Welcome to this webinar correcting Christmas carols. Thank you very much for being here.
My name is Helen. I'm the education of the in libraries. Just to let you know a few practical things before we start, we are recording the event.
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So once again welcome. The plan for today is to consider different versions of late mediaeval carols and
what they reveal about performance and oral culture in the late mediaeval period.
Our speaker today is Mika Mackay, doctoral student in the publication Before Print Doctoral Centre,
and we have Andrew Dunning Al Hunt, curator of mediaeval manuscripts.
Andrew will be sharing the manuscripts under the visualise and so we can see with details close up as Mika explains that context and significance.
As I said, we'll pause during the session for questions. So please at least the Q&A books throughout.
If we don't have time to answer all your questions today, we'll collate the most popular ones and do our best to answer them in our follow up email.
So I'll hand over now to Mika.
Hi everyone, and thank you for being here today and thank you to the Bodley and for having me as part of their public engagement series.
I am really pleased to be talking to you all today about a topic that I'm really interested in and is the basis of all my research at Oxford,
which is mediaeval carols. So to explain my research area really and what I'll be talking about today,
I think it's quite good to use an example of what got me started off with all of this.
And this story concerns my parents say my mother about two years ago was talking to me about her wedding and she was saying,
We have this lovely song that played at the reception and it's one of my favourite songs and she starts singing it.
I realise the song is vaguely familiar. And then she gets to the chorus and she says, Coco Hart.
And then I stop. I said, That's not the right words.
And I turned to her and said the lyrics to Elton John's sacrifice are cold, cold heart, hard done by you.
Now you can see the problem you have, having played that her wedding, that song suddenly took on an entire new interpretation for her,
basically based on the error she had made with the wording of the song itself initially.
So I'm sorry that I ruined that song of your mother.
I know you're watching today, but thank you for inspiring my research area because that then made me think, Well, what if we look at music?
And what if we look at the mistakes, errors, maybe the corrections that we get in music, particularly mediaeval music?
What can we see on the page and what mistakes can we see there?
And what can that actually tell us about performance and morality and the oral culture of late mediaeval England?
So, yes, thank you for inspiring my research area.
So anyway, today what I hope to do is to introduce you all to a bit about Carole culture, about performance in the late mediaeval period,
and also to have a look at some of the mistakes and errors scribes often made in the page.
And what this might reveal to us about performance or morality, what this might show us.
I think it's important to remember that a lot of this work is quite speculative,
although we can make suggestions as to what a mistake on the page might mean on or an error might mean.
A correction might mean we cannot go back 500 years and sit next to the scribe and see what actually happened.
Unfortunately, that would make my work, my work and not the scold us work and polygrapher a lot easier.
But alas, but yes, we kind of have our best guesses.
We can have our suggestions, we can go on what we seem to be finding and where the evidence points to.
So today I'm going to be making some of the suggestions and hopefully sharing a little bit about what the
mistakes and what the words in the page may indicate about the performance and morality of late England.
So first of all, what is it, Carol? That might sound like a relatively simple question.
Every year, millions of people tune in to carols from King's,
and we wait to hear this sort of haunting voice of the boy singing once in Royal David's City.
And that's normally what people associate with Carol and with carols.
But where did that all come from, and where did this idea of the carol come from?
We often hear some diva carols in that ceremony.
We hear there is no rose and lay bound and just just two of them and diva cows that often come up and services.
But yes, what? What made those carols? Why were they written down? How do we have them today?
So Richard Layton Green was the sort of big voice in the carol 50 years ago.
He collected together hundreds of carols or the sort of surviving carols he could
find from your manuscripts into one huge collection called Adi English Carols.
And it's sort of the main work and feel the such and has remained like that, and green gives this definition of the carol.
He says that the previous 15:50 Carol is a song on any subject composed of uniform stanzas and provided with a baton,
and that just generally gone on to be accepted as the definition of a mediaeval carol.
But what does that mean? What is a burden? Well, a burden is a refrain element normally at the beginning of carols.
You'll get a little sort of statement, a two line phrase make.
We're joined now in the best and quickest is not as asked, for example, that's done by a group of people normally.
