There can be no author of the eighteenth century whose presence as author was more determined by the changing fortunes of the theatre than Henry Fielding. Nor one more instrumental in translating, indeed transposing, the conventions of theatre to the new fictional vehicle of the novel. In the late 1730s and when Fielding himself was less than thirty years old – partly due to his own actions – the career he had made for himself writing for and managing theatre companies became too hot to handle. Henry Fielding turned to producing more of the partisan periodical writing he had already engaged in, alongside committing to two new professions in which his talent for fiction might thrive: the law and prose fiction.

Henry Fielding may be held partially responsible for the Licensing Act passed on 21 June 1737 which curtailed his career as manager of an acting company and prolific playwright. His modern biographers, Martin and Ruthe Batttestin, observe that in his stage career he ‘broke too many windows and pulled down too many idols’. He seems positively to have sought the intervention that meant, according to his contemporary Arthur Murphy, he ‘left off writing for the stage when he ought to have begun’. Rival playwright Colley Cibber, the target of so much of Fielding's satire, compared him to the ancient arsonist Herostratus who set fire to the second Temple of Artemis in Ephesus to establish his eternal fame, one ‘who to make his poetical Fame immortal, like another Erostratus, set Fire to his Stage by writing up to an Act of Parliament to demolish it’. On Monday 30 May 1737, the ‘Little’ theatre rented by the brilliant Henry Fielding at the Haymarket failed to open for its first night of two short farces that continued his satirical campaign against the government led by the prime minister, Robert Walpole. The landlord, John Potter, took down the scenery and filled the house with various forms of building material in order to prevent a performance he knew the government would disapprove.

We turn now to a character who appears in every way the opposite of Lady Townly. Indeed, she may have been a character composed to answer back to another conventional stage type: not the town lady, but the shrewd country maidservant swift to exploit the predatory instincts of the young men in the household she serves. In Samuel Richardson’s novel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, first published on 6 November 1740, a fifteen-year-old servant girl stoutly resists her young master, Mr B, in his attempts to seduce her. Mr B, his sister Lady Davers, the servants who abet his endeavours, all finally acknowledge Pamela's virtue and the capacity of her writing, the letter-memoir she writes recording her persecution, to bring others to virtue. Mr B persecutes Pamela, abducts her to his remote country estate, but finally sets her free; Pamela returns of her own volition to him and he offers her honourable marriage. The novel was an instant hit, enabling its printer-author to expand his London premises behind Salisbury Court in 1741. He published a continuation on 7 December 1741. Both parts were printed together in the sixth edition on 8 May 1742.

Responses to Pamela are legion and proliferate across media – from William Hogarth's expensive engravings, to a fan illustrating scenes from the novel, to verse rejoinders, to earnest works of criticism. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela also, however, swiftly attracted satirical re-presentation, which recast the heroine's virtuous resistance to Mr B's advances as a strategic manipulation to secure her best future advantage. In this respect – a scepticism informing the reception by audiences of their marital settlements – there is an affinity between the fine lady who reforms herself (Lady Townly) under threat of punishment, and the country girl who reforms others (Pamela) through her own virtuous example.

Pamela as character has, I suggest, ‘sway’. Gumbrecht glosses sway as occupying space in a vertical dimension: sway is ‘emergence and its result: being there’. It is a bodily presence that exerts influence by virtue of that occupation. Both the book and character of Pamela are in the eighteenth century recognised as ‘novel’, as birthing a new kind of fiction from the romance and novel forms that pre-existed it.

Musical activity in the North-East of England in the late medieval and early modern periods is attested by a wealth of surviving documents. Those of York and Newcastle upon Tyne have been published, along with the surviving documentary evidence for drama, dance and other kinds of performance, in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) series. Research on the rest of the North-East region is well underway in the Durham-based project REED North-East. Evidence collected so far for the north-eastern region shows minstrels attached to great households and on tour, as well as bands of waits employed over many years in numerous towns and cities. However, although many other craftspeople in those centres formed occupational guilds from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, evidence of guilds of minstrels or musicians is harder to find. This chapter examines the documentary evidence for one guild of minstrels, that of Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire, with the aim of discovering more about its significance in the wider contexts of urban and musical life in the period.

I shall focus in detail on the 1555 Ordinances of the Minstrels’ Guild of Beverley, particularly their claims for the antiquity and status of the guild, before discussing wider contexts: Tudor Poor Law statutes governing vagabondage, which threatened touring minstrels; the recorded activities of minstrels in Beverley, including the long-established town waits; documentary and sculptural evidence supporting the claim for Beverley as a northern musical centre; and finally the possibility that Beverley was at one time the headquarters of a northern minstrels’ court.

