From memory to record

When Ælfric wrote that ‘every mass-priest should have a mass-book and epistle-book and song-book and reading-book and psalter and handbook and penitential and kalendar’, there is every possibility that by ‘song-book’ he was thinking of a book containing not just chant texts, but also their melodies. A type of musical notation recognized as Anglo-Saxon appears in more than one hundred manuscript sources of the late tenth and the eleventh centuries, many of which may be linked with major ecclesiastical centres such as Worcester, Exeter, Sherborne, Canterbury, Durham and Winchester. Whilst it is possible that knowledge of musical notation reached England via northern France during the ninth century, it was apparently not until after the mid-tenth century, when the Benedictine revival occasioned numerous contacts between England and the continent, that music-writing became established in Anglo-Saxon England. Several Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the late tenth century have contemporary notation, and they show the use at this period of two different neumatic systems. One system – closely related to northern French notations, particularly those of Corbie — was to set the pattern for the great majority of eleventh-century English notations; the other type, related to notations of Breton provenance, appears mainly confined to sources originating in south-west England. The breadth of notational detail found in one of the so-called Winchester Tropers (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 473) indicates that the practice of notating music was well established, at least at Winchester, by the year 1000

Ancient history · Art · Eleventh · Linguistics · Literature · Melody · Middle Ages · Musical · Musical notation · Notation · Period (music · Classics · History · Medieval European Literature and History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

• The origin of the Exeter Book of Old English poetry

  Open Access•Richard Gameson•Anglo-Saxon England•1996

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• Le Domaine de la Notation Bretonne

  Michel Huglo•Acta Musicologica•1963

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• An unknown English Benedictine gradual of the eleventh century

  Open Access•K D Hartzell•Anglo-Saxon England•1975

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