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Shrewsbury School, Manuscript VI: A Medieval Part Book?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1975

Susan Rankin
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Extract

The manuscript Shrewsbury School VI (formerly Mus. iii. 42), an English liturgical book of the early 15th century, includes texts and music for processions, Passions and plays, some of which may have originated in the late 14th century. It has the format and liturgical order of a small service book such as a processional, but contains single mensural melodies rather than the plainsong melodies usually associated with the texts. Previous studies of the manuscript have concentrated on the plays; besides neglecting the rest of the manuscript as a source of further information about the plays, they have ignored the importance of this source as a collection of English liturgical ritual music. Because of the unique nature of the manuscript, many questions arise besides the usual problems of date and provenance, principally because some or all of the music may not have been monophonic as the extant material suggests, but polyphonic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 102 , 1975 , pp. 129 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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Footnotes

1

This article is based on a paper given at the Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music at Oxford in September 1976. I wish to thank the Governors of Shrewsbury School for permitting me to consult the manuscript and to have it photographed

References

2 Kurt von Fischer has proposed the date 1430, in ‘Die Passion von ihren Anfangen bis ins 16. Jahrhundert’, Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen. Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade (Berne, 1973), 574. I do not intend to discuss the dating, but I am of the opinion that this is a reasonable estimate, both on paleographical grounds and because the fragment of an isorhythmic motet which is written on a piece of parchment used in the binding can be dated between 1410 and 1420. That the manuscript is English is beyond doubt the type of binding, the capital letters and their decoration, and the hand used in the vernacular sections of the plays are all typical of English practice. Mr. J. B. Lawson, the Librarian of Shrewsbury School, has very generously allowed me to use a typescript copy of the entry prepared by Neil Ker for the forthcoming fourth volume of his Catalogue of Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries.Google Scholar

3 Principally Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, ii (Oxford, 1933), 514–23, and Norman Davis, Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, Early English Text Society, supplementary series, i (Oxford, 1970), xiv-xxii, 1–7 The latter includes an appendix on the Shrewsbury music by Frank Harrison.Google Scholar

4 On the first two leaves, which are formed by a single folded leaf, is written the complete upper voice and a fragment of the middle voice of an isorhythmic motet. One may conjecture that this leaf formed the left-hand side of a double sheet, on the right-hand side of which was written the rest of the middle voice and a tenor (and perhaps a fourth voice). That this folio was never used as originally intended is implied by the absence of any text. For further comments on this piece, and on the structure of the manuscript as a whole, see Rankin, Susan, Shrewsbury School MS VI: a Study and Transcription (unpublished M. Mus. dissertation, King's College, University of London, 1976).Google Scholar

5 A previous modern foliation, probably added during the nineteenth century, suggests that the missing folio was removed after the foliation was made.Google Scholar

6 So far as one can judge from the extant material, red void coloration is used in the same sense as red full coloration Red void coloration appears only in the six Salve festa dies hymns, although these are not grouped together in the manuscript but arranged according to the liturgical yearGoogle Scholar

7 This feast was celebrated on the Sunday before Ascension.Google Scholar

8 Sanch Spiritus was the sequence for Mass at Pentecost according to the Sarum use.Google Scholar

9 That is, processions with their own specific liturgy.Google Scholar

10 Christopher Wordsworth and Henry Bradshaw, ed., Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, ii (Cambridge, 1897), 11Google Scholar

11 Sir William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. John Caley, vi/3 (London, 1830), 1264.Google Scholar

12 Wordsworth and Bradshaw, op. cit., 15, 23.Google Scholar

13 This is not to say that these three plays were not performed individually elsewhere: it is the association of the three which is peculiar to Lichfield.Google Scholar

14 Frances M. Miller, ‘Metrical Affinities of the Shrewsbury Officium Pastorum and its York Correspondent’, Modern Language Notes, xxxiii (1918), 91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Davis, op cit., p. xix.Google Scholar

16 British Library, Harley 5249 It bears the inscription, ‘Iste liber est de dono magistri William Admondeston Canonici Ecclesie Cathedralis lychefeld ad perpetuum usum eiusdem Ecclesie Si quis enim alienavit: anathema sit.’ It probably dates from c 1420.Google Scholar

17 At f. 53v-54v. This is the only other source of this hymn known to me.Google Scholar

18 The library was not catalogued at this date; new acquisitions appeared on the annual accessions rolls. In 1606 eleven medieval manuscripts were bought, and the relevant entries include ‘14: Another booke perteininge to musicke written in parchment leaves in quarto’ The school possessed two other music manuscripts (one has since disappeared) and it is not certain that the 1606 entry refers to MS VI. However, the present librarian, Mr. J. B. Lawson, believes that it probably does.Google Scholar

