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New evidence from Shrewsbury on the creation and circulation of music in high-medieval England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2024
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.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
This work developed from a Master's thesis at the University of Oxford, which was supervised by Elizabeth Eva Leach, whose guidance was indispensable for the creation of both the thesis and this article. I am indebted to the Ralph Leavis–Lydia Chan scholarship at Jesus College, Oxford, for funding this research. I would like to thank Andrew Dunning for his aid with transcriptions, Susan Rankin for her thoughts on the winged neume shape, and all those who provided comments and suggestions on this article over the course of its development, especially Catherine A. Bradley, Brianne Dolce, Karen Desmond, Helen Deeming, Andrew Dunning, Jacob Currie and the anonymous reviewers of Plainsong and Medieval Music. Some of the findings in this article were presented at the annual Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference (Munich, 2023).
References
1 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Rawl. D. 1225. Some images are hosted by the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music: www.diamm.ac.uk/sources/539/#/.
2 Helen Deeming, ‘Music in English Miscellanies of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge (2005); Samantha Blickhan, ‘Translating Sound, Then and Now: The Palaeography and Notation of Insular Song, c.1150–1300’, Ph.D. diss., Royal Holloway, University of London (2016). Deeming and Blickhan have produced further publications in this field, but the only subsequent publication to include Rawl is Helen Deeming, ed., Songs in British Sources, c.1150–1300, Musica Britannica, xcv (London, 2013), with the accompanying database Sources of British Song, c.1150–1300, hosted by the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (2013), founded by Helen Deeming, Samantha Blickhan and Amy Williamson, www.diamm.ac.uk/resources/sbs/.
3 William Dunn Macray, Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Ricardi Rawlinson, Bodleian Quarto Catalogues, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1862–1900), 4: 358–60 remains the most comprehensive survey of the manuscript, but some of its conclusions, such as datings, have since been revised by later surveys – such as Karl Drew Hartzell, Catalogue of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1200 Containing Music (Woodbridge, 2006), §287; Deeming, ‘Miscellanies’, 89–91; and Deeming, Songs in British Sources, 173 and 217 – as have many of those in Gilbert Reaney, Manuscripts of Polyphonic Music, 11th–Early 14th Century, Répertoire international des sources musicales, B/IV/1 (Munich, 1966), 573–4. William Summers and Peter Lefferts, eds., English Thirteenth-Century Polyphony: A Facsimile Edition, Early English Church Music 57 (London, 2016), 28 considers only the one polyphonic item, as does Hughes, Dom Anselm, Medieval Polyphony in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1951), 47Google Scholar. Edward W.B. Nicholson, Introduction to the Study of Some of the Oldest Latin Musical Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Early Bodleian Music, 3 vols. (London, 1913), 3: lxxxv–lxxxvi and Hartzell, Catalogue consider only the twelfth-century music. Karlheinz Schlager, ed., Alleluia-Melodien II ab 1100, Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi 8 (Kassel, 1987) considers only the alleluias.
4 See preceding n. 3. This definition is paraphrased from Helen Deeming and Samantha Blickhan, ‘Songs in Circulation, Texts in Transmission: English Sources and the Dublin Troper’, Early Music, 45 (2017), 11–25, at 11.
5 See the earliest surviving map of the town from the mid-sixteenth century: London, British Library, MS Royal 18 D III, fol. 90r, www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=royal_ms_18_d_iii_fs001r.
6 A History of the County of Shropshire: Volume 2, ed. A.T. Gaydon (London, 1973), §17–18, §21 and §28–30.
7 Gaydon, ed., History, §3.
8 Le Martyrologe d'Usuard: Texte et Commentaire, ed. Jacques Dubois (Bruxelles, 1965), 134–9.
9 See Andersen, Merete Geert, ‘The Second Recension of the Martyrology of Usuardus’, Revue Bénédictine, 121 (2011), 382–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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14 Gaydon, ed. History, §35.
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18 Warwick Rodwell, ‘“A Small Quadrangle of Old Low-Built Houses”: The Vicars’ Close at Lichfield’, in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals, ed. Hall and Stocker, 61–75, at 61–2.
19 Blickhan, ‘Translating Sound’.
20 Deeming, ‘Miscellanies’, 90 (Fig. 5).
21 Ibid., 57 (plate 18b); see also notes at Sources of British Song.
22 Deeming, ‘Miscellanies’, 137, notes this connection.
23 A more detailed discussion of scribal affinities can be found in Jack Stebbing, ‘Processes of Music Inscription in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 1225’, MSt. diss., University of Oxford (2022).
24 Hartzell, Catalogue, 496.
25 Susan Rankin, personal communication, May 2022.
26 Hiley, David, ‘The Norman Chant Traditions – Normandy, Britain, Sicily’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 107 (1980–1), 1–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, n. 18.
27 David Hiley, Western Plainchant (Oxford, 1993), 388.
28 Blickhan, ‘Translating Sound’, 96–104.
29 Dating of ‘s. xii ex.’ is from Ker, Neil, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries IV Paisley-York (Oxford, 1992), 317–18, at 317Google Scholar.
