How can we construct the musical history of a pre-Reformation town without source materials? Newcastle upon Tyne has been well served by its historians – Bourne, Brand, Mackenzie and contributors to Archaeologia Aeliana (hereafter AA) – but they have worked thin seams of data. Unlike the rich and well-documented Durham Priory, its diocesan cathedral until 1882 (except briefly in 1553–54), pre-Reformation Newcastle has left no surviving notated polyphony and scant traces of its musical practices. Apart from a few chamberlains’ accounts (1508–11), Newcastle's civic and guild records are principally post-Reformation. However, the musical traditions of several less prominent towns are well documented between the 1340s and the 1540s, a golden age of polyphony. Using this data, therefore, we can recover something of Newcastle's pre-Reformation soundscape.

In the process we will view Newcastle through the eyes of one of its best-documented visitors, Margaret Tudor. The daughter of Henry VII passed through Newcastle in July 1503 on route to her new husband, King James IV of Scotland; her nuptial progress up the Great North Road was minutely recorded by John Young, Somerset Herald (Figure 2.1). Young's account provides the earliest evidence for the presence of trained choirboys in Newcastle, but 1503 also happens to be a propitious year in England's pre-Reformation music history. The emblematic Eton Choirbook was copied around 1503, and some of the pieces it contains probably travelled north with Margaret; coincidentally, in 1503 the composer William Brygeman worked at Eton before moving to Bristol, one of Newcastle's comparator towns.

Several months after her marriage by proxy on 25 January 1503, the fourteen-year-old bride travelled with the king to Collyweston (Northamptonshire), residence of her formidable grandmother Margaret Beaufort. On 8 July the bridal retinue embarked upon a sequence of royal entries, several involving ‘colleges’ of clergy: Grantham, where Margaret was greeted by the ‘Freres mendicants’ and ‘Colledge of the sayd place’; Newark, where ‘owt of the sayd Towne cam before hyr the College arayde richly in Processyon’; and Pontefract, where she was escorted by ‘the College of the said Place togeder with the Freres Jacobyns in Processyon’.

ONE OF JOHN Caldwell's major contributions to musical scholarship has been in the field of music editing: not least in his Editing Early Music, an indispensable companion for music editors, and in his association with the British Academy's series Early English Church Music. Although his signal contribution to the series has been to oversee a transformation in its house style since 1997, his association with EECM can be traced back to 1966, when he published the fruits of his doctoral research on English keyboard music in EECM 6. The first of two volumes dedicated to early Tudor organ music, EECM 6 is a treasure-house for scholars and performers of the Henrician organ repertory, bearing directly upon pre-Reformation liturgy, improvisatory techniques (particularly faburden), related compositional methods, source studies, and performance practice (pitch standards, alternatim format, organology and fingering).

EECM 6 appeared during the series’ first flush under the general editorship of its founder, Frank Harrison. In 1961, EECM's foundation year, Harrison had completed his three-volume edition of the Eton Choirbook for Musica Britannica, which had been prepared simultaneously with another enduring monument, Music in Medieval Britain. Harrison's MB edition provided a model for EECM which endured throughout and beyond his tenure as General Editor. Harrison's working methods were exacting and accurate, and so the second edition, prepared by Harrison himself between 1967 and 1973, required only minor adjustments. Likewise, in a recent third edition of MB 11, David Fallows substantially revised Harrison's preface in order to reflect the amount of research published in the intervening decades, but needed to make very few changes to the transcriptions themselves. A third edition of MB 12 is in process (prepared by the author of this essay); again, this leaves Harrison's transcriptions largely untouched, except in one regard. Harrison divided the contents of his three-volume edition according to the sequence of contents within the choirbook itself (see Table 1): if the third volume seems somewhat heterogeneous, even anticlimactic, compared with the first and second, this can be attributed partly to the quantity of miscellaneous (but very useful) letter-press, and to the juxtaposition of complete pieces (items 33–50), incomplete (presented in full transcription: 51–5) and fragmentary (presented as incipits only: 56–65).

The starting point for this essay is a wholly unremarkable document, the will of John Boraston. The testator was lay clerk and informator choristarum at Eton College between 1473 and his death twenty years later, in the winter of 1493. As one of the college’s five lay clerks, his duties revolved around the daily cycle of worship that took place within the college chapel. As informator choristarum, or instructor of the choristers, he was also responsible for the training and oversight of the college’s boy choristers. He was therefore a central figure in the choral foundation of one of fifteenth-century England’s foremost secular colleges. He was something of a transitional figure, appointed only a few years after the college’s dissolution and partial restitution by Edward IV in the mid-1460s. When he arrived the choir, which had been dispersed in 1465, was still in the early stages of recovery; by the end of his tenure, the college’s choral foundation stood on the threshold of its most brilliant phase of virtuosity. This achievement set the scene for the copying of the Eton choirbook, a magnificent codex containing polyphony of the first order of splendour and complexity, and one of the landmark music manuscripts of pre-Reformation England.

Few if any of Boraston’s testamentary provisions will excite seasoned readers of late medieval wills. Among his twenty-two bequests, however, one is certain to attract a musicologist’s attention, namely the gift of ‘all my books of polyphony (canticis fractis)’ to the college chapel. Although most music books were copied and owned by their immediate users, rather than on behalf of institutions, such books seldom appear in the wills of singers. That Boraston owned pricksong books, and bequeathed them to Eton College less than a decade before the copying of MS 178, is made all the more suggestive by their devotional purpose, to serve the cult of the Virgin Mary: she was the dedicatee of most of the compositions in the Eton choirbook, and it would seem likely that it was from Boraston’s collection that the earlier layer of the choirbook’s repertory was drawn. The college’s account rolls are unhelpfully silent as to the copying, purchase or illuminating of MS 178: circumstantial evidence such as this, pointing towards the genesis of this crucial manuscript, is therefore of more than passing interest.

Boraston’s remaining bequests largely conform to classic late medieval testamentary stereotypes.