❧ The 1555 Ordinances: Documentary Context

The quotation in the title of this chapter comes from the only surviving copy of the ordinances of the Beverley Guild of Minstrels. This 1555 document can be assumed to be a correct copy; it was carefully recorded by the town governors (Beverley's equivalent of a mayor and council at that period) in their formal book of record, now known as the Great Guild Book from the number of guild ordinances entered in it.

A significant aspect of these ordinances is that no others for the Minstrels’ Guild survive among the extensive town records. The surviving documents, apart from the Great Guild Book, include accounts, minute books of the governors and later mayors, and a fifteenth-century document called the Town Char-tulary (which also records many local guilds’ ordinances).

Fran’s First Thoughts

Imagine: you are a woman “well-turned seventy,” white, British, living alone and independently in London. You are divorced and widowed, in that order. A mother of two. You are in good health, solidly middle-class, and employed by a charitable trust that supports research on housing for the elderly. Your name is Francesca Stubbs (such a glamorous name, but you’re actually known as Fran) and you are the primary fictional character in Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises, a novel about ageing set in England after the turn of the millennium and published in 2016. The novel opens with your point of view, offering us your frame of mind – your thoughts and feelings, your restlessness, your apprehensiveness about ageing, all delivered in a kind of stream of consciousness steadied by the author’s unobtrusive omniscience.

Here you are, driving by yourself (you do many things by yourself, and you like to drive). Off to a conference outside of London. To what do your thoughts turn? The first two paragraphs of The Dark Flood Rises are devoted to your musing – perhaps fixating would be a more accurate word – on the different forms your death might take. There are three.

One: you imagine you’re driving too fast and crash head-on into a tree. Or that the furnace in your flat, not having been properly maintained, has sparked a lethal fire in which you are engulfed. This kind of death is both brutally accidental and satisfyingly expeditious. We accord special meaning to a person’s final words by virtue of their being last. What are Fran’s last words? “You bloody old fool,” Fran thinks, addressing herself. Or stronger, “you fucking idiot,” bluntly indicting herself as the cause of her imprudent death, internalizing responsibility for what is an accident (1).

Late medieval English church roods are mostly known by their near-total loss, their fragmentary remains, and by the still-painted spaces that frame their absence. One of the most well-known examples is the ghosted raguly tree-of-life cross outline on Suffolk's Wenhaston Doom tympanum. The mixed-media nature of the decorative apparatus which surrounded and augmented the rood is demonstrated by empty outlines of roods in numerous chancel arch wall paintings, the blank space the lacuna where polychrome three-dimensional roods once stood over wooden structures combining rich carvings, two-dimensional paintings, glass, tin-relief, gilded surfaces, as well as the squint holes cut by devout parishioners keen to see the elevation of the host at Mass.

Nevertheless, despite the loss of nigh-on every late medieval English rood, much about the main crucifix of the church can be gleaned from what still survives. It is commonly accepted, and evident from the proliferation of rood loft stairs, that by the mid-fifteenth century, virtually every church in England had a chancel screen, sometimes of stone and sometimes of wood, depending on the region, intrinsically linked to the presentation of the rood. The screens discussed here largely date from about 1420‒1536 and centre on East Anglia and the West Country as a substantial number of screens in these two regions retain enough polychromy to perceive decorative choices as well as structural designs. By the mid-fifteenth century, the heyday of the English screen, the ensemble tended to consist of a solid lower dado, about a metre and a half in height and crossed by a transom, above which rose the decorative lights, filled with tracery at the top. Some screens had doors, and this is more commonly the case in Devon than East Anglia. Usually the screen was galleried with a rood loft and topped by the rood, and figures of Mary and John the Evangelist, and perhaps the good and bad thieves or attendant angels. The rood group was sometimes placed on a rood beam but could also be part of the parapet of the rood loft. It was often backed by a painted tympanum and/or decorated chancel arch, usually depicting the Doom.

