New evidence from Shrewsbury on the creation and circulation of music in high-medieval England

Abstract

This article presents new discoveries from a manuscript from the Collegiate Church of St Chad, Shrewsbury, with implications for the circulation of ecclesiastical music, particularly sequences, in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. It begins with a brief examination of the twelfth-century musical contents of the manuscript, which are shown to hold close scribal affinities: in particular, a ‘winged’ neume shape is contextualised by contemporaneous musical inscriptions found in a manuscript probably written at Haughmond Abbey. The remainder of the article considers music, mostly sequences, inscribed in a palimpsest gathering at the back of the St Chad's manuscript in the thirteenth century. Two of these are compared for the first time with their concordances, one concordance newly discovered. Examination of the preservation and record of these musical entries (with discussion of contrafacture and marginalia) sheds light on creative practices of citation and intertextuality, performance traditions, and processes of reading and recording music at St Chad's, ultimately illuminating the role the church played within a creative network across England and northern Europe.

In the late twelfth century, scribes at the Collegiate Church of St Chad, Shrewsbury, added musical material into the blank spaces left in one of their liturgical books. This manuscript, GB-Ob Rawl. D. 1225 (hereafter Rawl), is now kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.¹ Although incorporated into the pioneering surveys of songs in British sources by Helen Deeming and Samantha Blickhan, and containing more musical entries than almost any other surviving contemporaneous insular miscellany (the Appendix provides a table of its musical contents), Rawl has largely been passed over in musicological scholarship.² This article represents the first sustained individual enquiry into the manuscript, the discoveries of which provide important context for the circulation and recording of ecclesiastical music, particularly sequences, in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England.

Rawl comprises a diverse collection of non-musical and musical materials, with multiple different hands adding and editing material, it seems, up to the sixteenth century. The palaeographical and codicological challenges posed by the manuscript's apparent miscellaneity are probably a significant factor in its scholarly neglect: Rawl is mostly mentioned only in catalogues, many of which are limited in scope to certain parts of the manuscript.³ The doctoral theses of Deeming and Blickhan are exceptions in considering Rawl within broader musicological surveys, though they, too, isolate certain musical entries, namely those which they assimilate into a corpus of British medieval songs. These ‘songs’ are musical entries interspersed individually or in small number amid generally non-musical manuscripts, often Marian or otherwise devotional in nature, written in Latin, English or French, and which Deeming and Blickhan argue only rarely served a liturgical function.⁴ Enquiry into Rawl has, however, revealed concordances with graduals and missals, which act to blur the distinction between liturgical music and song. This is a distinction which the medieval scribes at St Chad's themselves also do not appear to make, since unambiguously liturgical items such as alleluia verses (the liturgical counterpart to sequences) appear alongside adjacent sequence-procedure compositions treated as songs by Deeming and Blickhan. In this article, sequences are labelled as such when there is known liturgical use, that is, a concordance with a sequence either with rubrication or found in a sequentiary.

Through contextualising the musical contents of Rawl, this article emphasises the significance of St Chad's – and by extension the wider network of English collegiate churches – for the transmission of medieval church music in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. After a brief introduction to St Chad's, the article proceeds to discuss the palaeography and codicology of the earliest layer of music in Rawl, showing affinities between the entries and providing new contextual evidence for a rare winged neume form used throughout. The article then turns to a palimpsest gathering at the back of the manuscript containing thirteenth-century notations, providing the first comparison of concordances from this chronological layer of the manuscript and revealing a new concordance for Ave maria preciosa gemma. Examination of the preservation of these musical entries in Rawl sheds light on creative practices of citation and intertextuality, performance traditions, and processes of reading and recording music at St Chad's, ultimately illuminating the role the church played within a creative network across England and northern Europe.

St Chad's, Shrewsbury

Shrewsbury, a Shropshire town bordering Wales in a loop of the River Severn, was an important ecclesiastical centre throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The churches of St Chad, St Julian, St Alkmund and St Mary, as well as the castle with St Michael's chapel, would have dominated the town throughout much of the medieval period.⁵ Friars arrived throughout the thirteenth century – Dominican, Augustinian and Franciscan, most likely in that order – and three religious hospitals were established: St George, St Giles and John the Baptist.⁶ The eleventh-century Benedictine Shrewsbury Abbey, which from 1138 housed the relics of St Winifred, lay just beyond the river to the east; other abbeys – Grandmontine, Augustinian, Benedictine, Cluniac and Cistercian – lay further afield in Shropshire.⁷ Haughmond, an abbey of Augustinian canons, was the closest of these.

Although some uncertainty surrounds the provenance history of Rawl, the manuscript is strongly linked to St Chad's from its conception. The oldest and most extensive layer of Rawl is a copy of a martyrology (fols. 12r–128r), the text of which was originally composed by the monk Usuard of Saint-Germain-des-Prés between c.850 and c.879.⁸ Usuard's martyrology is a compendium of information on Christian martyrs for each day of the liturgical year, meant for reading aloud during liturgical offices and other occasions; the second recension of the text – preserved in Rawl – circulated widely in England and Normandy throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries.⁹ The version in Rawl, probably copied c.1173, was individualised for the church's patron saint, St Chad. At the entry for St Chad's feast day of 2 March (fol. 35v), the scribe of the martyrology covered most of Usuard's text on the martyrs Jovinus and Basileus, but paused their copying at the end of a line (indeed, halfway through a word) well before the bottom ruling, leaving space for a roughly contemporaneous collaborator to take over and interpolate an extensive entry – most likely their own composition – on Chad's life.¹⁰ There is also a thirteenth-century alleluia verse with music for St Chad (fol. 131v); marginalia throughout the book refer to the church of ‘S. Cedde Salop’; and obit markings of local benefactors confirm the book's presence at the church from at least the early thirteenth century.¹¹ Together this seems evidence enough to locate the book at St Chad's throughout the period under discussion in this article.

