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Reflections on some manuscripts containing 13th-century polyphony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2009

Christopher Hohler
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Extract

The famous manuscript Harley 978 in the British Library is best known for containing Sumer is icumen in. Several of the problems of this fascinating book were disposed of in a masterly article by Schofield; but, with the notable exception of Kingsford, few of those who for one reason or another have used the manuscript have given their readers an adequate picture of the source on which they were drawing. It is a species of miscellany, but compiled on systematic lines. It is written in several hands, but the most obvious explanation for this is that the compiler was in a position to tell others to copy things out for him. The size and ruling of the pages is uniform, apart from the ruling of those on which the Conflict of Body and Soul (Noctis sub silentio, item 75 in the Harleian catalogue, item 78 in Kingsford's table) has been added. Format and type of interests alike suggest that the compilation is the work of a single mind, though the compiler's own handwriting may well be one of the cursives rather than any of the book hands.

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Articles
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Journal of the Plainsong & Mediaeval Music Society , Volume 1 , January 1978 , pp. 2 - 38
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© The Plainsong and Medieval Music Society 1978

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References

Notes

1 (p.2) Schofield, B.: ‘The Provenance and Date of Sumer is icumen in’, Music Review, 9 (1948), p.81 Google Scholar

2 (p.2) Kingsford, C.L.: The Song of Lewes (Oxford, 1890), VII–XVIII Google Scholar

3 (p.3) The note 5 martii 1595 sunt in hoc libro folia conscripta 182 is in Lapworth's hand, as appears from its identity to that which wrote In hoc libro sunt folia 65 in manuscript Bodley q.01 which, as an inscription records, Lapworth himself gave to the Bodleian. See also Kingsford's article on Lapworth in the Dictionary of National Biography.

4 (p.3) Bodleian Quarterly Record, 8 (1935), p.47 Google Scholar

5 (p.4) His excerpts are in mss.James 2 and 8 in the Bodleian. The last excerpt apparently from Lapworth's ms. in James 8 reads:

Hanc secure saepius studeas orare

Cui nequid filius quicquam denegare

Nam si mater pos[c]eret nec tamen expeteret

Orans petit vacua, esset contradictio, et ita

dissensio, in pace perpetua.

This is not in the ms. now, and presumably stood in the missing section. I do not know its source.

6 (p.4) The tracts are: (1) Beda dixit quod tres (a version of Tres sunt dies ut ait); (2) Luna prima hec est utilis; (3) Saturni die qui in lectum; (4) Si vis scire pronunciacionem mulieris. All are in Thorndyke's Initia of Medieval Scientific Works in Latin.

7 (p.6) See Tilander, G.: ‘Fragment d'un traité de fauconnerie’, Studier i modern språkvetenskap, 15 Google Scholar

8 (p.7) The list in Kingsford is correct except that Primum fuit gaudium (RH 31874) is distinct from Regina clemencie (RH 17164) which precedes it; Petrus Romanis reseravit (Walther 14064), without music, is distinct from Felix sanctorum chorus; a collect for the Five Joys (Deus qui beatam virginem M. in conceptione … pervenire) follows Gaude salutata (RH 27126).

9 (p.8) Printed in Kingsford, Appendix

10 (p.8) The rubric to Multis a confratribus in Oxford, Trinity Coll., 34 (c.1200) reads Incipit rithmus episcopi Gulias+ de incarnatione domini coram universo clero Oxonie

11 (p.8) Bodley 851, described in James, M.R.' edition of the De nugis (Oxford, 1914)Google Scholar

12 (p.9) The collation of all the sources is given in Watenphul, H.: Die Gedichte des Archipoets (Heidelberg, 1958)Google Scholar. The way they group is particularly clear in the stanza Meum est propositum: the version found in German and Italian mss. and in Harley 978 has the more stanzas (intruded in it or omitted from the other, according to taste).

13 (p.10) Strecker, K.: Moralisch-satirische Gedichte Walters von Châtillon (Heidelberg, 1929), nos.4–7AGoogle Scholar

14 (p.10) Carmina Burana, ed. Hilka and Schumann, no.92

15 (p.10) The majority of the Goliardic poems are printed from this ms. in Wright, T.: The Latin poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes (London, 1841, repr.)Google Scholar

16 (p.10) For a summary list of contents see Die Handschriften der Württembergischen Landesbibliothek Stuttgart. 2. Reihe: Die Handschriften der ehemaligen Kgl. Hofbibliothek, Bd.I, Teil I (Wiesbaden, 1968), p.171 Google Scholar. (I shall report shortly on a newly discovered source for Samson dux fortissime, a Dominican troper from Palermo – Ed.)

