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Songs and society in early Tudor London*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

John Milsom
John Milsom
Affiliation:
Middlebury College
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Extract

Looking back over the past half century of research into the music of early Tudor England, it is clear that interest has been focussed principally upon sites of wealth, privilege and power. Dominating the arena are courts and household chapels, cathedrals and colleges, and the men and women who headed them. Perhaps that focus has been inevitable, since by their very nature wealthy and powerful institutions have the means to leave behind them rich deposits of evidence: not only high-art music, itself often notated in fine books, but also detailed records of expenditure, of the contractual duties carried out by or expected of musicians, and of valuable assets such as books and musical instruments. Moreover, where magnificence is on show there will often be eyewitness accounts to report on what has been seen and heard. All of those forms of evidence survive in quantity from early Tudor England, and it is hard not to be drawn to them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Early Music History , Volume 16 , October 1997 , pp. 235 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

1 See in particular Stevens, J., Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London, 1961)Google Scholar; Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. Stevens, J., Musica Britannica 18 (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Early Tudor Songs and Carols, ed. Stevens, J., Musica Britannica 36 (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Records of English Court Music, calendared and ed. Ashbee, A., vol. 7: 1485–1558 (Aldershot, 1993)Google Scholar; Bowers, R., ‘The Cultivation and Promotion of Music in the Household and Orbit of Thomas Wolsey’, in Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art, ed. Gunn, S. J. and Lindley, P. G. (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 178–218Google Scholar; Harrison, F. Ll., ‘The Eton Choirbook: Its Background and Contents’, Annales Musicologiques, 1 (1953), pp. 151–75Google Scholar; The Eton Choirbook, ed. Harrison, F. Ll., Musica Britannica 10–12 (London, 1956–1961; 10 only: 2nd edn, 1967)Google Scholar; Skinner, D., ‘Nicholas Ludford (c. 1490–1557): A Biography and Critical Edition of the Antiphons, with a Study of the Collegiate Chapel of The Holy Trinity, Arundel, under the Mastership of Edward Higgons, and a History of the Caius and Lambeth Choirbooks’, D.Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 1995Google Scholar; Kisby, F., ‘The Early-Tudor Royal Household Chapel in London, 1485–1547’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1996Google Scholar; Skinner, D., ‘“At the mynde of Nycholas Ludford”’, Early Music, 22 (1994), pp. 393–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kisby, F., ‘Music and Musicians of Early Tudor Westminster’, Early Music, 23 (1995), pp. 223–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Stanley Boorman has recently identified even earlier experiments with single-impression printing of plainchant. See ‘The Salzburg Liturgy and Single-Impression Music Printing’, Music in the German Renaissance: Sources, Styles, and Contexts, ed. Kmetz, J. (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 235–53Google Scholar.

3 The date of publication is discussed in Roberts, R. J., ‘John Rastell's Inventory’, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 6th ser., 1 (1979), pp. 34–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Leaver, R., ‘Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes’: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove 1535–1566 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 62–8Google Scholar.

4 RISM 15306; STC 22924. The Bassus partbook, which is virtually intact, is London, British Library, printed book K.l.e.l. For details of the fragments in the Library of Westminster Abbey, see Nixon, H. M., ‘The Book of XX Songs’, British Museum Quarterly, 16 (1951), pp. 33–6Google Scholar. The fullest study to date of XX Songes is Saunders, C., ‘A Study of the Book of XX Songes (1530)’, M.Mus. thesis, King's College, University of London, 1985Google Scholar.

5 The most substantial of these is London, British Library, Royal Appendix MSS 45–8, containing masses by Nicholas Ludford; see Milsom, J., ‘The Date of Ludford's Lady Masses: A Cautionary Note’, Music and Letters, 66 (1985), pp. 367–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Identical printed staves also occur in a small supplement of songs bound at the end of the Bassus book of XX Songes (British Library, K.l.e.l): see Fenlon, Iain and Milsom, John, ‘“Ruled Paper Imprinted”: Music Paper and Patents in Sixteenth-Century England’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 37 (1984), p. 142 n. 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The keyboard booklet is Oxford, Christ Church, Mus. 1034a.