St Chad's was a collegiate church, run by a body of clergy concerned with performing the Opus Dei, whose members followed canon law but did not take monastic vows and could interact extensively with the laity.¹² Though a religious building stood on the site from perhaps as early as the seventh century, the church was refounded in the early twelfth century by a bishop of Chester, then the bishop's seat for the Lichfield diocese in which St Chad's lay. In a twelfth-century list of bishops of Chester on fol. 9v of Rawl, a later hand labels Walter Durdent as this founding bishop (‘q[ui] dedicauit ecc[lesi]am istam’), but it was probably his predecessor, Roger de Clinton (1129–48).¹³ The refounding involved the standardisation of ten canons, led by a dean, though it is unclear how many of these canons remained in residence.¹⁴ Since canons, who were highly educated, often travelled the country to offer their administrative skills to kings or bishops, it seems unlikely that more than one or two resided at St Chad's at any one time.¹⁵

The music recorded in Rawl may have been inscribed and performed by these canons or by vicars choral. Vicars choral were of lower status and education than canons and were chosen for their musical ability: unlike canons, they remained in residence, acting as minor clergy and guaranteeing musical quality.¹⁶ A marginalium in Rawl records the presence of vicars choral at the church from 1326, but the only evidence of vicars choral at the time of the earliest musical notations in Rawl is an ambiguous reference to ‘two vicars choral’ alongside the dean and canons in a nineteenth-century historical survey of Shrewsbury.¹⁷ At Lichfield, vicars choral are recorded in the cathedral's first statutes, drafted during the episcopate of Hugh de Nonant (1185–98); if St Chad's had followed this diocesan example, vicars choral may have been at the church at a similar time, but this must be speculative.¹⁸ The difficulty of the early musical items in Rawl, including one thirteenth-century polyphonic entry, would regardless have required skilled musicians for their execution and inscription, either vicars choral or particularly musically skilled canons.

The earliest musical additions

In the late twelfth century, scribes at St Chad's added musical notations to the spaces left blank after the copying of the martyrology and the coeval liturgical calendar which precedes it (in the gathering fols. 3r–9v), a task which would have presented numerous challenges. Blickhan shows that scribes in Britain working in this period lacked any standard musical orthography, instead using new notational forms and employing existing forms in non-traditional ways in a creative process of representing sound.¹⁹ The complexity of some of the music in Rawl would also have presented issues, a problem confounded by the spatial limitations of adding musical notations to a non-musical book. The notations in Rawl suggest that the three twelfth-century items were added roughly contemporaneously by a group of scribes navigating these challenges.

Psallat celum, which is unrubricated but seems to be an Easter sequence with regular parallel versicles, was added to a blank folio at the end of the opening eight-folio gathering containing the outlines of a liturgical calendar (fol. 9r).²⁰ This calendar had been ruled with at least some rubrication in the twelfth century but was left without entries until the fourteenth or perhaps fifteenth century, whereupon the twelfth-century markings were mostly overwritten and supplemented.

In the same manner, scribes at St Chad's used the leftover space at the end of the final gathering of the martyrology for musical insertions, beginning with Flos excellens, a Marian song also with parallel versicle structure. The scribe of the martyrology had finished copying the text prematurely in the final eight-folio gathering, leaving half a page ruled but empty (fol. 128r), and the verso side and final folio completely blank (fols. 128v–129v). The scribe, or scribes, of Flos excellens initially used the ruling of the martyrology where it remained on fol. 128r, writing – in standard fashion – one line of music text for each two lines of martyrology text, thereby leaving space for a stave above (Figure 1). Although red-ink staves were drawn between the two vertical ruling lines, both music and text scribes extended beyond it into the right-hand margin, the music scribe having to extend the stave on line 3 with his own black ink (‘filio’). That the text scribe continually went over the margin suggests that he found the space constricting: at least in this case it appears he planned to position the opening of the second stanza (‘Rubum’) at the start of the fourth system but the two versicles of the first stanza were too lengthy to fit neatly within the first three systems. The miscalculation at ‘filio’ suggests that the text scribe did not account for the difficulties this over-extension by two syllables would create for a musical notator. The challenges of using a non-musical ruling system for musical inscriptions was clearly recognised, however, since on the verso there is a new ruling which is more suitable for writing out Flos excellens, with the same inner margin as the martyrology but extending closer to the outer edge of the page. The horizontal ruling lines are also spaced 2 mm further apart vertically, so that there is more space for the music and text. From this point onwards, the text scribe does not go over the vertical ruling with a syllable, so the music scribe does not need to go into the margin either.

Figure 1. Rawl, fol. 128r. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. (colour online)

The inscription of Flos excellens seems to be linked to the musical entry also in parallel versicle structure directly underneath, Flos convallis (fol. 129r). This latter is rubricated – apparently subsequently, cramped into the remaining space and initially missing a vowel – ‘de s[an]c[t]a M[a]rgareta’. It uses the same pricking and ruling, and similar notations and script to Flos excellens, but was written using a quill with a thinner nib.²¹ The two pieces open with the metaphor of the flower: Mary is a ‘Flos excellens’ (‘excellent flower’), Margaret is a ‘Flos convallis’ (‘flower of the valley’).²² This metaphor neatly equates Margaret and Mary, and the adjacency of the two songs – filling the remaining gathering space completely – suggests a planned ordinatio, though they were copied by different scribes.

