Giraldus’s account was set down in 1198, about half a century before the Reading Rota was set down.
So is the Reading Rota a uniquely complex and innovative musical composition, the product of an
anonymous English composer’s prescient musical genius? Or was it a lucky (for us) written reflection of a
widespread but otherwise unrecorded oral tradition—“acquired,” as Giraldus informs us, “not by art but
by long usage which has made it, as it were, natural,” so that “children scarcely beyond infancy, when
their wails have barely turned into songs could already take part”—possibly set down by a waggish monk
who noticed the resemblance of a popular pes to the beginning of the Regina coeli chant, and fitted out a
popular round with a Latin contrafactum that accorded with that chance resemblance?
If we assume the latter, then a great deal of what is otherwise strangely unique about early English
music seems to fit into a historical pattern, and it turns out that that widespread oral tradition may not be
quite so unrecorded as we might otherwise have thought. Once again the line between the oral and the
literate—between “folk” and “artistic” practice, between “popular” and “aristocratic” culture, or define
it as you will—turns out, fascinatingly and fruitfully, to be a blur.
VIKING HARMONY
Giraldus himself supplemented his observations of contemporary lore with a keen historical speculation.
Noting that polyphonic folksinging in the British Isles was mainly endemic to two areas, Wales and the
northern territory occupied by the old kingdom of Northumbria, he ventured that “it was from the Danes
and the Norwegians, by whom these parts were more frequently invaded and held longer, that they
contracted this peculiarity of singing.”
There is a musical document, unknown to Giraldus, that seems to corroborate his theory. The
Northumbrian style of “symphonious” singing, as Giraldus described it, consisted not of many parts in
harmony, but only two, “one murmuring below and the other in a like manner softly and pleasantly
above”—that is, “twinsong” (tvìsöngur), to give it its old Scandinavian (or modern Icelandic) name. A
late thirteenth-century manuscript, now at the University library in Uppsala, Sweden, but copied at a
monastery on the Orkney Islands off the northern coast of Scotland, contains a strophic hymn setting that
seems to fit Giraldus’s description (Fig. 11-2; Ex. 11-3). From around 875 to 1231 the Orkneys were a
Viking earldom under the Norwegian crown, and even afterward remained a part of the Scandinavian
archbishopric of Nidaros—the most northerly of the Christian sees, with its seat at Trondheim, Norway—
incorporating Iceland, Greenland, the Faeroe Islands, and the Western Isles of Scotland.
The hymn, Nobilis, humilis, sings the praises of St. Magnus (d. 1115, canonized 1135), the Norwegian
patron saint of the Orkneys. By the time it was noted down the Orkneys were under Scottish temporal rule,
but the music still undoubtedly represents a Nordic style of singing about which virtually nothing else is
known. It cannot be connected with any other surviving Scandinavian music of the period (or even with
the modern Icelandic tvìsöngur, for that matter, which proceeds for the most part in parallel fifths). It
seems to have been known elsewhere in the British Isles, however: the English theorist Robert de Handlo
quoted the incipit of what appears to be its upper part in a treatise written early in the fourteenth century
(with a text, Rosula primula, “Our dear first-among-roses,” that substituted praise of the universally
venerated Virgin Mary for the local Orkney saint).