6 Fenlon, I., Music. Print and Culture in Early Sixteenth-Century Italy (London, 1995), p. 4Google Scholar.

7 Anglo, S., Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969), p. 165Google Scholar. A collection of essays on the life of John Rastell, edited by the late James Devereux, is reported to be in preparation.

8 Full details of John Rastell's surviving publications are in STC, iii, p. 142Google Scholar. Several lost items are discussed in Roberts, ‘John Rastell's Inventory’.

9 For biographical details of the Rastells see in particular Reed, A. W., Early Tudor Drama: Medwall, the Rastells, Heywood, and the More Circle (London, 1926)Google Scholar. Summaries of their careers as publishers are given in STC, iii, p. 142Google Scholar.

10 King, A. Hyatt, ‘Rastell Reunited’, Essays in Honour of Victor Scholderer, ed. Rhodes, D. E. (Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 213–18Google Scholar;, idem, ‘The Significance of John Rastell in Early Music Printing’, The Library, 5th Ser., 26 (1971), pp. 197–214; idem, ‘An English Broadside of the 1520s’, Essays on Opera and English Music in Honour of Sir Jack Westrup, ed. F. W. Sternfeld, N. Fortune and E. Olleson (Oxford, 1975), pp. 19–24.

11 London, British Library, printed book 643 b.45; STC 20722. Facsimile in Tudor Facsimile Texts, ed. Farmer, J. S. (London, 1908)Google Scholar; modern editions in Three Rastell Plays, ed. Axton, R. (Cambridge and Totowa, NJ, 1979)Google Scholar, and The Four Elements as Performed at the University Printing House, ed. Coleman, R. (Cambridge, 1971)Google Scholar. The song ‘Tyme to pas with goodly sport’ is edited in Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. Stevens, , p. 14Google Scholar; for a facsimile of the music pages only, see King, ‘The Significance of John Rastell’, Plate I (facing p. 198).

12 The musical notation in Four Elements is confined to sig. E (both formes); blank staves occur on sigs. E4v and E7.

13 King, ‘The Significance of John Rastell’, pp. 204–8, supported by STC, and Axton, (ed.), Three Rastell Plays, p. 9Google Scholar.

14 British Library, K.8.k.8; STC 20700.3.

15 See King, ‘Rastell Reunited’; idem, ‘An English Broadside’.

16 King, ‘An English Broadside’, p. 21.

17 King, ‘The Significance’, pp. 212–13.

18 Temporary call-mark (as of August 1996): Department of Manuscripts, MSS Deposit 9588. The fragments were discovered, identified and reconstructed (with assistance from the Conservation Department of the Bodleian Library, Oxford) by the present writer at the time of their deposit at Christ Church, Oxford, where their host deed-box was located in the company of the Evelyn Papers.

19 McKerrow, R. B., Printers' and Publishers' Devices in England and Scotland 1485–1640 (London, 1913), p. 14 and facsimile 37Google Scholar. The deterioration of McK. 37 was first studied by F. S. Ferguson and was noted in a card index which at the time of writing is deposited in the North Library of the British Library. STC dates have relied extensively upon Ferguson's chronology. In the course of the present study, all aspects of deterioration in Rastell's woodblocks were charted independently of both Ferguson and STC.

20 These extreme outside dates are established from two securely dated books, STC 9515.5 (1519) and STC 22869.7 (1525), both of which include McK. 37. Between them, McK. 37 can be found in progressive states of deterioration in five books: STC 23879.7, STC 20701, STC 15759.5, STC 20702 and STC 20721.

21 In the introduction to his edition of The Four Elements as Performed at the University Printing House, Roger Coleman suggests the period of c. 1525–8 on typographical grounds, based on ‘a very superficial inspection of the Rastell books in the Cambridge University Library’ and the hypothesis that ‘between 1525 and 1530 Rastell conceived and carried out a plan to publish a specialized “popular” series of interludes and similar works’ (p. 15). The chronology of John Rastell's publications may eventually be refined through the study of watermarks. All three of the song-sheets have watermarks; all are different. No attempt has been made in the present study to relate them to paper used by Rastell in his other productions.