Psallat celum, Flos excellens and Flos convallis were most likely copied around the same time by the combined efforts of a group of scribes at St Chad's: the manuscript's twelfth-century entries share palaeographical affinities which, if not the result of the same hand, at least suggest awareness of a ‘house’ style.²³ The single notes with tails in all three entries feature prominent hairline ascenders, produced by a scribe placing the pen and pulling downwards. The notations of Flos convallis and Psallat celum share further affinities (Table 1), especially in the neume for two ascending notes, and the neume signifying Low–High–Low (liquescent). Text scripts share affinities as well: both Flos excellens and Flos convallis include the rare ‘æ’ ligature (fol. 129r, line 2 and fol. 129v, line 1, respectively), and the capitals in Flos excellens and Psallat celum are by the same or a very similar hand (Table 2).

Table 1. A comparison of some neume forms in Psallat celum and Flos convallis

^a Three or more descending notes can have varying forms in Psallat celum.

Table 2. A comparison of capitals in Psallat celum and Flos excellens

A peculiarity common to all three notation sets is their use of a ‘winged’ neume form (Table 1, row 1). In Blickhan's survey of notations in British miscellanies, only eleven songs from three manuscripts use this neume form, and Rawl's three witnesses therefore constitute 27 per cent of the corpus. Hartzell incorrectly linked this punctum form with Lotharingian (‘Messine’) neume script, presumably due to similarities with the Lotharingian uncinus neume.²⁴ However, a defining feature of Lotharingian script is the absence of virgae (single notes with tails), which is not the case in Rawl.²⁵ Rather, the curved, ‘winged’ neumes take the morphology of what David Hiley has termed ‘Fécamp mi-neumes’: these are a type of punctum used in English sources from the tenth century onwards, before the introduction of the lined stave; the form indicates the presence of a semitone, found at E and b in the intervals E–F and b–c, respectively.²⁶ Hiley identifies the mi-neume in twelfth-century Norman and English books, classing it as ‘strictly speaking, redundant’ given the information provided by the clef and stave.²⁷ Yet the scribes of the period often retained this form, showing that ‘redundant’ neume forms persisted.

The mi-neume shapes in Rawl do not indicate the presence of a semitone. Blickhan shows that, since the neume shape is frequently used for positions outside the semitone boundaries in Flos excellens, Flos convallis and Psallat celum, the use of the mi-neume morphology in Rawl is probably aesthetic rather than functional.²⁸ Equally in Psallat celum and Flos convallis, most of the neume forms for two ascending notes use a similar curved form for the starting note which again does not seem to signify a special function and may simply be an aesthetic enrichment of a starting horizontal stroke (Table 2). Nevertheless, the use of this neume form for a single note without a tail by three different music scribes, and its disappearance in the thirteenth-century musical layer, suggests that – whatever the reason – twelfth-century scribes at St Chad's used this winged shape as a standardised punctum (a single note without tail), a practice which was phased out between the two chronological layers of musical notations.

The manuscript Shrewsbury School, XXX (hereafter GB-SHRs XXX) – a late twelfth-century gradual of Augustinian use, possibly written for Haughmond Abbey near Shrewsbury – provides important context for the use of this winged neume shape which has not previously been recognised. The manuscript was not incorporated into the surveys carried out by Deeming and Blickhan because it is dedicated to liturgical music. Following the main section of the manuscript containing the Temporale, Sanctorale, Common of Saints and Office for the Dead, folia left blank at the end of the final gathering were used in the late twelfth century for the inscription of three musical items using different textual and musical scripts both among the entries and from the previous material.²⁹ They include a sequence Alleluia nunc decantet (fols. 142v–143r), a section rubricated ‘In dedicacione’ with Proper material including the sequence Psallat ecclesia mater (fols. 143v–144r) and a sequence Benedicta sit beata (fol. 144v): this short collection contains the only sequences that appear in the manuscript approximately matching the time of copying of the twelfth-century gradual.³⁰ By filling blank folia left at the end of gatherings with sequence-form compositions, the scribes of GB-SHRs XXX have engaged in a similar activity as those of the early musical entries in Rawl (which also employ the characteristic parallel versicle structure). In these three added sections, two of the music scribes use the winged neume form without functional significance (the other addition, Alleluia nunc decantet, uses it functionally as a mi-neume) (Figure 2). The form appears at positions besides those needed for marking semitones, and with little consistency in parallel versicles. With this information, it seems that almost all the surviving examples of music in sequence form from the twelfth-century Shrewsbury area use the winged form as a standard form, such that the winged mi-neume shape may have functioned as the ‘standard’ punctum for notating new music in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. Perhaps the form carried over from pre-stave traditions (as it would have in the early layer of the Haughmond gradual) but lost its functional significance in the recording of music from later centuries.

Figure 2. GB-SHRs XXX, fol. 144v. Reproduced with permission from Shrewsbury School. (colour online)