19 I am indebted to Miss J. Isaac of the Lichfield Joint Record Office for bringing the 1577 document to my notice. It appears in an uncatalogued and unfoliated book of accounts of the vicars-choral The lease of 1590 (Dean and Chapter Muniments, D30, C58) is to William Bersley, although it is endorsed Beardsley. It is listed in J Charles Cox, ed., Catalogue of the Muniments and MS Books of the Lichfield Vicars, Publications of the William Salt Archaeological Society, vi/2 (London, 1886), 18. The vicars' accounts for 1594 (Dean and Chapter Muniments, D30, C1, D9), in which a Mr. Bearsley is mentioned, are printed in Thomas Harwood, History and Antiquities of the City of Lichfield (London, 1806), 268.Google Scholar

20 Frank Ll. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain (London, 1958), 406.Google Scholar

21 Manfred F Bukofzer, ‘English Choral Music of the Fifteenth Century’, New Oxford History of Music, in, ed. Anselm Hughes and Gerald Abraham (London, 1960), 183Google Scholar

22 Walter W Skeat, ‘Fragments of Yorkshire Mysteries’, The Academy (4 and 11 January, 1890), no. 922, p 10; no 923, p. 27Google Scholar

23 Ibid.Google Scholar

24 Frank Ll Harrison, cd, The Eton Choirbook, Musica Britannica, xii (London, 1961), 170.Google Scholar

25 Op. cit, 592.Google Scholar

26 Gloria laus and Sedentem in superne It will be seen from the inventory that Centum quadraginta also appears twice, but the first version is erased In the case of all three the second version is the usual plainsongGoogle Scholar

27 If the manuscript did indeed belong to Lichfield Cathedral, the evidence of Sarum rubrics still stands, for the Sarum ordinal was prescribed for use thereGoogle Scholar

28 The exceptions include Centum quadraginta. Gloria laus, the two processional psalms and Sanctι Spιrιtus Gloria laus and Psalm 112 both appear in the British Library manuscript Egerton 3307 set in three-part polyphony Unus autem er ipsis, added to the Shrewsbury manuscript in a later hand, was also usually sung by three soloists.Google Scholar

29 The manuscript is similar in this respect to Egerton 3307 see Manfred F Bukofzer, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York, 1950), 118, 127Google Scholar

30 Gwynn S McPeck, ed, The British Museum Manuscript Egerton 3307 (London, 1963), Sydney R Charles, ed, The Music of the Pepys MS 1236, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, xl (Rome, 1967)Google Scholar

31 The Egerton manuscript contains mainly music for Holy Week, besides secular carols, the Pepys manuscript covers the whole liturgical year but it is not arranged in any kind of order, and has the appearance of a rather haphazard collection; it may represent only a selection of pieces from the repertory which it records.Google Scholar

32 None of the Pepys monophonie pieces has a textual concordance in the Shrewsbury manuscriptGoogle Scholar

33 Quoted from Nan C Carpenter, ‘Music in the Secunda Pastorum’, Speculum, xxvi (1951), 698CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 On several other folios there is the appearance of a ‘t’ or ‘tr’ below the signature, but the ink is so light, the letters so small and the page corners so worn that it is difficult to be sure.Google Scholar

35 Roger Bowers, Choral Institutions within the English Church: their Constitution and Development, 1340–1500 (unpublished Ph D dissertation, University of East Anglia, 1975), chap 6, p 16 (6016).Google Scholar

36 Denis Stevens, ‘Processional Psalms in Faburden’, Musica Disciplina, ix (1955), 105–11Google Scholar

37 In this manuscript the normal chant verses are labelled ‘org’ and the faburden verses ‘chorus’.Google Scholar

38 This is unusual because the technique of ‘faburdening’ was essentially improvisatoryGoogle Scholar

39 Augustus Hughes-Hughes, Catalogue of Manuscript Music in the British Museum, 1 (London, 1906), 256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Each of the Salve festa dies hymns has two musically different refrains, one of which may have been sung as the proper first verse of the hymn.Google Scholar

41 This may resolve the ambiguity of examples such as Sancti Spiritus and Sedentem in supreme which are related to the chant in two different ways None of the lower voices in the Egerton and Pepys manuscripts fits its Shrewsbury textual concordanceGoogle Scholar

42 Quoted in Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain, 103, from Bishop Grandisson's statutes for Ottery St. MaryGoogle Scholar

43 These include accidentals (sharps, flats and cancelling letters) and marks in the shape of a cross with dots in the corners. The latter appear at the beginning of many but not all of the Passion speeches; their significance is unknown.Google Scholar

44 The fact that the Egerton and Pepys manuscripts do not exist in part-book form is irrelevant, since neither is so clearly a performing copy as the Shrewsbury manuscript, and neither includes plays. In any case the idea of a musical part book must be considered entirely novel at this dateGoogle Scholar