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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 April 2022
The earliest known treatise on Boethian proportions in Middle English is attributed to ‘Chilston’ in London, British Library, Lansdowne 763. Nothing is known of Chilston's biography, although his treatise also survives anonymously in two related sources (New York, Morgan Library, B.12 and Dublin, Trinity College, 516). In 1927, Irish musicologist William Henry Grattan Flood suggested an identification between the author of the proportion treatise and the scribe of British Library, Royal 5 A VI, a priest's handbook dated to 1446. English lexicographer Jeffrey Pulver was quick to dismiss Flood's identification, which apparently discouraged any further assessment of it. This article reconsiders Flood's suggestion, taking into account 1920s political and cultural biases that might explain Pulver's swift rejection. A contextual exploration of the evidence supports the connection of the proportion treatise to Royal 5 A VI and sheds light on the milieu in which Chilston may have worked. Long recognised for his significance in the vernacular history of music theory and music pedagogy, the proposed contextual framework has significant implications for understanding the multiple functions of music theory in fifteenth-century England. Most notably, it documents the use of speculative music theory among readers and audiences with limited knowledge of Latin. A variety of uses for music theory reveal themselves within the emerging vernacular pedagogical practices of late medieval England. These reflect the broader production of technical texts in Middle English and the increased vernacularisation of English society at a pivotal moment of ecclesiastic and musical history.
1 See British Library, Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, Lansdowne 763, www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=7809&CollID=15&NStart=763.
2 Kerry McCarthy, Tallis (Oxford, 2020), 21.
3 Brian Trowell, ‘Wylde, John’, Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.30637 (accessed 19 August 2020).
4 The manuscript is widely cited, following extensive coverage in Sir John Hawkins, General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 5 vols. (London, 1776) and Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages of the Present Period (1789), ed. Frank Mercer, 2 vols. (London, 1935). It is also cited in Michel Huglo, Christian Meyer and Nancy C. Phillips, The Theory of Music: Manuscripts from the Carolingian Era up to c.1500 in Great Britain and in the United States of America: Descriptive Catalogue B/III/4 (Munich, 1992). Its Latin treatises are all transcribed in the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/ and the English treatises in the TME database, www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tme/15th/.
5 Known to scholars since at least the eighteenth century, Hawkins included a transcription of this proportion treatise in his General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 2: 229–35. Sanford B. Meech included a transcription in ‘Three Musical Treatises in English from a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript’, Speculum, 10 (1935), 235–69, at 265–9. It is divided into three files in TME, https://chmtl.indiana.edu/thesauri/tme/15th/DEPRPA1B_MLBLL763.html (corresponding to fols. 117r–118v), https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tme/15th/DEPRPB1_MLBLL763.html (fols. 118v–120r) and https://chmtl.indiana.edu/thesauri/tme/15th/DEPRPC1B_MLBLL763.html (fols. 120v–122v).
6 Calvin M. Bower trans. and Claude V. Palisca ed., Boethius: Fundamentals of Music [De Institutione Musica], Music Theory Translation Series (New Haven, 1989), 1–87.
7 BL Lansdowne 763, fol. 123r, www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=lansdowne_ms_763_f123r.
8 BL Lansdowne 763, fol. 122v, www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=lansdowne_ms_763_f122v.
9 Meech, ‘Three Musical Treatises in English’, 236.
10 Bühler, Curt F., ‘A New Manuscript of the Middle English Tract on Proportions (sometimes attributed to Chilston)’, Speculum, 21 (1946), 229–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heminger, Anne, ‘Music Theory at Work: The Eton Choirbook, Rhythmic Proportions and Musical Networks in Sixteenth-Century England, Early Music History, 37 (2018), 141–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 147. It is not separately numbered in Huglo, Meyer and Phillips, The Theory of Music, 87–91 or in the British Library catalogue, www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Lansdowne_MS_763 .
11 TME, www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tme/15th/.
12 Dumitrescu, Theodor, The Early Tudor Court and International Musical Relations (Aldershot, 2007), 185–6Google Scholar.