The scribes of all three twelfth-century entries in Rawl seem to show a process of acclimatisation to the challenges of inscribing complex music. Hartzell characterises the neumes of Psallat celum as ‘cursive and uncalligraphic’.³¹ Clef changes are inserted ad hoc, as opposed to those in the two Flos sequences where clef changes usually occur at verse boundaries, suggesting that the music scribe of Psallat celum was not thinking ahead for the musical ambitus of the versicle. Nicholson has suggested that the clef itself is a mistake, as G should be a space-line signature, with g as the line signature of the octave above.³² The text scribe has also not been sensitive to the room needed for the rather complex musical notations; for example, by abbreviating the word ‘proles’ at a melismatic passage (fol. 9r, line 8). Considering also its position at the front of Rawl, Psallat celum may have been the first musical addition to the book by scribes writing quickly and unplanned, struggling with the spatial restrictions. The scribes of Flos excellens and Flos convallis have neater notations and show better communication between music and text scribes, aside from the ruling difficulty outlined earlier. At one point in both, the text scribe has missed a letter, resulting in too few syllables for the music (Figure 3). In Flos excellens, the music scribe has positioned the first neume on the syllable ‘-ra’ of ‘habra[h]e’ to the left of the text syllable to leave room for an inserted letter ‘h’, suggesting that the correction was made at least before the music was copied and possibly during the process. In Flos convallis, the ink of an inserted second ‘i’ to the word ‘martir[i]um’ is slightly darker than the rest of the text, the angle of the minim is slanted to the left, and it lacks prominent serifs: this is perhaps the music scribe correcting the text scribe. In both songs the mistake would be easy for a text scribe to make if copying from an exemplar (both words are valid Latin, albeit grammatically incongruent) but the music–text alignment would mean a music scribe would notice the lack of a required syllable. Perhaps, then, the scribes started with the hasty inscription of Psallat celum, a process which was soon after followed by the better planned Flos excellens and Flos convallis collection.

Figure 3. Scribal errors in Flos excellens (top) and Flos convallis (bottom). (colour online)

Networks and expansion

Immediately following the final gathering of the martyrology containing Flos excellens and Flos convallis, there is a gathering of two bifolia with the outlines of a liturgical calendar, over which musical notations have been added. This calendar is pricked for a different number of columns than the first calendar, its spelling of the month March is different (‘Martii’, as opposed to the ‘Marcii’ used in the first calendar and the martyrology), and it seems to have been cut down from the top and is missing an outer bifolium. Together, these differences (and its unconventional position at the back of Rawl) suggest that this calendar was not originally intended for inclusion in Rawl, that it was copied at a different time or place from the rest of the manuscript, and that only later was it inserted into the book. While the circumstances of its abandonment remain elusive – indeed, why neither of the calendars in Rawl were finished is unclear – it was eventually bound into the back of the manuscript to serve as palimpsest pages. An additional pricking line occurs along the vertical edges of the bifolia, with pricking marks spaced 20 mm apart, to which neither the remaining calendar markings nor the musical additions conform but which are for the most part consistent with the new pricking lines added for the ruling of the two Flos items. If whoever carried out the pricking of the pages of Flos excellens and Flos convallis also carried out the new pricking of the palimpsest calendar, then the palimpsest calendar was probably in the manuscript when the first musical items were added. Perhaps whoever initiated the ruling for Flos excellens simply pricked the remaining pages in the manuscript with the intention that they be used for further musical additions.

The musical notations in the palimpsest calendar stand somewhat apart from the earlier layer. The scribes employ later forms of square notations that had become standard in the thirteenth century, and the musical items recorded are generally shorter, resulting in a greater density of change in scribal hands per page. This scribal disconnect may be contextualised by developments at St Chad's and in the town during this period. The close rolls record that in 1226 Henry III gifted the canons at St Chad's four oaks ‘ad operationem ecclesie Sancti Cedde’, suggesting that the church was either repaired or expanded during this time.³³ The town of Shrewsbury at large also enjoyed increased growth and prosperity, with a thriving wool trade drawing footfall during this period, and, as previously mentioned, the town experienced an influx of friars across the century.³⁴ At least five relatively large musical entries, Salve signum, Alleluia V. Ave dei genitrix, Virgo truces, Ave Maria preciosa gema and Ascendat homo, can be traced to this layer of inscription because a later scribe, easily identified by his use of a ‘box a’ (a late thirteenth-century scribal development), inserted three alleluias – Matris Christi (fol. 130r), O vir magne (fol. 131v) and Spes maria (fol. 132r), along with an abandoned outline of Matris Christi (fol. 133r; Figure 4) – in the blank spaces left around them. These musical inscriptions may represent a movement to expand the scope of liturgical music at St Chad's during this period of growth, and concordances that appear in this layer of the manuscript indicate that the church was becoming increasingly connected to other ecclesiastical centres.

Figure 4. Rawl, fol. 133r. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. (colour online)

The sequence Ave maria preciosa gemma (fol. 133r, Figure 4) has two such concordances: one is found in Bischöfliches Diözesanarchiv Aachen, Stiftsarchiv, 13 (hereafter D-AAm 13), a gradual probably written c.1170–1190 at the Aachen Marienstift, a collegiate church later raised to the rank of cathedral (Figure 5).³⁵ The manuscript has recently been digitised but is not yet open access, though a facsimile edition exists.³⁶ The other concordance is in GB-Mr Lat. 24, a noted missal from the mid-thirteenth century written at the scriptorium of Salisbury Cathedral; its copy of Ave maria preciosa gemma was until now thought to be unique (Figure 6).³⁷ Both concordances are newly presented and compared here: Example 1 presents a comparative transcription where departures from D-AAm 13 – the oldest record – are shown.

Figure 5. Bischöfliches Diözesanarchiv Aachen, Stiftsarchiv, Hs 13, fols. 153v–155r. (colour online)

Figure 6. GB-Mr Lat. 24, fol. 251v. Copyright of the University of Manchester (http//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). (colour online)

Example 1. Comparative diagram of the concordances of Ave maria preciosa gemma. Where settings differ, the divergent settings are recorded. Differences in spelling are not specifically noted. ‘x’ denotes liquescence.

