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A London Gild of Musicians, 1460–1530

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Hugh Baillie
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Extract

London in 1500 was not the vast metropolis that we know to-day; it was a small walled city only about one square mile in area. Within that square mile was concentrated much of the wealth of the whole kingdom. The city's prosperity reached a peak in Tudor times when foreign wars closed up avenues of foreign trade upon which Norwich and Bristol relied; as a result of this, London alone, which had built up strong commercial ties with the Netherlands, was able to maintain any substantial continental trade; and here it naturally expanded rapidly. It is important to emphasise this accumulation of wealth in the City, for at a time when the uses of money were much more restricted than they are to-day, the effect was an ever-increasing splendour of religious observances and secular entertainment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 83 , 1956 , pp. 15 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1956

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Footnotes

1

These dates are given, not because the gild only existed between them, but because it seems to have been at its peak as a musical society between them, and because a good deal is known about its membership then.

References

2 Gilbert Banister, William Newark, William Colman and Richard Pygott were four of the more important Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal who lived there.Google Scholar

3 Reginald R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of Letter-Books preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London, London, 1912, Letter-Book L.Google Scholar

4 It is true that they performed some of the less sophisticated forms of secular song. For an account of the waits and minstrels of London, see Woodfill, W. L., Musicians in English Society, Princeton, 1953.Google Scholar

5 Though the hospitals (St Anthony's and St. Bartholomew's) and the colleges (Whittington and St. Martin-le-Grand) had substantial choirs and made a useful contribution to London music.Google Scholar

6 Several wills illustrating these points may be found in Reginald R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of Wills proved in the Court of Hurting, London, London, 1890.Google Scholar

7 This piece was recorded for me by Boris Ord and the choir of King's College, Cambridge, to whom I am most grateful. The ‘Leroy’ Kyrie, which is published in Tudor Church Music, is based on a melody found in other compositions of the same period; this tenor is one of many, and the whole subject, which is complex and abstruse, will shortly be surveyed by Jeremy Noble and the author.Google Scholar

8 Van Wylder contributed a polyphonic setting of Pater Noster to the collection of London Mass music in B.M. Add. MSS 17802–5.Google Scholar

9 In the 1530 Ordinances parish clerks are instructed to make periodic returns of births and deaths in their parishes to the Corporation.Google Scholar

10 Laetitia Lyell, Acts of Court of the Merters Company, 1453–1527. Cambridge, 1936.Google Scholar

11 Repertories of the Corporation, No. 8.Google Scholar

12 Woodfill, op. cit.Google Scholar

13 Repertories, passim.Google Scholar

14 Guildhall library MS 4889/PC.Google Scholar

15 The death of the elder Howe is recorded in 1519. His son joined the same year. These organ-builders are discussed in W. L. Sumner, The Organ, London, 1955.Google Scholar

16 Joined in 1504.Google Scholar

17 Joined in 1515.Google Scholar

18 Hugh Baillie and Philippe Oboussier, ‘The York Masses’. Music and Letters, January, 1954.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 James Christie, Some Account of Parish Clerks, London, 1893. This is a most useful and informative book.Google Scholar

20 This description is modernised and adapted from two sources—The Diary of Henry Machyn ed. J. G. Nichols, Camden Society, 1848, and an account from Strype reproduced by Thomas Warton in History of English Poetry (ed. Hazlitt), Vol. III, London, 1871.Google Scholar

21 Two London Chronicles' from the Collections of John Stow (1523–55, 1547–64), ed. C. L. Kingsford, in Camden Miscellany, XII, London, 1910.Google Scholar

22 Crewdson, H. F., The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London, 1950. Two of the stands were occupied, respectively, by the choir of St. Paul's and the waits. The others were manned by minstrels or clerks.Google Scholar

23 Machyn, op. cit.Google Scholar

24 Charles Welch, History of the Tower Bridge, London, 1894.Google Scholar

25 Warton, op. cit.Google Scholar

26 Only a fraction of the relevant parish records has survived to the present day, so it is reasonably certain that other important musicians also worked in London some time during their lives.Google Scholar

27 I am grateful to Thurston Dart, Brian Trowell and Roger Martin for assistance or information they have given me in the course of my preparing this lecture.Google Scholar