22 Isaac, F., English and Scottish Printing Types 1501–35 * 1508–41 (London, 1930), text accompanying Figures 36–43Google Scholar. Although Isaac's researches are fundamental to any study of English typefaces, they have been supplemented in the discussion that follows by a personal and independent study of textura founts in all books printed by or for John Rastell.

23 The present discussion builds upon that of Isaac, English and Scottish Printing Types, text accompanying Figures 74–6, and is based upon a detailed study of all of William Rastell's publications. Typographical evidence suggests that STC 3288.5 and STC 9521, attributed to William Rastell in STC, were not in fact printed by him.

24 STC 20721, sigs. E5–6; contractions expanded; lineation, capitalisation and punctuation editorial.

25 Edition in Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. Stevens, no. 9. For a discussion of ‘Adieu madame et ma maistresse’, see Fallows, D., ‘Henry VIII as a Composer’, Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections Presented to O. W. Neighbour on his 70th Birthday, ed. Banks, C., Searle, A. and Turner, M. (London, 1993), pp. 27–39Google Scholar.

26 Edition in Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. Stevens, nos. 7 and 7A.

27 London, British Library, Add. MS 31992, fol. 14v, text underlay to top voice; contractions expanded; lineation, capitalisation and punctuation editorial.

28 Axton, (ed.), Three Rastell Plays, p. 12Google Scholar.

29 The fullest study is Reed, , Early Tudor Drama, pp. 230–3Google Scholar.

30 Although the connection was first made two decades ago by Greene, R. L. in The Early English Carols, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1977), nos. 470–470.1 and pp. 503–4Google Scholar, it has been missed in most subsequent literature, including STC.

31 Greene, , The Early English Carols, no. 470 and p. 503Google Scholar. For a description of the manuscript see ibid., pp. 324–5.

32 STC 20700.3; contractions expanded; lineation, capitalisation and punctuation editorial.

33 The melisma is implied not only by the textless music of the lowest stave but also by the cropped stave at the top of the fragment, where the vertical rule that marks the end of the music is placed well to the right of the last phrase of text underlay.

34 Transcribed from the Rastell song-sheet; lineation and passages in square brackets supplied from London, British Library, Add. MS 17492 (the ‘Devonshire MS’), fol. 20; contractions expanded; capitalisation and punctuation editorial. The text has previously been catalogued in Robbins, Rossell Hope and Cutler, John L., Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse (Lexington, 1965; hereafter SIMEV), no. 813.6Google Scholar; and in Ringler, William A. JrBibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558 (London and New York, 1992; hereafter BIEVM), no. TM 418Google Scholar.

35 For a study of this manuscript and its context, see Southall, R., The Courtly Maker (Oxford, 1964)Google Scholar.

36 It is accepted as Wyatt's, in Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Muir, K. and Thomson, P. (Liverpool, 1969), no. 188Google Scholar, and in Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. Rebholz, R. A. (Harmondsworth, 1978), no. 212, with commentary on p. 521Google Scholar. Separate editions of the two sources are given in Greene, , The Early English Carols, no. 468, with commentary on p. 501Google Scholar.

37 Transcribed from the Rastell song-sheet; lineation and material in square brackets supplied from London, British Library, Add. MS 17492 (the ‘Devonshire MS’), fol. 20; contractions expanded; capitalisation and punctuation editorial.

38 The fullest discussions of this subject are Stevens, , Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, pp. 132–9Google Scholar, and Ward, J., Music for Elizabethan Lutes, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1992), vol. i, Appendix C (pp. 84–6)Google Scholar, ‘Music for the Poetry of Wyatt and Surrey’. For an alternative and generally less accepted view, see Maynard, W., ‘The Lyrics of Wyatt: Poems or Songs?’, The Review of English Studies, New Ser., 16 (1965), pp. 1–13 and 246–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Ward, , Music for Elizabethan Lutes, vol. i, p. 85Google Scholar.

40 The song-sheet includes a number of previously unrecorded variant readings of the text.

41 Huddersfield, Central Library, West Yorkshire Archives, Kirklees DD/R/dd/V/30, fol. 2.

42 See Baron, H., ‘The “Blage” Manuscript: The Original Compiler Identified’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 1 (1989), pp. 85–119Google Scholar.