Most notably, stanzas 6 to 14 of Ave maria preciosa gemma are excised in Rawl. In the other sources, these stanzas form a relatively self-contained typological section focusing primarily on the prophesying of Mary's achievements by Moses and Aaron. The version in Rawl, by contrast, contains only the initial salutations (‘Ave’ and ‘Salve’ verses) and concluding prayers for intercession. The missing stanzas preserved in D-AAm 13 and GB-Mr Lat. 24 also stand apart musically: the final rises by a fifth and the ambitus begins to expand, leading to a climax at a top g in stanzas 13 and 14 (‘Ave uirgo speciosa sole digna’) before settling back to the original range to align with the Rawl version again for the concluding stanza. That this excised section acts, therefore, as a kind of self-contained unit which musically and textually extends and enriches the sequence, perhaps explains why a performer or scribe at some point felt it permissible to cut it for the abridged version. If this decision was made at St Chad's, perhaps the somewhat smaller setting of the church relative to Aachen and Salisbury made a lengthy and extravagant sequence less attractive.

Another factor which sets the Rawl version of Ave maria preciosa gemma apart from its concordances is its treatment of cadential patterns. Both the Aachen and the Salisbury manuscripts contain varied endings for each stanza, seemingly linked to the words they set (see, for example, the cadential pair ‘miserie’ and ‘misericordie’ dropping to the subfinal for the first time in the sequence in D-AAm 13). The version recorded in Rawl, however, gives each versicle which ends in proparoxytone stress (all but the fourth and sixth stanzas) a melisma (babGa) on the emphasised syllable, with the concluding two unstressed syllables set to a repeated final: this is reproduced verbatim across versicles, though the ligature is written slightly differently on separate occasions. It is unclear whether the version of the sequence known and sung at St Chad's had such standardised versicle endings, or whether singers would have the varied cadential patterns in performance through recall or extemporisation, producing a realisation more closely resembling the written versions in the Aachen and Salisbury manuscripts. In the latter case, the scribe may have chosen not to include the differing endings for pragmatism or a desire not to be prescriptive, the notation serving rather as a prompt or framework. Given that the ending patterns in Rawl are closer to those in the Salisbury manuscript than those in D-AAm 13 (see, in particular, stanzas 3a and 3b, 5a and 5b, 15a and 15b), if the endings were indeed varied at St Chad's then the realised performances may have resembled those at Salisbury more closely than those at Aachen. Conversely, verbatim ending repetitions would have had a striking epistrophe-like effect in performance, creating association between words placed on each similar melisma; for example, the ‘filium’ of stanza 2a might recall the ‘uirginum’ of stanza 1a, thus drawing attention to the miracle of Mary's virgin birth of Christ, and may further find resonance in the ‘glorie’ of stanza 3b brought about by this birth. Both performance possibilities, therefore, can be entertained.

Unlike the scribes of Salisbury and Aachen, the St Chad's scribe did not indicate liquescences in his notation. The scribe of D-AAm 13 used an early Hufnagelschrift, indicating liquescenses by comma-like figures after neume shapes (line 1, on the syllable ‘gem-’ of ‘gemma’), and of the three sources it is the most sensitive to these liquescences. The square notation of GB-Mr Lat. 24 includes both upwards liquescence markings (RH column, line 7, on ‘per’ of ‘per filiis’) and downward liquescence markings (LH column, line 14, on the syllable ‘gem-’ of ‘gemma’) occasionally in different places from D-AAm 13. Just as for the cadential patterns, it is unclear whether the scribe at St Chad's did not include the liquescences because they were not performed or, perhaps more likely, because they were considered tacitly implied as an integral aspect of performance.

Aside from these preceding differences, the setting of Ave maria preciosa gemma in Rawl correlates closely with the Aachen and Salisbury witnesses, only once diverging entirely from both concordances (3b ‘restauratrix’, a peculiarity not reproduced in the parallel versicle). On four occasions the Rawl notations follow Salisbury and not Aachen (2a ‘exora’ and 2b ‘angelorum’, 15a ‘perhenni’ and 15b ‘cernere’) and in general the cadential endings of the Salisbury witness are a closer match, as noted. However, on three occasions the Rawl notations follow Aachen and not Salisbury (4a ‘pia prece’ and 4b ‘morbos pelle’, 5a ‘Educ’) and in these cases the Salisbury witness differs significantly from both D-AAm 13 and Rawl, such that the general contours of the notated sequence in Rawl more closely concord with the older Aachen version. The Salisbury witness, which at one point diverges even in words from the Aachen witness (9b ‘in carne dei patris filium’) may therefore represent a more idiosyncratic version of the sequence as performed at Salisbury Cathedral. The concordance with Aachen may be indirect, through a British intermediary centre such as Salisbury, but considering the strength of correlation between Rawl and D-AAm 13, and that the then thriving wool trade between Shrewsbury and northern Europe (especially Flanders) shows that the two areas were connected, sequence transmission between Shrewsbury and the continent should not be discounted.³⁸

The other concordance in Rawl is for the sequence Salve virgo (fol. 131r; Figure 7), found in a sequentiary at the back of F-Pa 135, a Sarum noted missal from either the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century (Figure 8).³⁹ Hiley suggests that the sequentiary does not accord with Sarum use and perhaps originated from London,⁴⁰ though Canterbury is also a possibility, especially given its numerous sequences for Canterbury saints. In Rawl, the words to this sequence were inscribed underneath the text and music of another setting of the same melody, Salve signum, and the two clearly form a contrafact pair. It seems that the scribe of Salve signum did not plan for the inclusion of the text of Salve virgo, as he did not leave any space for subsequent additions; the later scribe of Salve virgo therefore had to fit his text on any available parchment, sometimes intruding on the staves and inconsistently aligning syllables with notes. Along with Oblatum canticum inscribed at the foot of the page, the script of Salve virgo departs from the standard Textualis rotundus of Salve signum and the surrounding musical entries, instead using an English form of Cursiva antiquior, a lower status script suggesting practicality rather than display.⁴¹ Perhaps the later scribe of Salve virgo simply recognised the melody and decided that it would be useful to write the alternative text underneath. Conversely, F-Pa 135 (like GB-Mr Lat. 24) displays the sequence in two-column format with wide margins, a beginning decorated initial and subsequent blue and red capitals for each parallel versicle pair. As opposed to the Rawl witness which almost exclusively uses single notes with tails, F-Pa 135 employs a greater range of note forms, retaining a virga-punctum distinction, including liquescences and even concluding with an embellished note form.