Music and dance share many properties – both are nonverbal, both are ephemeral – but one key difference between them is that western art music was more readily notated than dance. This fundamental difference bridges text and performance and presents, for composers who know their craft well, a challenge as much as an opportunity to think about how best to write dance music, or music that accompanies actors’ movements. Some composers begin with simple mimicry, depicting a gesture through music by composing, for example, an ascending melody for a dancer who raises her arm; but other composers go beyond this basic level of mimicry and establish more sophisticated relationships between music and motion. This book is an examination of how composers came up with musical ideas based on movement. In more concrete terms, I examine how composers in eighteenth-century France – especially Paris – wrote music that accompanied motion. My argument contributes to a growing corpus of literature on music and the body, or what Elisabeth Le Guin calls “carnal musicology.”

Composers active in eighteenth-century France were fascinated by foreign dancers – those from England and Italy, in particular – who incorporated the element of pantomime in their performances, and they processed this fascination by composing music that captured the effects of these dances. Many did not try to translate dancers’ movements into music, but many recreated the most salient properties of these performances – precision, agility, sentimentality – through music. The kind of thinking across the mediums of music, gesture, and language was not new, for French composers had, since the early eighteenth century, created instrumental character pieces, some with suggestive titles, that portrayed all sorts of subjects: individuals, objects, animals, or natural phenomena. What was new around the second half of the eighteenth century was that composers deliberately represented performers’ ephemeral bodily movements through the more durable medium of notated music. In this book I argue that they used their agency – known generally as “moral liberty” in the Enlightenment – in three major ways: 1) they composed music for pantomime without following existing dance conventions; 2) their music heightened performers’ awareness of their moral liberty during performances; 3) pantomime performances stimulated spectators to recognize themselves as thinkers of liberty.

A MISPLACED TRADITION?

Something that has been ‘misplaced’ has been either put in the wrong place or lost altogether (for example, because it had been misplaced). This may have happened to a tradition of early music which we will call ‘non-mensural polyphony’. To start with, it cannot easily be found because it goes by many names. Researchers variously call it ‘simple’, ‘primitive’, ‘archaic’, ‘peripheral’, ‘organum-like’ (‘organal’), ‘early’, ‘liturgical’, ‘usual’ (‘usuell’), ‘monastic’ (‘klösterlich’), ‘oral’ and ‘retrospective’ polyphony. You may be forgiven for thinking that a musical tradition with so many names would command the particular affection of music historians – but no. The plurality of the nomenclature only suggests that they did not really know where to place it. Understandably, leading reference works and general music histories make no mention of it. But the misplacement is not entirely accidental; it corresponds to a misconception in the historiography of early European music.

‘Medieval music’ is conceived as a dual tradition: monophonic and polyphonic. Monophony comprises liturgical plainsong and – more marginally – vernacular artsong; polyphony begins with early organum and arrives, via ‘Notre-Dame’ and ‘ars nova’, at Renaissance counterpoint and the music of our time. ‘Simple’ polyphony is understood – when mentioned at all – as a minor or more conservative variant of polyphony, which has failed to reach Renaissance counterpoint and thus our time; it lacks both the progressive trajectory of counterpoint and the ritual dignity of monodic plainsong. Under these historiographical preconceptions, it is no surprise when certain traditions of music-making disappear from standard history-writing. ‘Simple’ polyphony is in fact not the only species threatened by musicological extinction: Latin song in its diverse non-liturgical traditions and early instrumental practices are usually discussed in music histories only as far as they were notated and polyphonic.

Archival, theoretical and literary sources of the era, however, do not always distinguish between monophony and polyphony. Neither of these terms was actually used at the time. The contemporary terms ‘diaphonia’, ‘organum’ and ‘discantus’ (with their variations) were more special names that never embraced all the possible techniques we would call ‘polyphony’. It remained ‘plain’ even with embellishments or enhancements. It became multiple, for example, when doubled at the fifth and octave.

I will never forget the day a student burst into laughter when I played a fourteenthcentury motet in class. It was not Gothic Voices, but it could have been, because to this undergraduate piano performance major the sound of the motet was ridiculously strange. Built from the bottom up (though that statement is a gross generalisation), often with multiple simultaneous texts, medieval motets do not reflect the top-down approach we normally use to listen to music of more recent times. Moreover, at least in their late medieval French incarnation, these motets often engage in intertextual dialogue with the bible and liturgy, with vernacular literature, with historical events, and with each other. It is hard not to see them as puzzles of sorts; products of a kind of insider group that may seem to be more interested in the kinds of inaudible harmonies described by Boethius than in pleasing the ears of listeners – in their time or ours.

