¹ Weston, William, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London, Longmans, 1955), 71 Google Scholar.

² Hodgetts, Michael, ‘Recusant Liturgical Music’, The Clergy Review, 61 (1976): 151–156 Google Scholar.

³ Mateer, David, ‘William Byrd, John Petre, and Oxford Bodleian MS Mus. Sch. E. 423’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 29 (1996): 21–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sequera, Hector, ‘House Music for Recusants in Elizabethan England: Performance Practice in the Music Collection of Edward Paston (1550–1603)’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2010)Google Scholar; McCarthy, Kerry, ‘Byrd’s Patrons at Prayer’, Music and Letters, 89 (2008): 499–509 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ From the contemporary account written in 1627 by Richard Smith, edited by Southern, A. C., An Elizabethan Recusant House Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (1538–1608) (London: Sands, 1954), 41–42 Google Scholar.

⁵ Marsh, Christopher, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁶ Hereafter, unless indicated by dates in brackets, reference to ‘William Blundell’, ‘William’ or ‘Blundell’ should be assumed to be William Blundell (1560–1638).

⁷ ‘Diarium Secundum’ in Records of the English Catholics under the Penal Laws, ed. Thomas Francis Knox (London: David Nutt, 1878), 97–266 (at 229, 239).

⁸ Shell, Alison, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pettegree, Andrew, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Shell, Oral Culture, 82.

¹⁰ Fumerton, Patricia and Guerrini, Anita with Kris McAbee eds. Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010)Google Scholar. One contributor to the collection highlighted the need for a ‘catholic perspective’, 72.

¹¹ See Marsh, Christopher, ‘The Sound of Print in Early Modern England: the Broadside Ballad as Song‘ in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, eds. Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171–190 Google Scholar; Marsh, , Music and Society, 225–337 Google Scholar; Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar and Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in early modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Watt, , Cheap Print, 88 Google Scholar.

¹³ Shell, , Oral Culture, 89 Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Kelly, James, ‘Kinship and Religious Politics among Catholic families in England, 1570–1640’, History 94 (2009): 328–343 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Questier, Michael, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the influence of this approach see also Marshall, Peter and Scott, Geoffrey eds. Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Questier has since made this particular argument more concisely within an article that addressed the methodology and conclusions of Pritchard, Arnold, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London: Scolar Press, 1979)Google Scholar in Questier, ‘Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England’, English Historical Review 113 (2008): 1132–1165.

¹⁶ Shell, , Oral Culture; Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ To cite just one example see Corthell, Ronald et al, eds., Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ As distinct from ‘inter-faith’ conversion: there is currently no extant evidence to suggest that Catholics were using ballads to convert Protestants, except for Lewis Owen’s remarks – see n.108.

¹⁹ Lancashire Record Office, DDBL, acc 6121, Box 4, Great Hodge Podge. (Hereafter Great Hodge Podge). For a literary analysis of the entirety of the Great Hodge Podge see van Vuuren, Julie, ‘The manuscript culture of an English recusant Catholic community in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: a study of The great hodge podge and the Blundell family of Little Crosby, Lancashire’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Reading, 2011)Google Scholar. This includes a chapter on ‘music and orality’, which explores five of the songs Blundell composed, but offers quite a different analysis and draws largely different conclusions to those presented here.

²⁰ For more on Blundell’s grandson and namesake see Baker, Geoff, Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a Seventeenth-Century Catholic Gentleman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Describing Little Crosby as an ‘enclave’, see Woolf, D.R., ‘Little Crosby and the Horizons of Early Modern Historical Culture’ in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500–1800, eds. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 93–132 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (at 112).

²² Sena, Margaret, ‘William Blundell and the Networks of Catholic Dissent in Post-Reformation England’ in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, eds. Alexandra Shepherd and Phil Withington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 54–75 Google Scholar.

²³ I have excluded here the poems and verses that were unlikely to have been sung to a melody, but that does not mean that they were not read aloud and significantly this makes them no less oral. See Shell, Oral Culture.

²⁴ The two other items in the miscellany are ‘A Sick Man’s Salve’ – a prose recipe and the medieval poem a ’Parliament of Devils’.

²⁵ BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.31–33.

²⁶ Rollins, Hyder ed. Old English Ballads, 1553–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Incorrectly transcribed as ‘F.B.P.’ in Rollins, Old English Ballads, 164.

²⁸ Rollins, Old English Ballads, xxx.