Figure 7. Rawl, fol. 131r. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. (colour online)

Figure 8. F-Pa 135, fol. 282v. Bibliothèque nationale de France. (colour online)

Mise-en-page aside, the concordance is strong, and most differences can be attributed to copying errors, almost all of which are made by the scribe of F-Pa 135. This later scribe begins, for instance, in an F-clef but switches to a C-clef within the first system and retains this form for the rest of the sequence. In the second stanza, he writes the music on the syllable ‘fe-’ of ‘ferens’ (LH column, line 5) a note too low – and when corrected in the parallel versicle (on the initial ‘Le-’ of ‘leuas ad palacium’), he retained the erroneous following interval, such that ‘-uas ad palacium’ is a degree too high – and in the fourth stanza, he writes the neume on the syllable ‘-go’ of ‘virgo’ (LH column, penultimate line) also a degree too high. Line-break mistakes seem to have been made in F-Pa 135 at ‘et certum indici-’ (RH column, line 1), which is a fourth too low, and in Rawl at ‘nobile/previa’ (line 5) which is a degree too high – both are corrected in their parallel versicles.⁴² True variations are few: line 5 in Rawl reads ‘ut’ rather than F-Pa 135's ‘in’; in Rawl (line 8), the ‘no-’ of ‘noscitur’ has a two-note descending melisma; and in F-Pa 135, the ‘-e’ of ‘pietatis’ and the ‘-ua’ of its parallel ‘iuua’ in the final stanza (RH column, ll. 2 and 4) are embellished with the first and only three-note melismas in the sequence, probably added at some point by a performer as a concluding flourish which was standardised in the F-Pa 135 version but which did not make it to St Chad's. The only significant ambiguity apart from this is the end of the third stanza, which in Rawl ends on the final, but which in both versicles of F-Pa 135 the final phrase of six syllables with a paroxytone stress is transposed a third higher – since every other stanza in the sequence ends on the final, the Rawl version is probably more reliable. Accounting for the scribal errors and minor variations, the correlation is strong – especially given that the Rawl melody was copied with a different text in mind – suggesting that the sequence had a relatively secure transmission history, and that the melodies in each were taken from similar written exemplars. However, given that the Rawl version employs only very rudimentary notations and some staves have redundant fifth lines, it is unlikely that it was copied from a display volume such as the Sarum missal, and it may have travelled to the church via an ephemeral source such as a libellus.

Salve virgo and the original Rawl entry, Salve signum, are clearly related. Since they share a rhyming structure and an unusual metrical structure which changes halfway through (Table 3), the two are certainly linked and one is probably a direct contrafact of the other. Since Salve virgo appears in the Sarum noted missal whereas Salve signum has no concordances, Salve virgo may be the original sequence, or at least the better known. Furthermore, Salve virgo starts each stanza with ‘Salve’, a technique of anaphora common to Marian poems, which Salve signum breaks in stanza 2, suggesting deviation from a model.⁴³ Since Salve signum is uniquely known from Rawl, its contrafact text may even have been written at St Chad's.

Table 3. A comparison of the texts of Salve signum and Salve virgo

^a Translations (with minor edits, see, for example, note 42) are from Deeming, Songs in British Sources, 147–8.

It is unusual for a contrafact network to correlate so directly: often contrafacta in this period start with a citation of melodic and textual material before deviating.⁴⁴ Here, both melody and syllables align exactly, demonstrating that the contrafact creator was not simply drawing on a common fund of musical material, but rather aiming to draw a parallel between the texts and subjects of both sequences. Deeming has coined the term ‘virtual polyphony’ to refer to the layers of meaning which are experienced simultaneously through memory in a contrafact of a known song.⁴⁵ Here, then, the Cross (the subject of Salve signum) is aligned with Mary (the subject of Salve virgo). This was a common theological trope in the thirteenth century: Dolores Pesce notes this trend and shows how a contrafact of the Alleluia V. Dulcis lignum, an alleluia verse known in England, was circulated in n orthern France as Alleluia V. Dulcis virgo and in the eleventh fascicle of D-W Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst (St Andrews) as Alleluia V. Salve virgo dei mater, both contrafacts drawing attention to the idea that Mary and the Cross are linked by their worthiness to ‘bear’ Christ.⁴⁶ This ‘bearing’ (‘ferens’) is the image used in the opening versicle of Salve signum, forming a parallel with the theme of Mary holding the ‘word of God’ in her belly in the equivalent stanza of Salve virgo, and the following, where she bears the solace of sinners (‘ferens … solacium’).