13 BL Lansdowne 763, fol. 117r, www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=lansdowne_ms_763_f117r.
14 BL Lansdowne 763, fol. 118v, www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=lansdowne_ms_763_f118v.
16 In translating the Middle English, help was generously provided by Ardis Butterfield.
17 New York, Morgan Library, B.12; Dublin, Trinity College 516 (olim E.5.10). The versions in all three manuscripts are transcribed in the TME database, www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tme/15th/. Dumitrescu observed the common beginning of the three treatises in The Early Tudor Court, 185–6. John Scattergood published a codicological study of TCD 516 in ‘Trinity College MS 516: A Clerical Historian's Personal Miscellany’, in Makers and Users of Medieval Books: Essays in Honour of A.S.G. Edwards, ed. Carol M. Meale and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 2014), 121–31. The broader context of the treatise is addressed in Lynsey Callaghan, ‘Exploring Circulation: “þe proporcions” in a Fifteenth-Century English Miscellany and the Vernacularisation of Musica Speculativa’, Ph.D. diss., Trinity College, Dublin (2021).
18 Bühler, ‘A New Manuscript’, and Meech, ‘Three Musical Treatises in English’.
19 The Morgan Library catalogue simultaneously attributes the second treatise on proportions to Gerbertus and defines it as an anonymous extract in Latin on musical and harmonic theory (fols. 68v–76r). Photographs of Morgan B.12 fols. 2r–58r are viewable at http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/thumbs/76798.
20 Scattergood, ‘A Clerical Historian's Personal Miscellany’, 121. Photographs of TCD 516 are not yet publicly accessible online.
21 John Scattergood was the first to suggest that the symbol might be a letter ‘C’ (private correspondence), rather than the number ‘6’, as reported in earlier scholarship; see Peter M. Lefferts, ed., ‘On the Three Manners of Proportions’, in the TME database, www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tme/15th/DEPRPC1C_MDTC516.html (accessed 13 February 2020).
22 See Chevalier, Ulysse, Répertoire des Sources Historiques du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1905), 906Google Scholar; Blom, Eric, ed., Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th edn, 10 vols. (London, 1954), 2: 214–15Google Scholar; Meech, ‘Three Musical Treatises in English’; Sweeny, Cecily, ‘John Wylde and the Musica Guidonis’, Musica Disciplina, 29 (1975), 43–59Google Scholar; Sachs, Klaus-Jürgen, ‘Chilston’, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, ed. Finscher, Ludwig, 21 vols. (Kassel, 2000), 4: 938–9Google Scholar; Andrew Hughes, ‘Chilston’, Grove Music Online, https://doi-org.elib.tcd.ie/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.05593 (accessed 23 November 2019).
24 Hawkins, General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 2: 227. Transcriptions are available in TME, https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tme/15th/POWERTR1_MLBLL763.html and https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tme/15th/HEREFOL1_MLBLL763.html.
25 Riemann, Hugo, History of Music Theory: Polyphonic Theory to the Sixteenth Century, trans. Haggh, Raymond H. (Lincoln, NE, 1962), 119Google Scholar.
26 Burney, A General History of Music, 1: 685–95.
27 Meech, ‘Three Musical Treatises in English’, 236. This is the view of Sachs, ‘Chilton’, 4: 939.
28 Wolf, Johannes, ‘Early English Musical Theorists: From 1200 to the Death of Henry Purcell’, The Musical Quarterly, 25 (1939), 420–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 422; Andrew Hughes, ‘Pseudo-Chilston’, Grove Music Online, https://doi-org.elib.tcd.ie/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.22503 (accessed 14 March 2020).
29 Pulver, Jeffrey, ‘Chilston’, The Musical Times, 68 (August, 1927), 699–701CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 701.