17 (p.11) The transmission of Ave gloriosa is discussed at length in Ludwig, F.: Repertorium organorum I, 1 (Halle, 1910, repr.), p.258 Google Scholar

18 (p.11) Analecta Hymnica ed. Dreves, , etc., vol.xxxvii, no.29Google Scholar, from the Dublin Troper and the 1507 Missal of Seville. Also in ms.C of the Sarum Missal (ed. Wickham Legg) and the Las Huelgas ms. (ed. Angles). Several Spanish contrafacta, e.g. RH 663. The Spanish and English texts have different versions of the second pair of stanzas.

19 (p.11) The sequences of the Dublin Troper (Cambridge, Univ. Lib., Add.710) have now been published in a most valuable facsimile edition by Hesbert, Dom (Monumenta Musicae Sacrae, iv, Rouen, 1970)Google Scholar. Fortunately for us, no one seems to have warned him about the snags, or he might have settled for a less problematical sequencer to represent the British Isles. The basic collection, to which the well-known series of Marian votives is appended, is actually almost standard Sarum: and since the manuscript also contains a Sarum customal, it must be (as Frere said) according to the use of the (secular) chapter of S.Patrick's, Dublin. The presence of additions relating solely to the (Arrouasian) chapter of Christchurch, Dublin, is just one of those things. Interpolated into the Sarum collection are several non-Sarum compositions. That for S.Patrick is no doubt a specific adaptation for Dublin. But it is difficult to see how the inclusion of unique sequences for S.Clement and the two saints Edmund (and nothing for S.Brigid) can be taken as an adjustment to Irish requirements. Dom Hesbert has spotted that the sequence for S.Clement is set to the melody of Verbum pater eructavit for S.Cuthbert. This is in the York sequencer; and so, apart from those for the saints Edmund and Dilecto regi, an alternative sequence for S.Catherine, are all the other non-Sarum items, in their case text as well as music.

I should say in parenthesis that the evidence of York books is inevitably ‘late’ since we have only the temporale of one 12th- or early-13th-century missal to illuminate York use before the 14th century. As with most English churches, one has to act on the hypothesis that whatever survives broadly reflects a use stabilised soon after the Conquest; though Verbum pater is the sequence given in the latest of the three 12th-century ‘libelli’ from Durham with services for S.Cuthbert (Dijon, Bibl.Mun., 657) and was probably not composed much before 1200.

I should also add, in connection with the Dublin (and York) sequence Spe mercedis for S.Thomas of Canterbury, that for many purposes all Sarum books have a combined statistical value of unity, no matter how many cathedrals had adopted the use. The local and official Sarum sequence for S.Thomas was Solemne canticum: and, although in one sense very common, it is no book not of Sarum use, and therefore in another sense rare. The majority of English churches not following Sarum are found using Spe mercedis as soon as there is evidence. This not infrequently appears, as at Dublin, in addition to Solemne canticum in Sarum books; and in two of the three Sarum missals used by Legg it is given to the exclusion of the latter. Solemne canticum, though prescribed by the rubric, is not to be found in either book. Spe mercedis is thus evidently the Canterbury handout, to which, almost alone, the chapter of Salisbury preferred a composition of their own. The fact that Blume found it in a great many German missals merely confirms this, and does not prove, as he said and misled Dom Hesbert into thinking, that it originated in Germany.

Reverting then to the Dublin book, in its choice of sequences for Easter week, Whit week and the Octave of the Assumption (where there is often variation between ‘Sarum’ sequencers, and occasionally even between the rubric of missals) its only close ally known to me is the Sarum missal London, B.L., Add.37519, another book with an interesting sequencer, unfortunately without notation. It is certainly an Oxford text: not only does its rubric agree in minute textual variants with Legg's ms.B (Bologna, Bibl.Com., 2565), which like it contains the mass of S.Frideswide, but it contains what seems to be the only surviving sequence for S.Frideswide.

These facts can be recombined to suggest a variety of conclusions: but as the southern suburbs of Oxford were in the diocese of Salisbury, of which S.Edmund of Abingdon (canonised in 1246) had been precentor, in the course of a career involving teaching at Oxford and Paris, before finally becoming archbishop of Canterbury, some of the distinctions one may be tempted to draw are likely to have been of no moment in the 13th century.