Further virtual polyphony abounds: whereas in Salve virgo Christ is given to the world (‘mundo’), in Salve signum Christ is the price of the world (‘mundi … precium’). Stanza 2 of Salve virgo portrays Mary as the gate of paradise (‘porta paradisi’) whereas in Salve signum the cross is the key to paradise (‘clave paradisi’). Stanza 3 in both sequences concerns ‘us’, the servants of Christ undergoing suffering such as metaphorical shipwreck: ‘naufragatis’ in Salve virgo and ‘naufragio’ in Salve signum. This stanza contains the most emphatic and memorable part of the sequence through an ascending leap of a seventh: Mary described as a guiding star (‘stella previa’) to those tossed in the sea (‘ut mari vexatis’), the turbulence of the sea denoted by the disjunct seventh. In Salve signum, the cross is described as a noble sign dedicated to God (‘deo dedicatum’), the seventh coinciding with the introduction of God the Father who signifies the cross. While in Salve virgo, it is Mary who acts as a saving port (‘portum salutiferum’), in Salve signum, it is Jesus, through his death on the Cross, who leads the shipwrecked to port (‘ad portum duxisti’). Though Mary as a saving guide for the shipwrecked is a common trope, this metaphor is less common for the Cross, further suggesting that Salve signum was a direct contrafact of Salve virgo, and that the words are intended to associate the Cross with the praises usually attributed to Mary. Perhaps, then, the clergy at St Chad's required a text for the feast of the Cross and chose to contrafact a Marian sequence that they already knew.⁴⁷

It is evident that such theological reading of the text was a concern for the community at St Chad's from a gloss added to Salve signum (Figure 7). At ‘Salve crux … qua pax postliminii / fuit reformanda’ (‘Hail cross … by which the peace of returning home is restored’), the word ‘postliminii’ has a signe de renvoi, with a corresponding sign and gloss in the left-hand margin. The script is in a form of Cursiva antiquior with decorative bifurcating ascenders: it differs from the script of Salve signum but resembles Salve virgo – though given that the gloss does not reference the latter sequence, it was perhaps added before the second text was inserted – and even more so Oblatum canticum written at the foot of the page, which has the same ascenders. The gloss reads:

Hec liminium

id est captivitas

et exilium extra

limen expulcio

et contra postliminium

id est rencio de

exilio ad iura⁴⁸

It seems that the writer of this passage is drawing attention to the dual meaning of ‘liminium’ – within the word ‘postliminium’ – as both ‘captivity’ and ‘entrance’ (which when allied with ‘post’ becomes ‘postliminium’, literally ‘past the entrance’, that is, ‘returning home’).⁴⁹ Thus, in the context of the Salve signum (where the Cross guarantees that ‘the peace of returning home is restored’), the idea of returning home is interpreted to refer to the amelioration of captivity and exile from the church; in other words, the Cross acts as the key to paradise for those who had been barred from entry.

The gloss suggests that Rawl was referenced by readers who had been educated in theology. Deeming has drawn attention to how poetry and music were often cited in sermons (including the so-called ‘scholastic’ sermon), distinctiones (alphabetical compendia of exegeses on words) and exempla (collections of anecdotes to be used in evangelistic work), and generally used as a resource for theological teaching and study.⁵⁰ A verse ‘Morbos curat’ inscribed underneath the entry on the feast day for Thomas Beckett (fol. 15r) in the martyrology suggests that this process was also at work at St Chad's. Similarly, it may be that a clergy member such as a canon had turned to Salve signum for theological reference and written down their thoughts, or perhaps a new clergy member was appointed to the church who, upon reading the sequence in Rawl, offered their interpretation of a difficult passage.

Another intertextual network is found in Alleluia V. Ave dei genitrix (fol. 131v; Figure 9), a two-voice alleluia based on the tenor plainchant dies sanctificatus. Its textual script differs from its surroundings, the horizontal ascender of ‘d’ and nearly single-compartment ‘a’, along with the red initials not found elsewhere, suggesting that it was produced in a distinct phase of copying and, given its formality relative to its surroundings, was perhaps one of the earlier additions to the calendar palimpsest. Karen Desmond has identified a rich tradition in high to late medieval England of adding new texts to pre-existent alleluias, often making use of prosula technique by adding new voices and texts which comment on, and interact with, the plainchant tenor.⁵¹ Alleluia V. Ave dei genitrix, however, does not use prosula technique: while prosulae usually interpolate new words around the existing text, setting new words syllabically to the melismatic passages, in Rawl there is no trace of the original chant text or even liturgical theme (the words are entirely replaced with a new Marian text) and melismas remain. In this sense, it is more of a contrafact, though unlike for Salve crucis/Salve virgo it is less a citation of a melody–text pair with its liturgical overtones but rather a replication and repurposing of the most widely known melody in the alleluia repertory. Alleluia V. Ave dei genitrix finds particular resonance with the previously mentioned eleventh fascicle of D-W Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst, especially Alleluia V. Virgo intemerata which also sets the dies sanctificatus plainchant in two voices (in Desmond's repertory, three voices is usual) and uses a similar technique of contrafacture rather than prosula technique.⁵² Hughes has already suggested that the style of polyphony in Alleluia V. Ave dei genitrix is ‘strongly reminiscent’ of this fascicle.⁵³ Alleluia V. Ave dei genitrix is, however, somewhat abridged: like Alleluia V. Virgo intemerata, it includes the opening four notes of the ‘Alleluia’ in the polyphony, but while in the St Andrews manuscript the monophonic jubilus respond is copied out, in Rawl it is left out (see Example 2). This is common practice in soloist books, as the soloists were not expected to sing the choral jubilus, and it further suggests the book's use by select musically trained canons or vicars choral who would act as these soloists. Rawl also skips many of the mainly syllabic and recitation-tone sections of the plainchant, and while (unlike in Alleluia V. Virgo intemerata) it includes the end of the alleluia verse in the polyphony (‘esto memorum’), it appears to finish prematurely, without the concluding fall to the D final – though this may similarly have been left out for brevity if it were choral and monophonic.⁵⁴ Since the composition lacks any concordances, it is uncertain whether it was created at St Chad's or whether it was copied from a written exemplar. Problems of alignment in the music suggest that it was not the latter: although the text scribe left gaps for melismas, the syllables are clearly written with the lower line of music in mind – that is, the plainchant tenor – without considering the space needed for the more active top line quite carefully enough.