30 Ibid.
31 Pulver, Jeffrey, A Biographical Dictionary of Old English Music (London, 1927)Google Scholar.
32 Jeffrey Pulver, A Dictionary of Old English Music and Musical Instruments (London, 1923), 77 and 182.
33 Pulver, ‘Chilston’, 700.
34 W.H. Grattan Flood, ‘New Light on Late Tudor Composers: XXVII. John Hilton, Sen’, The Musical Times, 68 (1927), 701–2.
35 W.H. Grattan Flood, ‘Who Was Chilston?’, The Musical Times, 68 (1927), 933.
36 Jeffrey Pulver, ‘Who Was Chilston?’, The Musical Times, 68 (1927), 1026.
37 William Henry Grattan Flood, ‘Irish Ancestry of Garland, Dowland, Campion and Purcell’, Music and Letters, 3 (1922), 59–65. In relation to Dowland, this argument has been refuted in Diana Poulton, John Dowland (California, 1972), 21–5.
38 For a critique of Grattan Flood's historiographical scholarship, see Harry White, ‘The Invention of Irish Music: Remembering Grattan Flood’, in Franjo Ksavar Kuhač (1834–1911). Musical Historiography and Identity, ed. Vjera Katalinić and Stanislav Tuksar (Zagreb, 2014), 207–15, at 210–16. See also Antoinette Baker, ‘Chevalier William Henry Grattan Flood Mus. Doc. K.S.G.’, Ph.D. diss., University College Dublin (1989); Barra Boydell, ‘Flood, W[illiam] H[enry] Grattan Flood’, in The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, ed. Harry White and Barra Boydell, 2 vols. (Dublin, 2013), 1: 394–98. Michael Murphy, ‘“Irish” Musicology and Musicology in Ireland: Grattan Flood, Bewerunge, Harrison, White’, in Music Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour of Harry White, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley (Vienna, 2018), 307–22; Harry White, ‘Music and the Perception of Music in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 79 (1990), 38–44, at 40.
39 Axel Klein, ‘Flood, W(illiam) H(enry) Grattan’, Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.09843 (accessed 20 August 2020).
40 Boydell, ‘Flood’, 395.
41 Jeffrey Pulver, ‘What is Wrong with Welsh Music?’, The Musical Times, 65 (1924), 225–6.
42 Pulver, ‘Who Was Chilston?’, 1026.
43 Jeffrey Pulver, A Dictionary of Old English Music and Musical Instruments (London, 1923), 183.
44 Pulver, ‘Chilston’, 701.
45 Meech, ‘Three Musical Treatises in English’, 230.
46 Bühler, ‘A New Manuscript’.
47 Dumitrescu, The Early Tudor Court, 178–9; Callaghan, ‘Exploring Circulation’, 107.
48 Henry C. Maxwell Lyte, ed., Calendar of Patent Rolls (London, 1897–1911); William Henry Grattan Flood, ‘Entries Relating to Music in English Patent Rolls of the Fifteenth Century’, The Musical Antiquary, 4 (1912–13), 225–35.
49 W.H. Grattan Flood, Early Tudor Composers (Oxford, 1925). It is usual for a preface to praise the author, but in the present context it is worth noting W.H. Hadow's high estimation for Flood: ‘Among the scholars who have materially helped to elucidate this period, an honorable place has been won by Dr. Grattan Flood. He has occupied many years in researches, often difficult and remote, with a view to rescuing from undeserved oblivion many artists who advanced the cause of English music at the time of its highest renown […] for the list given in this volume we are highly indebted to Dr. Grattan Flood's wide knowledge and untiring industry […] his volume is a valuable contribution to musical biography; it will be indispensable to the musical historian of the future’ (ibid., 9–10).
50 Flood, Early Tudor Composers, 7.
51 Ibid.
52 Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and King's Collections, ed. George F. Warner and Julius P. Gilson (London, 1921), 96 and British Library Online, Explore Archives and Manuscripts, http://searcharchives.bl.uk/IAMS_VU2:IAMS040-002106045 (accessed 26 May 2020). Photographs of Royal 5 A VI are not yet available for viewing online.