43 SIMEV, no. 2224.5; BIEVM, no. TM 1027. The verse is accepted as Wyatt's in Collected Poems, ed. Muir and Thomson, no. 150, and in The Complete Poems, ed. Rebholz, no. 231. For a discussion of the text, see Mason, H. A., Editing Wyatt (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 136–9Google Scholar. The Ramsden song is not discussed in Ward, Music for Elizabethan Lutes. For another early Wyatt (or Wyatt circle) setting that escaped Ward's scrutiny, see the comments on (and edition of) ‘The sight [recte knot] which first my hart dyd strayne’, in Milsom, J., ‘Songs, Carols and Contrafacta in the Early History of the Tudor Anthem’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 107 (1980–1981), pp. 40–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In British Library, Harley MS 7578 (fol. 116v) there is a single voice-part from a setting of ‘Tak hede by tym whiles youth doth Rayn’, the text of which is a moralisation of Wyatt's ‘Take hede be tyme leste ye be spyede’. This too is missing from Ward's survey. The manuscript is Elizabethan, but its contents are largely of earlier date.

44 Transcribed from the Rastell song-sheet; lineation and material in square brackets supplied from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 176, fol. 99v; contractions expanded; capitalisation and punctuation editorial. The text has been catalogued previously as SIMEV, no. 3074.6, and BIEVM, no. TM 1383.

45 See Wagner, B. M., ‘New Songs of the Reign of Henry VIII’, Modern Language Notes, 50 (1935), pp. 452–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Saunce remedy’ is transcribed on p. 454. Other texts in Ashmole 176 that are known to have had musical settings in the sixteenth century come from a variety of backgrounds. One, ‘Adieu, adieu, my hartes lust’ (fol. 100), was set by William Cornysh: see Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. Stevens, no. 16. Two others, ‘Up I rose in verno tempore’ (fol. 98v) and ‘Come over the bourne, Bessy’ (fol. 100), occur among the anonymous songs of the ‘Ritson MS’ (London, British Library, Add. MS 5665); see Early Tudor Songs and Carols, ed. Stevens, nos. 16 and 18. A fourth, ‘If care may cause men cry’ (fol. 97), attributed to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, survives as a lute-song in three sources from the mid sixteenth century; see Ward, , Music for Elizabethan Lutes, vol. i, pp. 121–3, and the edition in vol. ii, no. 104 (p. 128)Google Scholar. In view of the low survival rate of musical sources for Tudor songs from the period c. 1520–70, it is very likely that other texts in Ashmole 176 once possessed musical settings.

46 London, British Library, Add. MS 31922, fols. 51v–52; previously edited in Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. Stevens, no. 47.

47 Ibid., fols. 23v-24; previously edited in Music at the Court of Henry VIII, no. 16.

48 Watt, T., Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 11Google Scholar.

49 Details of Heywood's career are summarised in The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Axton, R. and Happé, P. (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 1–10Google Scholar, which expands upon Reed, Early Tudor Drama. See also the short article on Heywood, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

50 Reed, , Early Tudor Drama, pp. 46ffGoogle Scholar.

51 The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Axton, and Happé, , pp. 119–20Google Scholar. It is assumed that there was once a William Rastell edition of this play, although no copy survives; ibid., p. 42.

52 The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Axton, and Happé, , p. 205Google Scholar.

53 Three Rastell Plays, ed. Axton, , p. 82Google Scholar.

54 The classic study of allusions to music in English Renaissance literature is Hollander, J., The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar.

55 For further details, see Kinsman, R. S., ‘The Printer and Date of Publication of Skelton's Agaynste a Comely Coystrowne and Dyvers Balettys’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 16 (1953), pp. 203–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Reproduced in Hodnet, E., English Woodcuts 1480–1535, reprinted with additions and corrections (Oxford, 1973), no. 2287 and fig. 229Google Scholar.

57 For a study of Skelton's political career, see Walker, G., John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar. John Rastell's association with Skelton may have been close; according to the inventory of 1538 made on John Rastell's death, his unsold stock included 213 copies of Skelton's Philip Sparrow, and 28 of Ware the hawk, evidently in editions printed by him that no longer survive. See Roberts, ‘John Rastell's Inventory’, pp. 36–8.