²⁹ Shell, Alison, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 196 and Oral Culture, 116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Great Hodge Podge, f.65v. William Blundell (1620–1698) was related to the Anderton family through his mother Jane Bradshaigh. See transcription of this catalogue in Hawkes, Arthur J., ‘The Birchley Hall Secret Press’, Library 7 (1926): 137–183 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (at 151).

³¹ Great Hodge Podge, f.65v.

³² BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.36v–37v. After some confusion, ‘I.B’ or ‘I.B.P’ is now known quite comprehensively to have been the pseudonym of James Anderton, as opposed to his cousin, the Jesuit priest Lawrence Anderton. See Michael Mullett, ‘Anderton, James (1557–1613)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, accessed 15 January 2014. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/510 and ‘Anderton, Lawrence (1575–1643)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, accessed 15 January 2014. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/511.

³³ [Anon.], The Song of Mary (London, 1601), 30–37.

³⁴ I.B., A looking glass of mortalitie (London, 1599).

³⁵ Lancashire Record Office, DDBL, acc 6212, Box 3. This is almost certainly the ‘Catholic’ version of the psalm 107 from the Douay-Rheims bible. The ‘Protestant’ version is psalm 108 in the King James Bible and begins ‘O god, my heart is fixed’.

³⁶ SP 12/243 f.158. Nicholas Blundell (1667–1737) also owned a bass viol see Nicholas Blundell’s Great Diurnal, ed. Frank Tyrer, 3 vols. (Liverpool: The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1969), 3:204.

³⁷ PC 2/17 f.811; PC 2/19 f.248; Calendar of the MSS of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, Hatfield House ed. R. A. Roberts, vol. 4: 1590–1594 London, 240.

³⁸ SP 12/274 f.37.

³⁹ Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster (hereafter AAW), Series A, vol.4, no.38.

⁴⁰ Great Hodge Podge, f.179.

⁴¹ Great Diurnal, ed. Tyrer, Vol.1, 153, 182, 228, 240.

⁴² Great Hodge Podge, f.144.

⁴³ The following recordings are not intended to imitate, recreate or reconstruct past sounds, but are imaginative interpretations by Robin and Graham Bier of Les Canards Chantants. All music and words composed by William Blundell (1560–1638) except where indicated. Spelling for titles have been modernised.

⁴⁴ Musical notation: Great Hodge Podge, ff.126v, 130, 135v, 136, 140, 141, 142, 144v.

⁴⁵ Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster (hereafter AAW), Series A, vol.4, no.38.

⁴⁶ Great Hodge Podge, ff.126v, 129, 155v, 156, 275. BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.47v.

⁴⁷ Great Hodge Podge, ff.275–6.

⁴⁸ AAW, A 4 no.38, 446–7.

⁴⁹ ‘Hight’ is from the Middle English ‘to be named, be called’.

⁵⁰ ‘A [mos]t Excellent Ballad of Joseph the Carpenter’, EBBA, accessed 30 January 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20650/xml.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² BL. Add. MS. 15225, ‘Against Nigardie and riches’, ff.7v–8v; ‘Duke of Buckingham’, ff.13–15; ‘A doleful daunce’, ff.15–16; ‘Give place ye leadies & begone’, f.16v; ‘A pleasant ballad of the just man Job’, ff.16v–17; ‘I might have lived merrily’, ff.18–18v; ‘Ould Tobie, cald his loving sonne’, ff.19–20; ‘The thoughts of man doe daylie change’, f.38; ‘Seek wisdome cheefly to obtain’, ff.38v–39; ‘O man that runneth here thy race’, ff.43v–44v; ‘A dittie most excelent for everie man to reade’, ff.56–58; ‘All you that with good ale doe hould’, ff.58v–60v. Great Hodge Podge, ‘The worldlings farewell’, ff.160–161v.

⁵³ See Bossy, English Catholic Community and resulting debate with Haigh, Christopher, ‘The Fall of a Church or the Rise of a Sect?’, Historical Journal 2 (1978):181–186 Google Scholar; Haigh, , ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, Past and Present 93 (1981): 37–69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haigh, , ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1981): 129–147 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Haigh, , ‘Revisionism, the Reformation, and the History of English Catholicism’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26 (1985): 394–405 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁴ I have chosen to use the term ‘Tridentine’ to describe the religious practices affected by the spiritual renewal of Catholicism after the meetings of the Council of Trent from 1545–1563. The term should be understood ‘less as an abstract noun…but rather as a concrete verb’. See Ditchfield, Simon, ‘Tridentine Catholicism’ in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, eds. Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 15–31 Google Scholar (at 19).