Christopher Page warned us about excessive focus on the motet as intellectual puzzle removed from sound in Discarding Images. I was in graduate school when that book came out, working with Margaret Bent, and both the book and her critical response to it influenced me as I moved through the dissertation on to a career at a university where my fundamental role was teaching undergraduates – not future musicologists, but students in music therapy, jazz studies, and other fields for whom medieval motets are an object of bewilderment if not derision. I have come to use the very strangeness of fourteenth-century motets as a way to challenge my students to consider what these pieces can tell us about the late medieval world, and I hope my efforts at getting my students to understand ‘the “otherness” of the Middle Ages’ is accomplished with the respect Chris charges us to bring to the task.

Of course, another way Chris has influenced me and many others is through his recordings with Gothic Voices. There he brought motets to life in real time, further reminding us that, even if these motets have all those inaudible harmonies (and I still believe they do), they also exist as sound, and surely in both their own time and ours that sound is the primary experience for many people. The following is offered in gratitude for those recordings and the ways he has challenged our field for the better.

The conductus repertory of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries consists of around 180 two-voice compositions and around 110 for three voices. Among these are a group of five compositions that exploit both two-voice and three-voice writing in the same work. The five variable-voice conducti, as they might be called, are ‘Naturas deus regulis’, ‘Ortu regis evanescit’, ‘Relegentur ab area’, ‘Salvatoris hodie’, and ‘Transgressus legem domini’. Of the three stanzas that make up the poetry of each, the first, or first two, are for three voices (prima pars) and the third, or last two, are for two voices (secunda pars). In the manuscript Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek (D-W) 628, three stanzas of each of the five works are presented successively with the implication that they should be performed that way. In Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana (I-Fl) Pl. 29.1, however, the three-voice sections are found in the fascicle of the manuscript dedicated to three-part conducti whereas the two-voice sections are found among the manuscript's collection of twovoice works; there are unambiguous cues that link the two partes together. Other sources preserve different configurations of poetry and music.

Although the scribes, performers and other users of D-W 628 and – less clearly – I-Fl Pl. 29.1 might have thought of the variable-voice conductus as a coherent entity, and to be performed that way, examination of the works in all their surviving forms shows that their thematic and structural features are more variable than one might expect from the multistanzaic conductus in general. The following questions arise: was there a reasoned plan to create conducti that exploited both two- and threevoice textures, or was there a more opportunistic background to the appearance of the variable-voice conductus? Judgement of both alternatives is predicated on the similarity or dissimilarity between the individual compositions, and addresses the issues of whether these five variable-voice conducti constitute a sub-genre in the same way as, for example, the conductus cum caudis or the monophonic conductus. This strikes at the heart of the relationship between the performance, composition and reception of polyphonic music in the thirty years either side of 1200.

The presence of at least one monumental rood, above either the pulpitum or the rood screen, was a standard feature within the late medieval English cathedral. We also have evidence from a number of cathedrals that record the presence of a monumental rood above the high altar. A late thirteenth-century inventory from York Minster, for example, found on the fly-leaf of the York Gospels, records the presence of two roods, one above the pulpitum and one above the high altar, both said to have been donated and dedicated by Archbishop Roger Pont l’Évêque, who was in office 1154‒1181. They are described as holding relics of apostles and Roman martyrs in the corpus of the crucifix, and it is perhaps the case that these relics were brought from Rome by Roger himself, as he is documented as travelling there at least twice. Later evidence from the fabric rolls of the Minster and wills requesting burial within the interior suggests that roods were kept in these positions into the sixteenth century, and it is possible that they were in fact still Roger's twin donation. The image of the high altar of Westminster Abbey in the c. 1532 Islip Roll gives us an indication of how monumental roods above the high altar could look (Fig. 7.1) and extant monumental roods on the Continent, such as that at the cathedral of St Stephen and St Sixtus in Halberstadt, demonstrate their imposing presence above pulpita (Fig. 7.2; Plate VI).

These examples are helpful in reminding us of the most common locations for monumental roods in the cathedral context, and they also suggest, through their similar monumentality, the idea that such roods might have been intended to function in dialogue with one another. In this discussion I intend to examine the evidence for another rood, in a slightly different location within a cathedral interior, which was likely monumental in size, is recorded only in documentary sources, and was lost in the Dissolution or shortly after. It is the rood known as ‘the Black Rood of Scotland’, located in Durham Cathedral Priory, one of the richest monastic institutions in the late medieval north of England and the site of the body and cult of St Cuthbert, centred on the feretory area behind the high altar, where his body was translated in 1104 (Figs 7.3 and 7.4).