58 See Reed, Early English Drama, chap. 6.

59 This reading (and its line references) follows John Skelton. The Complete English Poems, ed. Scattergood, J. (New Haven and London, 1983), pp. 36–8Google Scholar.

60 For further commentary on these extracts, see John Skelton. The Complete English Poems, ed. Scattergood, , pp. 391–2Google Scholar.

61 Fragment of the Medius partbook in the Library of Westminster Abbey; reproduced in Nixon, ‘The Book of XX Songs’, plate 16.

62 The Bassus partbook from an otherwise lost set: London, British Library, K.1.e.1.

63 Concordans musycall, jugyd by the ere Of syghtys gydyng to th'expert thyng touchyng, Doth execute the souns that were Of Tubals hammers by Pictagoras contryvyng. As to thys matter, nothyng to smellyng, [missing line] Then thus we shall gyve laude to hym that gyvyth us all. Lineation, capitalisation and punctuation editorial; contractions expanded. For a provisional and not entirely accurate edition of the song-texts in XX Songes, see Flügel, E., ‘Liedersammlungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, besonders aus der Zeit Heinrich's VIII’, Anglia, 12 (1889), pp. 589–96Google Scholar. Transcriptions of greater accuracy are given in C.Saunders, ‘A Study of the Book of XX Songes (1530)’, pp. 54–66.

64 One of the instrumental pieces, ‘Fa la soll’ by Cornysh, survives complete in London, British Library, Add. MS 31922. For a modern edition, see Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. Stevens, no. 6.

65 Modern edition in John Taverner: III. Ritual Music and Secular Songs, ed. Benham, H., Early English Church Music 30 (London, 1984), no. 23Google Scholar. The manuscript source is discussed in Fallows, D., ‘The Drexel Fragments of Early Tudor Song’, [Royal Musical Association] Research Chronicle, 26 (1993), pp. 5–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 See for example the remarks by Poole, H. E. in Music Printing and Publishing, ed. Krummel, D. W. and Sadie, S. (London, 1990), p. 21Google Scholar, where it is placed beside the work of contemporary Augsburg and Strasbourg printers, Petrucci's most successful imitators. XX Songes is ‘equally elegant and well printed’. In The Earliest English Music Printing (London, 1903)Google Scholar, Robert Steele – who believed XX Songes to have been the work of Wynkyn de Worde – describes it as ‘the best piece of [English] music printing of the century’ (p. 5).

67 Nixon, ‘The Book of XX Songs’, p. 35.

68 Saunders, ‘A Study of the Book of XX Songes (1530)’, pp. 25–9.

69 This identification is the result of a study of the majority of books printed in London during the period c. 1528–32.

70 The W is independent. Although the cut used for the statutes is of the same general design as the one used in the song-book, it is not the same piece of wood.

71 Treveris is perhaps a prime suspect for the production of the statutes, STC 9363.8, discussed above. An investigation of Treveris's publications, very few of which can be dated precisely, fell beyond the limits of the present study.

72 STC, vol. iii, p. 142Google Scholar.

73 Passages in square brackets are supplied from earlier sections of the songs; contractions expanded; lineation, capitalisation and punctuation editorial.

74 This line has been supplied from the song's manuscript source: New York, Public Library, MSS Drexel 4180–5, endleaves, fragments of Quintus and Sextus partbooks. See John Taverner: III. Ritual Music and Secular Songs, ed. Benham, no. 23.

75 See Chapman, C. W., ‘Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music Owned by Ferdinand Columbus’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 21 (1968), pp. 34–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, p. 284.

77 Fenlon, , Music, Print and Culture, pp. 3–4Google Scholar.

78 The manuscript is discussed in Ward, , Music for Elizabethan Lutes, vol. i, pp. 33–6Google Scholar; Heywood's song is edited in ibid., vol. ii, no. 40.

79 The song-texts are edited in Halliwell[-Phillips], J. O., The Moral Play of Wit and Science and Early Poetical Miscellanies from an Unpublished Manuscript (London, 1848), pp. 62–121Google Scholar.

80 I am grateful to Mark Everist for drawing my attention to this source.

81 The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Axton, and Happé, , p. 150Google Scholar.