And then come the verses. And after each verse, that burden or that refrain is sung again.
So the burden is very much the communal element. It's the element that everyone joins in with.
Everyone sings together with you, get all the voices acting together as one,
and the bass is a normally sung by soloist or a few soloists if it's more than one voice part.
If if we're talking to multiple voice parts in something called polyphony.
But the burden is really the important elements of the carol, the bit.
When everyone joins in, it's the bit that gets people involved.
It often has wording which encourages people to say in the example, I just said, Make we join?
The whole idea of the way of the participation of the everyone. Let's come together.
That's a really important element of most carol gardens.
But the important thing to remember is that despite a lot of countries having Christmas associations in mediaeval culture,
the carol was not necessarily a Christmas song. So, Carol, for every different type of event.
And if you study mediaeval carols, you'll see everything from feasting songs to really bawdy songs to Christmas Christmas carols.
It's a range of different things, a range of different celebrations and a range of different contexts.
So it's important to dismiss this idea with the mediaeval carol that carols were purely for Christmas.
I'm sorry if I've just spoilt all of your Christmases, but unfortunately that was the way in the mediaeval period, carols were on any subject.
It was just a form they took, as I said, agreed to find that made them Carol.
So understanding that now I would like to say, if there are any questions on what I've just established,
just being the council that I'm happy to take them if there aren't and very happy to move on to the manuscripts and have a crack out,
one of my favourite manuscripts, which is the South and Carroll book. Thank you, Mike.
I think we'll move on to the manuscripts, although I think we may be going to see a film first.
Oh yes, yes, of course. As a taste of Christmas carols, I think we have a recording that we can share with everyone.
Yes. So we have a recording which a few of us did in the crypt of St Edmunds Hall.
It's of us singing a carol called Net New Alice.
It's a very joyful carol, and we even got out some instruments to accompany us.
So hopefully you can hear the bird and best element.
Yeah, we sung it all voiced part of the entire thing rather than its soloists and then community singing together.
But yeah, here's our take on Noel Sing We. No, I no, no, no, no, I'm talking because I, you know.
Oh, oh, oh, oh oh.
And don't know, but I would say, wait a moment, some of the people of the 53 year old woman.
Oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh.
I don't know what to do if you want to interview people.
Oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh oh oh to know.
That was a wonderful moment. So many people are going to have a duty to to you.
Well, you know, I would say more.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
You know, I was have to deal with anyone leaving on this.
This will not allow this to take forms that will no longer tolerate the people who will be together.
So I think now we'll move on to looking at a really fascinating manuscript which Andrew will hope to get out for us now.
This manuscript is called Oxford Bodleian Library M-Sport Selden B 26.
It is a 15th century manuscript. We give it a rough dating of being sold mid-century, say, 14 Forties roughly.
I think that's debating that Fellows gives it.
It's one of my favourite manuscripts and we're very, very lucky to have it out today because the Bodleian very rarely lets anyone look at it.
It took me four years to get to this point of actually having consulted it in person and the person who trained me and Palio Crawford,
Daniel Wakelin, had to interview to see it in nineteen ninety nine. So it really is a gem of a manuscript and we're very lucky to be seeing it today.
So thank you very much to the board for allowing us to get up, get out. So yes, so you can see the Southern book here.
As I said, it's 15th century and it's one of four main what we call polyphonic carol manuscripts.
And that just means that the music within it has more than one voice part, so it might have two voice parts of three voiced parts in some cases.
So if we sort of flick through the first few days of this,
we could see that it contains some lovely initials that very bright colours and I have to say,
looking at it in person, the brightness of the initials really stands out quite strongly.
It's really lovely to see. And we could see some decorative elements say some reds notation here and there,
you know, really marking out certain phrases or times and the vocal parts.
And yes, so this these first few pages,
if we go on one more tea or two more photos shows a sort of range of material that this manuscript brings together.
We don't just have carols, we have liturgical pieces. We have drinking songs at the end of the book and we have carols.
We have quite a lot of carols. So yes, if we tend to audio 23 day, I'm just going to say a little bit about the provenance of this manuscript,
which is something I'm very interested in.
