofhis having remained at Lincoln Cathedral between 1461 (when he was appointed organist in February but departed at Michaelmas, see note 23 above) and his reappearance in 1477. In fact his principal base appears to have been in the vicinity of London: he was admitted to membership of the Gild of Parish Clerks of the City of London in 1458/9, was readmitted in 1462/3 after his brief excursion to Lincoln, and was elected master of the gild for 1474/5, see Baillie, H., ‘Some Biographical Notes on English Church Musicians, Chiefly Working in London’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 2 (1962), p. 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; his dates are corrected by reference to the Register of the Fraternity of St Nicholas: London, Guildhall Library, MS 4889, fols. 5V, 9V, 19r.

30 Lincoln, Lincolnshire Archives Office, Archives of the Dean and Chapter, MS a.2.37, fols. 57v, 58r.

31 Ibid., MS Book of Payments of the Clerk of the Communa 1504/5–1506/7, Bj 3/7 (1), fols. lr, 7V, 13v; MS a.3.2, fols. 50v, 110v, 130v.

32 Ibid., MS a.2.32 fol. 120r; MS a.2.34, fol. 2V.

33 Ibid., MS a.2.34, fol. 71v.

34 Ibid., MS a.2.34, fol. 88r.

35 Among the vicars-choral there had been, since at least c. 1390, a group of four designated the ‘cantores sancte marie’; these were competent in polyphonic music, and undertook the performance of Lady Mass daily with polyphony. The Lady Chapel organist was doubtless one of these, but unfortunately they are rarely referred to by name in the cathedral archives.