53 A sixteenth-century memorandum, on fol. 84v, records that the volume had belonged to Sir Edmond Kellet who had given it to Sir John Baker of Solihull on condition that he pray for the soul of Robert Kellet. It subsequently passed to Robert Taylor, of Wick, ‘curator’, 9 Nov. 1623 (fol. 2r), who gave it to Robert Lark, 13 May, 1626, to Henry Jackson (fol. 84v), and John Theyer (fol. 2r).
54 Lansdowne 763 has two unfoliated paper flyleaves at the beginning and at the end. Its decoration comprises large red and blue initials, with, respectively, lighter red and/or blue or brown foliate penwork decoration, or red penwork foliate decoration, extending into the margins. There are also small simple initials in red or blue or black, some with a yellow wash and highlighting of letters in red.
56 Vincent Gillespie, ‘The Literary Form of the Middle English Pastoral Manual with Particular Reference to the Speculum Christiani and Some Related Texts’, Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford (1981), and Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England (Turnhout, 2011).
57 Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore, MD, and London, 1990); Claire Jones, ‘Discourse Communities and Medical Texts’, in Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, ed. Päivi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen, Studies in English Language 1 (Cambridge, 2004), 23–36.
58 Vincent Gillespie, ‘1412–1534: Culture and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. Samuel Fanous (Cambridge, 2011), 163–94.
59 S.J.P. (incorrectly given as S.A. in Musica Disciplina) van Dijk, ‘Saint Bernard and the “Instituta Patrum” of Saint Gall’, Musica Disciplina, 2 (1950), 99–109 provides several concordances for this text.
60 Joseph Smits van Waesberghe identified other texts linked to the ascending hexachord syllables, tu rex mi fons sol laus, and another with the series tri pro de nos te ad, the latter of which appears in later theorists, such as Theinred of Dover and Ramis de Pareia, in his edition of Micrologus Guidonis Aretini, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 4 (Rome, 1955).
61 In translating the Latin in the following passages, considerable help was generously provided by Michael Roberts and Ruth DeFord.
63 The treatise is transcribed in TML at https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/ODISUM_TEXT.html, based on the edition by Frederick Hammond, Summa de speculatione musicae, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 14 (Rome, 1970). A facsimile of the manuscript is now available at https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/wq027ng0617. The treatise is discussed and contextualised in Elina G. Hamilton, ‘Walter of Evesham and “De Speculatione Musicae”: Authority of Music Theory in Medieval England’, Musica Disciplina, 58 (2013), 153–66.
64 Hammond, Summa de speculatione musicae, 92–126.
65 Ibid., 95–9, corresponding to Cambridge 410, fols. 21r–v.
66 Paul Zumthor, Essai de Poétique Médiévale (Paris, 1972), Ch. 2; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park, PA, 1999), 110.
67 Helen P. Forshaw, ‘New Light on the Speculum Ecclesie of St. Edmund of Abingdon’, Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Âge, 38 (1971), 7–33, and eadem, ‘St. Edmund's Speculum: A Classic of Victorine Spirituality’, Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Âge, 39 (1972), 7–40.
68 Nicholas Watson labels Forshaw's Speculum religiosorum L1 and her Speculum ecclesie L2, in ‘The Original Audience and Institutional Setting of Edmund Rich's Mirror of Holy Church: The Case for the Salisbury Canons’, in Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures: Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Laura Ashe and Ralph Hanna (Cambridge, 2019), 21–42, at 23.
69 Ibid., 21–2.
70 Cate Gunn, ‘Reading Edmund of Abingdon's Speculum as Pastoral Literature’, in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (Woodbridge, 2009), 100–14.
71 Watson, ‘The Original Audience’, 24–5.
72 This overturns the provenance, and date, suggested by C.H. Lawrence – that Edmund wrote the Speculum during the year he spent with the Augustinian canons at Merton, in 1213–14; see C.H. Lawrence, St Edmund of Abingdon: A Study of Hagiography and History (Oxford, 1960), 230–2.