⁵⁵ Great Hodge Podge, f. 137v. Also see Sena, , ‘William Blundell’, 63 Google Scholar. Sena also makes the suggestion that traces of this ballad are visible in ‘A Proper New Ballad Intitled the Faeryes Farewell’ written by Bishop Richard Corbett.

⁵⁶ Martz, Louis L., The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 25 Google Scholar. See also On giving the Spiritual Exercises: The early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599, trans. Martin E. Palmer (Saint Louis, Missouri: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996).

⁵⁷ Great Hodge Podge, f.144.

⁵⁸ Huntington MS. 904 and Bodl. MS. Eng. poet. b.5. See Brown, Cedric C., ‘Recusant Community and Jesuit Mission in Parliament Days: Bodleian MS Eng. poet. b.5’, The Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 290–315 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hackett, Helen, ‘Women and Catholic Manuscript Networks in Seventeenth-Century England: New Research on Constance Aston Fowler’s Miscellany of Sacred and Secular Verse’, Renaissance Quarterly 65 (2012): 1094–1124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ For more on the Jesuits and the senses see for example Endean, Philip, ‘The Ignatian Prayer of the Senses’, Heythrop Journal 31 (1990): 391–418 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the appeal to the senses in Jesuit culture, sciences and the arts see O’Malley, John et al eds. The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts 1540–1773 (London: University of Toronto Press, 1999)Google Scholar and O’Malley, et al eds. The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts 1540–1773 (London: University of Toronto Press, 2006)Google Scholar and Smith, Jeffrey Chipps, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar and for wider discussions on the relationship between religion and the senses see de Boer, Wietse and Gottler, Christine eds. Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012)Google Scholar and Macdonald, Robin, Murphy, Emilie K. M. and Swann, Elizabeth eds. Sensing the Sacred: Religion and the Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Ashgate, Forthcoming)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.1–2.

⁶¹ Rollins, , Old English Ballads, 102 Google Scholar.

⁶² Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (2^nd edn. London: Yale University Press, 2005), 234–237 Google Scholar.

⁶³ Martz, The Poetry of Meditation; Covington, Sarah, Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.20–22v.

⁶⁵ Great Hodge Podge, f.129v.

⁶⁶ Duffy, , Stripping of the Altars, 260 Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Aldrich-Watson, Deborah ed., The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 2000), 32 Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ See family tree compiled by the Who Were the Nuns? Project, accessed 22 January 2014. http://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ftrees/Blundellcro.pdf.

⁶⁹ Great Hodge Podge, ff.131–131v.

⁷⁰ Great Hodge Podge, ff.138v–139.

⁷¹ Great Hodge Podge, ff.135v–136.

⁷² BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.10–10v.

⁷³ BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.27v–29v.

⁷⁴ BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.11v–13.

⁷⁵ Great Hodge Podge, ff.3v and 140–140v.

⁷⁶ Katherine von Bora was a nun who later became Martin Luther’s wife after she contacted him, along with other nuns dissatisfied with the monastic life, and was interested in the emerging reform movement.

⁷⁷ BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.29v–30v.

⁷⁸ BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.30.

⁷⁹ See Marotti, Arthur ed. Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (London: Macmillan, 1999), esp. 1–34 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Dolan, Frances, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (London: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 1–44 Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Great Hodge Podge, f.136v.

⁸¹ BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.29v–30v.

⁸² Great Hodge Podge, f.3v. For tune of ‘Shall I wrastle’ see EBBA, accessed 22 January 2014. Also used in a multitude of comic, moralising ballads against various other vices such as: ‘The unfortunate Gallant gull’d at London’ c.1623, EBBA, accessed 22 January 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20089/image.

⁸³ ‘A new song for a Young mans opinion’, EBBA, accessed 22 January 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20104/xml.

⁸⁴ Marsh, , ‘The Sound of Print’, 179 Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

⁸⁶ Great Hodge Podge, ff.136–137, see also and ‘You that present are take of us some pitie’, ff.141–141v.

⁸⁷ Great Hodge Podge, f.136.

⁸⁸ See for example ‘A Lamentable dittie composed upon the death of Robert Lord Devereux late Earle of Essex’, EBBA, accessed 29 January 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/32221/image; and ‘Sir Walter Raleigh his lamentation’, EBBA, accessed 9 March 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20046/image.

