producing a double twinsong texture. That is already an English trademark, the first of many.
The whole piece is laid out, like the Sumer canon, as a set of variations over a pes. But that pes, even
more explicitly than the one in the Sumer canon, is essentially a harmonic rather than a melodic idea. It is
never literally restated even once, but its harmonic framework is restated some twenty-eight times. That
framework consists of the same alternation or oscillation we have observed in every other English pes we
have considered, between the final F (the “shut-cadence” note) and its upper neighbor G (the “open-
cadence” note). They alternate in a regular four-bar pattern, as follows (where “I” means F and “ii”
means G): I/I–ii/ii/ii–I.
FIG. 11-4 The murder of St. Thomas of Canterbury in 1170, from a Latin psalter made in England ca. 1200.
The reason for using the roman I and ii (reminiscent of harmonic analysis) instead of the claves (note-
names) F and G to represent the pes is that G is not invariably the lowest note in the “ii” portions. When
G is the lowest note, the cadences are of the familiar “double leading tone” type. But sometimes, when
one of the twinned tenors has G, the other one takes the C a fifth below, producing against the upper-voice
leading tone not a “six-three” harmony but one of those characteristically English “ten-fives” we first
encountered in Beata viscera. At such cadences the actual “bass progression” is not ii–I but V–I. No one
reading this book will fail to take notice of the first occurrence in its narrative of a “V–I” cadential
pattern, the most familiar and decisive of all harmonic closes to our modern ears. Just what the historical
significance of that (to us) striking and significant progression may have been on its debut is a matter of
considerable debate among historians—a debate that cuts very deep into the question of what the word
“historical” really means. We will return to it.
For now, it will be enough merely to take note of the freedom with which the “ten-five” open-spaced
triad is deployed in this motet, along with all the other full-triad sonorities we have been tracking in
“English descant.”
OLD HALL AND ROY HENRY
A caveat: Nothing that has been said about the distinctiveness and insularity of English music in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, or about its stylistic continuity, should be taken to imply that English
composers were unaware of continental developments, or hostile to them. On the contrary, by the end of