THE spirit of enquiry that characterizes current work on performance practices of the past appears as yet to have had little impact on the world of English church music. The principal reason for this may be the belief that Anglican choral singing has continued in an unbroken tradition from at least the Restoration up to the present day. Even the music of Tallis and Byrd has never entirely disappeared from its repertory, making it all too easy, when listening to such music sung by today's cathedral or college choirs, to imagine that one is hearing, as it were, the real thing. Here, I shall be concerned with just one of many issues: the use of instruments in the Anglican Church during the 16th and early 17th centuries. Were any instruments employed other than the organ? If so, which ones and under what circumstances?

Choral polyphony in England at the start of the 16th century was unquestionably the province of voices alone. But when we read of High Mass at St Paul's in 1514 being ‘performed with great pomp and with vocal and instrumental music’, we may begin to wonder whether or not this ‘instrumental music’ was simply organ-playing. On the Continent something quite different might well have been expected by this time: at the wedding celebrations in Torgau of a future Elector of Saxony in 1500 two Masses had reportedly been sung ‘with the help of’ a cornett, 3 sackbuts, 4 crumhorns and organ. In 1520 a moment of direct contact between the musicians of the English Chapel Royal and those of the French court occurred when, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Cardinal Wolsey celebrated Mass with both chapels taking part; according to an eye-witness account, the Credo was sung by the French singers with sackbuts and other wind instruments. The occasion must have made a strong impression on the English musicians present (Fayrfax and Cornysh amongst them) and indeed on Wolsey himself; only five years later we find Wolsey celebrating mass at St Paul's – in the presence of Henry VIII and various ambassadors – after which ‘the quere sang Te Deum, and the mynstrelles plaied on every side’.