Chaucer, in the XIVth century, makes frequent mention of music, both vocal and instrumental. Of his twenty-nine Canterbury Pilgrims, six could either play or sing, and two, the Squire and the Mendicant Friar, could do both. Of the Prioress he quaintly says:
“Ful wel she sangé the service devine,
Entunéd in hire nose ful swetély.”
Dr. Burney thinks that part-singing was already known and practised in Chaucer’s time, and draws this inference from the notice the poet takes in his “Dream” of the singing of birds:
“… for some of them songe lowe
Some high, and all of one accorde”;
and it is certain that this kind of music was a great favorite with the English people at a very early period, and was indebted to them for many improvements. The same writer says that the English, in their secular music and in part-singing, rather preceded than followed the European nations, and that, though he could find no music in parts, except church music, in foreign countries before the middle of the XVIth century, yet in England he found Masses in four, five, and six parts, as well as secular songs in the vulgar tongue in two or three parts, in the XVth and early part of the XVIth centuries. Ritson, it is true, in his Ancient Songs from the Time of King Henry III. to the Revolution, disputes this, but Hawkins is of the same opinion as Burney. Mr. Stafford Smith, at the end of the last century, made a collection of old English songs written in score for three or four voices; but though the oldest music to such songs is scarcely intelligible, the number collected proves how popular that sort of music was in early times. (Perhaps the illegibility of the music is due to the old notation, in use before the perfected stave of four lines became general—the pneumatic notation, supposed by Coussemaker, Schubiger, Ambros, and other writers on music to have been developed out of the system of accents of speech represented by signs, such as are still used in French.)
Landini, an Italian writer of the XVth century, in his Commentary on Dante, speaks of “many most excellent musicians” as coming from England to Italy to hear and study under Antonio degli organi (a name denoting his profession); while another writer, the choir-master of the royal chapel of Ferdinand, King of Naples, mentions the excellence of the English vocal music in parts, and even (incorrectly) calls John of Dunstable (a musician of the middle of the XVth century) the “inventor of counterpoint.”
One of the oldest compositions of this kind is a manuscript score in the British Museum, a canon in unison for four voices, with the addition of two more voices for the pes, as it is called, which is a kind of ground, and is the basis of the harmony. The words, partially modernized, are as follows (they are much older than the music, which is only four hundred years old):
“Summer is a-coming in,