mensural alignment, but with the pes moving at twice its original speed. What makes the piece not only
intelligible but palatable, even delightful, despite all cerebral complications is the mixture of all these
artful linear subtleties with the typically English full triadic sonority and the use of jolly dancelike tunes
to carry it through. Giraldus Cambrensis and his Welsh toddlers still lurk in the background.
So sophisticated is this music, so given was Pycard to mathematical and canonic wizardry in the other
eight pieces preserved under his name in Old Hall, and so suspiciously Gallic is his name (cf. the ancient
northern-French province of Picardie), that it has been suggested that he was actually a French composer
whose works are preserved for some reason in an English manuscript (and in only one other, a fragment,
also English). One scholar has even proposed identifying him with a chaplain named Jean Pycard (alias
Vaux), not otherwise identified as a musician, who served John of Gaunt (d. 1399), Duke of Lancaster and
Aquitaine, fourth son of Edward III, and progenitor of the English house of Lancaster, during his residence
at Amiens, the Picard capital, in 1390.^3
But a family named Picard or Pychard was prominent in England at this time, and it furnishes other
possible candidates for identification with the composer. Nor is there any reason to suppose that a French
composer would have been inclined to use a pes (or, before the fifteenth century, the Spiritus et alme
trope). As to the Frenchness of Pycard’s style, compare another Old Hall Gloria, in a purebred French
cantilena style, by Leonel Power, indubitably an Englishman. It easily rivals Pycard’s for sheer
complexity and displays far fewer identifiable English traits (though the voice exchange followed by
imitation at the very end of the excerpt in Ex. 11-13 is a giveaway, after all).
EX. 11-11 Thomas gemma Cantuariae/Thomas caesus in Doveria, mm. 1–32