Anne Boleyn, second of King Henry’s many wives, loved music and dancing, and she too tried her hand at composing, to which fact her O death, rocke me on slepe is proof. It is said that “she doated on the compositions of Josquin and Mouton,” and that she made collections of them for herself and her companions.
Up to this time there was no English Bible and only Latin and Greek versions were used. The Church did not consider it proper for the common people to read the Scriptures. The Priests wanted to read and interpret it to them instead. You remember, too, one of the reasons that the Reformation took place in Germany was because Luther wanted to let the people think for themselves, read their Bible, and choose their own ways of worshipping and interpreting it. The same feeling crept into England, and William Tyndale made the first English Translation of the New Testament (1538). Soon the Psalms were translated and set to music to any air from a jig to a French dance tune! The gayer the air the more popular the Psalm!
Chained Libraries
Because the Protestants did not want anything left that had been part of the old religion in England, a rather dreadful thing happened. The monasteries were either destroyed or their libraries and organizations were discontinued. On account of this, many fine manuscripts of music and poetry were lost, for as you know, the monks copied out, with much effort, the literature of their day, and these painstaking glorious bits of hand work were kept in the monasteries.
There are today four chained libraries in England, two of which are at Hereford, the old city that holds yearly musical festivals of the “Three Choirs.” The books are on the old chains and may be taken down and read on the desk below the shelves, as they were hundreds of years ago! Here they are, in the cloisters, a great collection of treasures beyond price, just as the medieval scholars read them in days when books were the costliest of luxuries, three hundred volumes dating back to the 12th century. The earliest manuscript is the Anglo Saxon Gospels which was written about 800 A.D. One of the greatest treasures is a Breviary (prayer book) with music (1280)—the plain-song notation as clear and as easy to read as modern print.
As something had to take the place of monasteries, the universities became the centers for study and the cultivation of music. As far back as 866, King Alfred founded the first chair of music at Oxford! Do you remember that this was the time of the bards and minstrels? We do not seem very old in America, when we think of a college with a chair of music eleven hundred years ago!
Before the printers were expelled from England, Wynken de Worde, printed the first song book (1530) which contained pieces by men important at the time: Cornyshe, Pygot, Gwinneth, Robert Jones, Dr. Cooper, and Fayrfax.
Music for the New Church
As the kingdom changed its king at the death of each monarch, the country swayed from Catholicism to Protestantism and back again, and many a poet and musician lost his head or was burnt at the stake because he wrote for the Protestant Church. In the case of Marbeck who had made music for the Book of Common Prayer, he just escaped death for the crime of writing a Bible concordance (an index)!
Before Wynken de Worde’s song book came out, William Caxton, the great printer, published a book called Polychronicon by Higden. In this, was an account of Pythagoras and his discovery of tone relations (Chapter IV); this proves the great interest in England for the science, as well as the art, of music.