30 The gradual itself contains some sequence incipits.
31 Hartzell, Catalogue, 496.
32 Nicholson, Introduction, lxxxvi.
33 Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi asservati, ed. Thomas Duffus Hardy, 2 vols. (Record Commission, 1833–44), 2: 135. Also cited in Owen and Blakeway, A History of Shrewsbury, 2: 184.
34 Bellamy, Vivien, The Making of Shrewsbury: The History of a Border Town (Barnsley, 2004), 42Google Scholar and 47–9. See n. 7.
35 Bischöfliches Diözesanarchiv Aachen, Stiftsarchiv, Hs 13, fol. 154r–v. This concordance was noted in Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, ed. C. Blume and G.M. Deves, 55 vols. (Leipzig, 1886–1922), 40: 95; Deeming cited this Analecta Hymnica entry in Songs in British Sources, 218. Dating is from Hürtigen, Eva and Hoffmann, Jürgen, Federstrich: Liturgische Handschriften der ehemaligen Stiftsbibliothek. Katalog der Ausstellung vom 3/12/2000–25/2/2001 (Aachen, 2000), 117Google Scholar.
36 Le prosaire d'Aix-la-Chapelle, ed. René-Jean Hesbert, Monumenta Musicae Sacrae 3 (Rouen, 1961).
37 Manchester, John Rylands University Library, Ms Lat. 24, fol. 251v. Dating and provenance is from Montague Rhodes James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Latin Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library at Manchester, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1921), 1: 73–5. Ave maria preciosa gemma is cited as an unicum in David Hiley, ‘The Rhymed Sequence in England: A Preliminary Survey’, in Musicologie médiévale: Notations et séquences, ed. Michel Huglo (Paris, 1987), 227–46, at 233.
38 Bellamy, The Making of Shrewsbury, 47–9.
39 Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Ms 135, fol. 282v. Concordance identified in Analecta Hymnica, 8: 67; also cited in Deeming, Songs in British Sources, 218.
40 Hiley, ‘The Rhymed Sequence’, 232.
41 See Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography 9 (Cambridge, 2003), 72–101 and 133–41.
42 Deeming has already suggested this latter correction to the Rawl version: Songs in British Sources, 218. The F-Pa 135 witness clarifies that the obscured word in the stanza 3a (Rawl line 6) should read ‘et vitam restituens’ rather than ‘viam’ as Deeming suggested – this is supported by the parallel versicle structure, since the parallel phrase reads ‘quorum vita noscitur’.
43 See Deeming, ‘Miscellanies’, 157–8 for anaphora in Marian poems.
44 Helen Deeming, ‘Music, Memory and Mobility: Citation and Contrafactum in Thirteenth-Century Sequence Repertories’, in Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Vol. 2: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Medieval Culture, ed. Giuliano Di Bacco and Yolanda Plumley (Exeter, 2013), 67–81.
45 Deeming, ‘Music, Memory and Mobility’, 67. This builds on earlier work in Fassler, Margot, Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-century Paris (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar.
46 Pesce, Dolores, ‘Beyond Glossing: The Old Made New in Mout me fu grief/Robin m'aime/Portare’, in Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Oxford, 1997), 28–51Google Scholar, at 37–43.
47 A later, perhaps fourteenth-century, list of ‘Reliquie inuente in feretro sancti Cedde Salop’ in Rawl (fol. 10r) shows that many relics relating to the crucifixion were at St Chad's, including the ‘fylyng of the nayles’, which were important for the bearing of Christ – but the presence of these objects at the church in the thirteenth century remains uncertain.
48 I am grateful to Andrew Dunning for his help in deciphering this inscription.
49 Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, hosted by Brepols, British Academy project (2013), www.dmlbs.ox.ac.uk/web/online.html.
50 Deeming, ‘Miscellanies’, 118–27.
51 Desmond, Karen, ‘W. de Wicumbe's Rolls and Singing the Alleluya ca. 1250’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 73 (2020), 639–709CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 D-W Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst, fol. 182r–v. For a transcription, see Edward H. Roesner, ‘The Manuscript Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, 628 Helmstadiensis: A Study of Its Origins and of Its Eleventh Fascicle’, 2 vols., Ph.D. diss, New York University (1974), 2: 53–5.
53 Hughes, Medieval Polyphony, 47.
54 English Music of the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries, ed. Ernest H. Sanders, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century 14 (Monaco, 1979), 243. See the transcription at 125.
55 Lori Kruckenberg, ‘The Sequence from 1050–1150: Study of a Genre in Change’, Ph.D. diss, University of Iowa (1997), 86–96.
56 See, for example, Hiley, David, ‘The Repertory of Sequences at Winchester’, in Essays on Medieval Music in Honour of David G. Hughes, ed. Boone, Graeme N. (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 153–93Google Scholar.
57 F-Pa 135, fol. 265v onwards. See also Bradford Eden, ‘The Thirteenth-Century Sequence Repertory of Sarum Use’, Ph.D. diss, University of Kansas (1991).
58 Hiley, ‘The Rhymed Sequence’, 235.
59 Jeffery, Collegiate Churches, 8.