Roger Bowers

THE CHAPEL ROYAL, THE FIRST EDWARDIAN PRAYER BOOK, AND ELIZABETH'S SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION, 1559

Already at the beginning of her reign Elizabeth I was resolved to effect at the earliest opportunity both the restoration of the Royal Supremacy and the replacement of the Latin liturgy by an existing Edwardian Prayer Book. Constrained by Marian legislation which she was firmly minded not to break, the queen signalled her intentions by conspicuous adoption in her Chapel Royal of such few and minor manifestations of Protestant liturgy and practice as fortuitously were still legitimate, amplified by certain early Edwardian practices (1547–9) originally introduced not by statute but by proclamation or injunction and therefore never formally de-legitimated by statutory repeal. That her initial intention was restoration of the Prayer Book of 1549 is indicated by the identity of certain texts set to music early in 1559 by her Chapel Royal composers, and by the response of Edmund Guest to a contemporary request that he undertake a revision of parts of the 1549 Book. Arising from her own personal convictions, Elizabeths policy was not without merits; however, political pragmatism and ecclesiastical realities coerced her into agreeing instead to the restoration of the Book of 1552. She exacted a number of concessions to her own conservatism ; first discernible in the instructions given to Guest, these achieved their realization through the rubrics of the 1559 Prayer Book and certain of the 1559 Injunctions.

The Saxilby fragment

The two folios which are the subject of this study are the property of the vicar and churchwardens of the parish of St Botolph, Saxilby-with-Ingleby, some six miles west of the city of Lincoln. The leaves are of parchment, are adjacent and may once have been conjoint, but are now disjunct. The overall dimensions of each leaf are approximately 430 × 325 mm; each has four good margins, leaving a music area of 358 × 247 mm. Each side is ruled with twelve five-line staves in red ink, apparently without the use of a rastrum; the staves are a little less than 20 mm high. On all four sides each of the two voices was supplied with an initial letter executed in blue paint with red tracery. Each initial is a single staff in height, and is similar in style to the subsidiary capitals of Old Hall and many other English manuscripts of the fifteenth century. In its surviving state the manuscript has undergone a sad mutilation: a rectangle four staves deep has been cut away from the top left-hand corner of folio 1 v , removing the initial ‘E’ of the top voice complete with the red tracery trailing from it down the edges of the staves below. In so doing, the vandal also removed a good deal of music from both sides of the leaf.

The Musicians of the Lady Chapel of Winchester Cathedral Priory, 1402–1539

In any evaluation of the character and accomplishments of the English Reformation, an essential ingredient must be a sympathetic but, so far as possible, objective assessment of the nature – in all its strengths and weaknesses – of the unreformed Church and religion upon which the Reformation was wrought. Among the multifarious operations of the pre-Reformation Church, perhaps the most central to its fundamental purposes was the conduct by its clergy of the worship of God and the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass, as effected on the small scale by the parish clergy and on the grand scale by the priests and clerks of the greater collegiate churches and the religious of the monasteries. As acts of worship, commemoration and intercession, the efficacy of these rituals lay in the simple fact of their enactment by those to whom their conduct was committed, irrespective of the grandeur of the setting or the presence or absence of any congregation or other attendance. Nevertheless, credit both terrestrial and celestial was perceived to redound upon those institutions which endeavoured to clothe their acts of devotion and worship with the finest products that the artisans of the day could create, within the grandest achievements of their contemporary architects. In respect of the conduct of the liturgy, it was, in the event, those institutions which had carried these arts to their highest levels that eventually proved to be the principal casualties of the Reformation process; a period of less than fifteen years (1535–49) sufficed to effect the extinction of all the monastic churches, and of all the collegiate churches except for some thirty which enjoyed cathedral status, academic function or extremely close royal connection.

New sources of English thirteenth- and fourteenth- century polyphony

The volumes of the Repertoire International des Sources Musicales (hereafter RISM) devoted to manuscripts of polyphonic music contain a nearly complete catalogue of the sources of late-medieval English polyphony known in the literature at the time of their publication in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since that time a substantial number of new sources has been discovered or rediscovered.

GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT AND HIS CANONRY OF REIMS, 1338–1377

At the heart of the biography of Guillaume de Machaut as currently understood there lies an inconsistency so great as almost to present a paradox, for it seems irreconcilable with the evident content of his surviving output of musical works. From 1338 until his death in 1377 Machaut possessed a canonry and prebend of the cathedral and metropolitan church of Our Lady of Reims. Conventionally it has been assumed that soon after his receipt of this benefice, and certainly by 1340, he had taken up residence within one of the prebendal mansions located in or near the precinct of the cathedral, and that he made this his permanent domicile for the remainder of his adult life – a period little short of forty years.

Liturgy and Music in the Role of the Chantry Priest

Abstract Within his home church, whether collegiate or parish, the primary role of the chantry chaplain was to be one of the team of executants of the plainsong liturgy. Collegiate churches were founded for the greater glory of God ; the soul of the founder drew benefit from his having procured an expansion of humanitys overall volume of worship, and in recognition of this the colleges execution of the standard diocesan liturgy and its plainsong could even be amplified with slight additions commending the founder by name. In parish churches the chantry staff assisted the parish priest in singing daily matins, high mass and vespers, so helping him to meet the stipulations of the liturgical service-books. Where they were maintained in sufficient number these clergy were commonly consolidated into an organised plainsong choir, directed by a qualified lay musician usually occupying the office of parish clerk. Less prominently, each chantry priest also recited, normally daily, a secluded private mass for the benefit of his founder (to the text of which, likewise, slight personalising additions might be made). Only rarely were chantry priests entrusted with roles more demanding; priests who sought to contribute to teaching of the chant, or to teaching or performing elaborate polyphonic music, or to playing the organ, were sought out by the vibrant fraternities of the living rather than by the trustees of the long deceased. More commonly, however, all roles such as these were fulfilled by laity ; of grammar schools alone did founders commonly seek to require the teacher to be a priest, able to execute some chantry functions in his spare time. All ended in 1548. By the 1540s collegiate churches rendered superfluous by the rise of the aristocratic household chapel were already vulnerable to agreed dissolution, and in 1548 Protestant disdain for the multiplication of formal worship for its own sake, especially when conducted in Latin, contributed to the end of the chantry, and of the involvement of chantry priests in the cultivation of the liturgy and its plainsong.

Humanism and the Reform of Sacred Music in Early Modern England: John Merbecke the Orator and The Booke of Common Praier Noted (1550) (review)

The author is also to be praised for his methodological sensitivity and sensibility. Overall, this is a must-read for students of German religious and political history in the mid-sixteenth century.The scope of the treatment goes well beyond the geographical or temporal limits described in the title: indeed, careful consideration of Rein’s thesis may well force scholars to rethink some of the standard approaches to the history of Confessionalization and of the origins of modern theories of political resistance.