20 (p.11) Walther, H.: Initia carmina ac versuum medii aevi posterioris latinorum. Alphabetisches Verzeichnis der Versanfänge mittellateinischer Dichtungen, unter Benutzung der Vorarbeiten Alfons Hilkas (Carmina Medii Aevi Posterioris Latina, I) (Göttingen, 1959)Google Scholar

21 (p.16) Bodleian Quarterly Record, 4 (1924–1925), p.168 Google Scholar

22 (p.17) Reckow, F.: Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, Teil I, Edition (Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 4, 1967), p.78 Google Scholar; Cambrensis, Giraldus: Descriptio Cambriae in Opera (ed. Brewer, and Dimock, , Rolls Series, 1868), vol.VI, p.189 Google Scholar, quoted by Hughes, Dom A., New Oxford History of Music, ii (1954), p.315 Google Scholar

23 (p.20) The first responsory at Matins in this one began Pulchra nimis vultu. Oxford, Bodleian Lib., Lat.lit.f.31 (15th century) has Ecce triumphalis (AH, 28, no.2). Cambridge, Gonville and Caius Coll., 394 has Virgo Christi Margareta. I know no others, but have not in the past specially looked out for any.

24 (p.20) Dittmer, L.: ‘An English discantuum volumen’, Musica Disciplina, 8 (1954), p.19 Google Scholar

25 (p.21) See British Library, Harley 2253, f.132 (ed. Ker, N., Early English Text Society, vol. 255, 1965)Google Scholar

26 (p.24) Dittmer, L.A.: The Worcester Fragments, Musicological Studies and Documents, ii (American Institute of Musicology, 1957)Google Scholar

27 (p.25) Antiphonaire Monastique de Worcester, Paléographie Musicale, xii, 1922, p.34 Google Scholar. The manuscript (Worcester, Chapter Lib., F160) is a 13th-century ‘precentor's book’, giving the entire annual chant for mass and office, with rubric, the collects and the psalter, which was kept up to date, unfortunately a process involving obliterations, down to the Suppression. Some leaves are missing. The facsimile covers the calendar, antiphoner and processional only, but several other items are printed; the serious omissions being the gradual and the collectar. It is easy to forget they exist and a supplementary volume would be useful. The sequencer is mostly missing, but there is a mass-ordinal attached to the gradual which gives cues for most of the sequences used.

28 (p.25) The sequence in the bad text given by ms.A is in Legg, J. Wickham: The Sarum Missal (Oxford, 1916), p.527 Google Scholar. ‘Eadburga’ has got omitted from the index. Its music is, I think, unpublished. The London calendars are published by Eeles, in Transactions of the Essex Archeological Society, 25 (1955–1960)Google Scholar. The only textual ally of ms.A of the Sarum Missal known to me is British Library Add.11414 of about 1300 which contains as its distinguishing feature a mass for the Translation of S.Hugh of Lincoln (probably meaning it was copied for use in the northern part of the diocese). This has a long series of votive sequences for our Lady (devoid of notation) like ms.A, but it is a different collection. The book is also the one in which a 15th-century corrector has made the well-known note that the Chapel Royal is normative for Sarum Use.

The ‘Canterbury’ group of sequencers includes, besides the three named and that attested for Barking by its ordinal (ed. Tolhurst, Henry Bradshaw Society, vols.lxv–lxvi), the one bound up with the Book of Cerne (Cambridge, Univ.Lib., LL.i.10), that included in the Croyland Gradual (British Library, Egerton 3759) and that appointed for the Church of Norway (see Ordinale Nidrosiensis Ecclesiae, ed. Gjerløw, L., 1968 Google Scholar; and Eggen, E.: The Sequences of the Archbishopric of Nidaros, Bibliotheca Arnemagnauana, xxi–xxii Google Scholar)

29 (p.27) The feasts are: 13 Dec. S.Eadburga of Thanet; 15 June S.Eadburga of Winchester; 18 July S.Eadburga of Bicester. But the July feast was also kept as that of the Translation of S.Eadburga of Winchester and is likely to mean this in the calendars in which the June feast appears as well. Barking (and Chertsey, in Winchester diocese) and Worcester kept the June (Winchester) feast only. Of the St.Paul's, London, calendars the best (from Writtle, Essex) ignores the saint. St.Paul's mss. 40.B, 38c.19 and B.13 have the Winchester feast: but 38c.19 has Eadburga with Osyth on 20 July (presumably in error as to the day) as well.