parent sources that most historians take it as a fact that pre-Reformation Britain produced more
manuscripts of polyphonic music than did any other country during those centuries. But all we have to go
on now, if we want to reclaim memory of what appears to have been an exceptionally rich literate culture
of music and sample its fruits, are these pitiful fragments from which no more than a few dozen whole
pieces, or even self-contained sections, can be salvaged.
Many of the extant manuscript bits originated or at least were used at Worcester Cathedral, which
confirms and supports Walter Odington’s authority as a witness to the repertory he described, and the
importance of “West-country” monastic centers as a hub for all that was most distinctive in English
“popish” polyphony during these (to us) dark centuries. In the early part of the twentieth century, when
systematic musicology was gathering steam in Britain, the loose leaves and strips from Worcester were
collected and bound into three main codices—one kept in the Worcester Cathedral library itself, one at
Oxford, and one at the British Library in London. These are now known as the “Worcester fragments.”
About three-quarters of this repertory can be dated to the last third of the thirteenth century, and confirms
Odington’s remarks about the prevalence in England of “pes” and “rondellus” techniques. We can be
reasonably sure that the vast vanished body of music from the period reflected similar preoccupations.
Over and above the pes-motets like Balaam (or like Alle psallite cum luya—“Hey, come sing and
play Alleluia”—its better-known companion in Mo), the Worcester fragments contain many rondellus-
type compositions in conductus style. Odington’s description of rondellus technique harks back
unmistakably to Franco of Cologne’s recipe for conductus, given in chapter 6. Where Franco wrote that
the composer of a conductus must “invent as beautiful a melody as he can, and then use it as a tenor for
writing the rest,” Odington’s instructions for composing a rondellus are these: “Think up the most
beautiful melody you can, arrange it to be repeated by all the voices one by one, with or without text, and
fit against it one or two others consonant with it; thus each sings the other’s part.” A circulation of parts in
which all voices (usually three) participate is the quintessential “West-country” style, in which the age-
old oral practices described by Giraldus Cambrensis are most fully absorbed into the developing literate
tradition.
Flos regalis, a conductus in honor of the Virgin, is one of the largest and most characteristic pieces
that can be salvaged from the dark centuries. It vividly reflects the way in which the English crossbred
continental genres with indigenous performing traditions and harmonic idioms. It begins with a
magnificent flourish of a cauda in the familiar trochaic (“first mode”) rhythms of Notre Dame, grouped the
French melismatic way into phrases of varying length. The first four lines of text are set in the
“Franconian” conductus style, built from the ground up (tenor in “fifth mode”) in regular four-bar phrases
with occasional fast flourishes in the higher parts. The next two lines, however, in a slightly more lilting
meter, are set as a three-part rondellus that runs through its entire cursus of voice-exchanges twice (once
per line of text, as Odington implied). The remainder of the poem is cut up in the same way: four lines
declaimed in longs à la française in a somewhat decorated homorhythmic texture, and the last two lines
in purely English rondellus style. This last section is shown in Ex. 11-8.
NATIONALISM?
The harmonic idiom, too, is purely English (well, English-Scandinavian), even in the “French-textured”
sections. No continental conductus sports strings of parallel or nearly parallel triads such as Flos regalis
blazons forth from the very start. To this extent at least, the English idiom was indeed insular. And to an
extent that continental composers may not have felt any need to match, the English seemed to flaunt their
insular idiom within the “universal” (i.e., “catholic”) ecclesiastical genres they had adopted.