73 Nicholas Watson, ‘Middle English Versions and Audiences of Edmund of Abingdon's Speculum Religiosorum’, in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (Woodbridge, 2009), 115–31, at 117.
74 Ibid., 120.
75 Ibid., 121.
76 The second part of Walter's treatise is transcribed in Hammond, Summa de speculatione musicae, 60–77.
77 John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum: A Critical Text, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1975–1988).
78 Callaghan describes this as ‘vernacular vulgate musica speculativa’ in ‘Exploring Circulation’, 73.
79 If Chilston was active in 1446, as the attribution in Royal 5 A VI suggests, this could call into question Bühler's early dating of Morgan B.12, to c.1425.
80 John Scattergood, email to Callaghan, 18 February 2019. For a map showing the five main dialect areas in Medieval England see Christopher Given-Wilson, An Illustrated History of Late Medieval England (Manchester, 1996), 128–9. For more on Middle English dialects, see James Milroy, ‘Middle English Dialectology’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language: 1066–1476, ed. Norman Blake, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1992), 2: 156–206.
81 Rosalind Ransford, ed., The Early Charters of the Augustinian Canons of Waltham Abbey, Essex, 1062–1230 (Woodbridge, 1989).
82 Scattergood, ‘A Clerical Historian's Personal Miscellany’, 121.
83 Teresa Webber and Andrew G. Watson, eds., The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 6 (London, 1998).
84 Peter Lucas, ‘Borrowing and Reference: Access to Libraries in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ed. Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2006), 1: 242–62, at 245.
85 Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven, 2006), 273.
86 Ibid., 270.
87 Susan Boynton, ‘Training for the Liturgy as a Form of Monastic Education’, in Medieval Monastic Education, ed. George Ferzoco and Carolyn Muessig (London and New York, 2000), 7–20, at 13.
88 Sylvia Federico, The Classicist Writings of Thomas Walsingham: ‘Worldly Cares’ at St Albans Abbey in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2016), 176–7. Walsingham's treatise is edited in Johannes Hothby, Opera omnia de musica mensurabili, ed. Gilbert Reaney, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 31 (Neuhausen, 1983), 74–98.
89 Ronald Woodley, John Tucke: A Case Study in Early Tudor Music Theory (Oxford, 1993), 70.
90 Gilbert Reaney, ‘The Anonymous Treatise “De Origine et Effectu Musicae”, an Early 15th Century Commonplace Book of Music Theory’, Musica Disciplina, 37 (1983), 101–19.
91 Luminita Florea Aluas, ‘The “Quatuor Principalia Musicae”: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Commentary’, Ph.D. diss., Indiana University (1996), 180 and 184.
92 Matthias Hochadel edited Bodley 77 in Commentum Oxoniense in musicam Boethii: Eine Quelle zur Musiktheorie an der spätmittelalterlichen Universität, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Veröffentlichungen der Musikhistorischen Kommission, 16 (Munich, 2002), reproduced in TML, https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/ANOOXO_TEXT.html.
93 Meech, ‘Three Musical Treatises in English’, 258.
94 Brian Trowell, ‘Faburden and Fauxbourdon’, Musica Disciplina, 13 (1959), 43–78. For more recent discussion of this topic, see chapter 6, ‘Fauxbourdon’ of David Fallows, Henry V and the Earliest English Carols: 1413–1440 (London, 2018), 43–51.
95 Roger Bowers, ‘Choral Institutions within the English Church: Their Constitution and Development, 1340–1500’, Ph.D. diss., University of East Anglia (1975).
96 Trowell, ‘Faburden’, 71.
98 Roger Bowers, ‘The Almonry Schools of the English Monasteries, c.1265–1540’, in Monasteries and Society in Medieval Britain: Proceedings of the 1994 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 6, ed. Benjamin Thompson (Stamford, 1999), 177–222, at 210.
99 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, ed. Geoffrey Wall (London, 1978).
100 Ibid., 70.
101 Nan Cooke Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities (Norman, OK, 1958), 77 and 90.
102 Pulver, ‘Who Was Chilston?’, 1026.