CHAPTER 11

Island and Mainland

MUSIC IN THE BRITISH ISLES THROUGH THE EARLY FIFTEENTH CENTURY AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE

CONTINENT

THE FIRST MASTERPIECE?

Ever since the late eighteenth century, when the first modern histories of music were written, the most

famous piece of “ancient music” in the Western world (apart from chants in daily use) has been the little
composition reproduced in its entirety in Fig. 11-1, a piece still known to many who have otherwise never
run into any early music at all.

It is found in a manuscript that was probably compiled at the Benedictine abbey of Reading, a town in
south central England some fifty miles west of London, around the middle of the thirteenth century. About
three hundred years later the monastery was dissolved in the turbulent course of the English reformation.
The manuscript eventually passed into the collection of Robert Harley (1661–1724), the first Earl of
Oxford, sometime speaker of Parliament and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a celebrated bibliophile.
After Harley’s death, his collection was acquired by the crown and joined the holdings of the British
Museum, where the manuscript was catalogued (as “Harley 978 ”) and became accessible to scholars and
historians of music—a profession (or rather, at the time, an avocation) that was then just coming into
being.

Harley 978 is actually a random assortment of old parchment and paper relating to the Reading
Abbey, probably bound together by Harley himself. The musical portion consists of only fourteen leaves
out of 180, containing thirteen miscellaneous pieces and a solmization tutor. Most of the pieces are
monophonic conductus settings, but there is also a three-voice conductus, a version of the same piece
entered sine littera in “modal ligatures” so as to fix the rhythm, and three two-voice textless pieces,
probably dances (estampies).

And there is the piece shown in Fig. 11-1. From the beginning, scholars examining the manuscript
knew that it was something special. For one thing, it had two texts in two different languages. Besides the
expected Latin versus—Perspice, christicola (“Observe, O Christians!”), a poem celebrating the
Resurrection—there is a text in English, in the local Wessex dialect, entered above the Latin, right below
the notes, which celebrates the arrival of summer: Sumer is icumen in/Lhude sing cuccu! In modernized
English, it goes like this:

Summer  has come!   Loudly  sing    cuckoo! Seed    is  growing,    the flowers are blowing in  the field,  the woods   are newly   green.

The ewe bleats  after   her lamb,   the cow lows    after   her calf.   The bull    starts, the buck    runs    into    the brush.  Merrily sing

cuckoo! That’s  it, keep    it  up!

And keep    it  up  they    do! But who are “they”? A   long-winded rubric  explains:

This    rota    [round] can be  sung    by  four    companions, but not by  less    than    three   (or at  least   two),   in  addition    to  the ones    on

the part    marked  pes [“foot” or  “pacer,”    or  better  yet,    “ground”].  Sing    it  thus:   While   the rest    remain  silent, one begins

together    with    the singers of  the pes,    and when    he  comes   to  the first   note    after   the cross,  another begins, and so  on. Pause

at  the rests,  but nowhere else,   for the length  of  one long    note.