Figure 9. Rawl, fol. 131v. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. (colour online)

Example 2. Settings of Alleluia V. dies sanctificatus, showing the plainchant preserved in Worcester, Cathedral Library, F.160, fol. 298r–v (chosen for consistency with Desmond, ‘W. de Wicumbe's Rolls’, 664), and the tenor plainchants in Rawl, fol. 131v and D-W Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst, fol. 182r–v. ‘x’ denotes liquescence.

The concordances for Rawl noted in this section are consistently found in large books of liturgical music surrounded by other relatively general Marian sequences which presumably could be applied to many liturgical occasions. The Ave maria preciosa gemma witness in GB-Mr Lat. 24 is rubricated ‘al[ium]’ from an earlier rubrication ‘In commemoracione beate uirginis seq[uencia]’. In D-AAm 13, it is rubricated ‘Item alia’, one of a group of seven successive Marian items initiated by a sequence rubricated ‘De sancta maria’. D-AAm 13 is peculiar in preserving two distinct sequentiaries, one a ‘French’ repertory (fols. 120r–156v) and the other ‘German’ sequentiary (fols. 157r–168r).⁵⁵ That Ave maria preciosa gemma appears in the French repertory and in two English sources is perhaps unsurprising given the historical connection of the West-Frankish sequence repertory with that of England.⁵⁶ While the function of the F-Pa 135 concordance of Salve virgo is less clear, as the latterly added pencilled rubrications cease shortly before the sequence's appearance, it too is preceded by a section filled with similar Marian sequences (34 of the 105 sequences in F-Pa 135 are Marian), including Mittit ad uirginem, for which there is a concordance with fol. 2r–v of Rawl, seemingly a late addition to the book.⁵⁷ All three of these sources contain other concordances with sequences in manuscripts from Britain included in Deeming's and Blickhan's studies of the period c.1150–1300. Even Alleluia V. Ave dei genitrix in D-W Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst is found in a group of relatively general Marian alleluias. It seems, therefore, that Ave maria preciosa gemma, Salve virgo and Alleluia V. Ave dei genitrix may have travelled to St Chad's as part of a network of Marian and other devotional liturgical music orbiting England and northwestern Europe. St Chad's may even have fed into this network with its own creations such as its many unica including the contrafact Salve signum.

A working book

A process of scribal accretion appears to have occurred in Rawl as subsequent generations added liturgical entries, corrections and other marks of use. This process continued perhaps as late as the Reformation, since ‘Pape’ is frequently scratched or crossed out in the martyrology. Parchment space became scarce, and music was frequently inscribed at the bottom of pages, such as the late thirteenth-century alleluias mentioned previously which were probably added as they arrived at, or were created at, St Chad's. Other ad hoc additions of short, usually devotional musical pieces occurred over the centuries: O Edmunde (fol. 133v) is a short, through-composed metrical song dedicated to St Edmund, and the aforementioned ‘Morbos curat’ (fol. 15r) is an un-notated verse for Thomas Beckett. Other short insertions include Oblatum canticum at the base of fol. 131r, a short through-composed entry calling on the Holy Spirit; Sanctis pro nobis (fol. 127v), a blank-stave piece in the bottom margin of the penultimate page of the martyrology which appears to appeal to the Virgin Mary; and Gloriosa dei cella (fol. 130v), a short sequence-form piece with striking anaphora, beginning each versicle and system with ‘Gloriosa’. Hiley has noted the ‘cross-fertilisation’ of the sequence repertory with other genres such as the texted prosula responsory, Vesper hymn substitutes and Offertories.⁵⁸ Many of the late additions could have been used in these ways.

Additions and edits to the book show that it was referenced over the next few centuries. ‘Obit’ markings are found throughout, most prominently in the martyrology and first liturgical calendar but also for example above Flos excellens on fol. 128v, and in the space on fol. 130r before Alleluia V. Matris Christi. Some musical items show signs of later hands correcting or changing the music. Flos excellens even witnesses a doodle of a face in its margin (fol. 128v): perhaps it was new to the church at the time of its inscription in the twelfth century and had to be learnt by future generations. While the manuscript's bulky form may have rendered it an impractical source for use in live performance, the signs of reference throughout the book suggest that it would have functioned as a repository of musical knowledge for the church's musicians, either vicars choral or – as suggested by the Salve crucis marginalium – canons.

Conclusions

Something of a chronology for Rawl can now be attempted: in the late twelfth century, certain musically skilled individuals at St Chad's, canons or vicars choral, began to add musical notations to the blank spaces left in their recently copied martyrology, creatively responding to the challenges of this task and drawing on shared scribal resources. In the early thirteenth century, the same or other individuals initiated a movement to expand the liturgical music at the church, creating new music and contrafacta, and assimilating general Marian or other devotional songs from other centres, which were deposited in a calendar palimpsest at the back of the book; over the following centuries, the book became a repository of musical knowledge, continually referenced and supplemented.

The music surviving in Rawl thereby provides a crucial perspective on the culture of musical creation and circulation in high-medieval England, and not from a major centre. English collegiate churches have tended to fall in the margins of scholarship on medieval music history, as they have in general historical scholarship, overshadowed by contemporaneous cathedrals and abbeys.⁵⁹ Yet the diversity of musical practice recorded in Rawl – the number of unica and the nature of the concordances, the number of different scribes writing music and the continual additions over the centuries – suggest that the musicians at St Chad's not only created and inscribed their own music, but also participated in a network of devotional music throughout England and northern Europe. If other English collegiate churches were as musically active, then investigation of additional sources with links to relatively small, neglected centres may ultimately lead to a richer understanding of the musico-liturgical landscape of high-medieval England.