⁸⁹ For more on the religio-politic landscape of Lancashire see Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire.

⁹⁰ Sena, , ‘William Blundell’, 59 Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Brett Usher, ‘Vaughan, Richard (c.1553–1607)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, accessed 30 January 2014. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28139.

⁹² Great Hodge Podge, f.142v.

⁹³ Dillon, Anne, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community 1558–1603, (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002), 370 Google Scholar.

⁹⁴ BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.2v.

⁹⁵ Monson, Craig, ‘Byrd, the Catholics, and the Motet: The Hearing Reopened’ in Hearing the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance ed. D. Pesce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 348–374 Google Scholar (at 358).

⁹⁶ Lancashire Record Office, DDBL, acc 6121, Box 1, Catholic Burial Register.

⁹⁷ John Birtwisle - Catholic Burial Register, no. 40 see Anstruther, Seminary Priests, 1:36; John Layton - Catholic Burial Register, no. 69 see Anstruther, Godfrey, The Seminary Priests, 2: Early Stuarts, 1603–1659 (Great Wakering: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1975), 186 Google Scholar and Richard Holme, alias Lawrence Smith – Catholic Burial Register, no. 106 see Anstruther, Seminary Priests, 2:160.

⁹⁸ Mullett, ‘Anderton, Lawrence (1575–1643).

⁹⁹ BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.22v.

¹⁰⁰ Great Hodge Podge, ff.145–145v.

¹⁰¹ The desire for news was fervent in this period, and there is no reason to believe that Catholics did not share in this enthusiasm. See Fox, Adam, ‘Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Historical Journal 40 (1997): 597–620 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰² BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.25v.

¹⁰³ Public executions were well attended during this period, with crowds for the London executions often numbering into the thousands.

¹⁰⁴ T. Frank Kennedy, S.J., ‘Some Unusual Genres of Sacred Music in the Early Modern Period: The Catechism as a Musical Event in the Late Renaissance – Jesuits and ‘Our Way of Proceeding’ in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., eds. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (London: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

¹⁰⁵ Blake Wilson, ‘Lauda (lt. ‘praise’; pl, laude [laudi]’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed 24 January 2013. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/43313.

¹⁰⁶ Ledesma, Giacomo, Modo per insegnar la Dottrina Cristiana[…] (Rome, 1573)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ See summary provided by Kennedy, T. Frank, S.J., ‘Music and the Jesuit Mission in the New World’, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 39 (2007): 1–24 Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Owen, Lewis, The Unmasking of all popish monks, friers and Iesuits (London, 1628), 35 Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁹ Cited in Kennedy, , ‘Music and the Jesuit Mission’, 18 Google Scholar.

¹¹⁰ See Roger Falck and Martin Picker, ‘Contrafactum’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed 30 April 2014. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/06361.

¹¹¹ Freedman, Richard, ‘Listening to the Psalms among the Huguenots: Simon Goulart as Music Editor’ in Psalms in the Early Modern World, eds. Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 37–60 Google Scholar.

¹¹² Ibid. 42.

¹¹³ Fisher, Alexander, ‘Song, Confession, and Criminality: Trial Records as Sources for Popular Musical Culture in Early Modern Europe’, The Journal of Musicology 18 (2001): 616–657 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁴ Marsh, , ‘Sound of Print’, 184 Google Scholar.

¹¹⁵ Great Hodge Podge, ff.274–275 and BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.7–7v.

¹¹⁶ ‘A new Northern Jigge, called Daintie come thou to me’, EBBA, accessed 30 January 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/30140/xml.

¹¹⁷ Cf. Watt, Cheap Print, 104–5. Watt cited Rollins (see n.124) but mistakenly asserted that ‘Jesu come thou to me’ was an example of a Protestant ‘godly’ adaptation. Indeed, unlike the Catholic songs explored here, Watt explains how for Protestants, ‘love songs and dialogues with Christ did not endure.’ This was, Watt claims, because the ‘invention of non-scriptural speeches for God or Christ was a dubious exercise for Protestants, with their emphasis on biblical authority and the clearing away of superfluous apocrypha’.

¹¹⁸ My emphasis.

¹¹⁹ See ‘Adoramus te Christe: Music and Post-Reformation English Catholic Domestic Piety’ in Religion and the Household, eds. John Doran, Charlotte Methuen, and Alexandra Walsham (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014) 240–253.

¹²⁰ My monograph, The Reformation of the Soundscape: Music and Piety in Early Modern England, is in preparation.