So the provenance of the Southern Cow book has been debated and really debated the Bodleian list at the moment as potentially coming from Worcester.
And that is what Green initially said, Green argued, was the origin.
His argument, however, was based on this little drawing that Andrew will hopefully point to now on the right hand side at the bottom of this page.
And it's a drawing, apparently of a cultural.
It's debateable, whether it is actually a cockroach, I struggled to see it, sometimes it's not a great trick.
You'll also notice that in the same pen, that sort of does that.
Drawing at the bottom of this page is an additional verse written out.
And Green looks at both of these and says, well, this first has northern dialect, and that's a drawing of a cockroach.
This must indicate was that because there is a cockroach in the coat of arms in Bishop or Cox Insignia.
So he argues that this must point to Mr Musk point towards this bishop that's largely been dismissed in Modern-Day scholarship,
and various people have gone on to suggest various things. Some people have said St. Mary's Newark might be an alternative.
I myself have proposed Hereford as an alternative location for this manuscript, Tempest,
and I'm happy to go into more profitable stuff if anyone wants to hear more about it,
but have to go back to the main purpose of this talk and this manuscript,
I want to say that the range of material that this manuscript embodies is not uncommon.
We do get a sort of liturgical material alongside more secular material in a few books,
especially with carols and in the other four manuscripts which are similar to this and contain music and carols with the written manuscript.
The Trinity Carroll role and the Edgerton manuscript, there's also that sort of variety.
So yes, that's not very uncommon. Yes, they precious little is really known about the composers associated with these carols.
We think we know some of the names.
So in the written manuscript, for example, we have little jokes and in-jokes being said by two composers John Truelove and Richard Samat,
and they sign their names here and there and make remarks at each other, which is very fun.
And in general, we think that a composer called John Dunstable might have had something to do with a lot of these manuscripts, a lot of these carols.
So when we look at Seldin, we don't really see all that many marks of ownership or any composers.
Really, the most we really have to go on is a little inscription at the top of 50 or 28 bass,
which just says child and various people have tried to find out who child might have been.
But thus far, no one has been all that successful as far as I'm as far as I'm aware.
But if we do look at one carol.
I pray you all in the sort of the first cow that comes up towards the start of the Friday if you turn back someone at thirty five, I think.
So, yes, if we look at this one, Carol, I pray you will.
It's. Basically, a cow which might then we might be able to tell us a little bit about this associated with this manuscript.
So I pray you will. As you can see, it takes a typical powerful. So it has the music at the top and it's got the burden and the first verse.
The music above it and then at the bottom has all these [INAUDIBLE] attached.
Those are the rest of the basses. Next to each of those basses is a bracket and then an indication that the burden must be sung again.
So that's typically how the carols are laid out in this book.
But if we go to that burden right at the bottom and what looks like a little bracket next to it,
we see it's not actually a bracket, it's actually cued JD and some some people have taken this to mean Quad.
John Dunstable. That's because we feel that a lot of carols like, I pray you all are John John Dunstable general style.
He was a bit composed in the 15th century, responsible for a lot of musical works and very well travelled.
He travelled a lot to France as part of the Bedford's household.
So this might also tie in with the association terrified here because John Dunstable was actually appointed to academy at Hereford by Bishop Kirk,
called Bishop Edmund Lacy. He was also thought to be linked to the marathon through another manuscript, which I'll mention later.
The written manuscript, Edmund Lacy, was very involved in patronage in sort of paying different musicians and composers.
He was a patron of Country Loaf and Richard. I mentioned earlier and he seemed to have been a patron of Dunstable,
so it would seem within his sort of tastes to sort of have a by Dunstable in a book associated with an area where he was present.
So horrific, as I said, comes to mind here. It is one of the primary reasons I have argued for Hereford. origin.
But anyway, to move on. John Constable's involvement with all of this and the fact that later on in this manuscript,
we actually have a piece titled Pull Christ by John Plummer could signify sort of courtly culture for this whole thing.
As I said, Dunstable worked for the Duke of Bedford.
He also worked for the Gloucester and Queen Jane at one time, and John Plummer was a member of the Chapel Royal by fourteen point one.
So this could shape the type of environment these cows were being traded in and were occurring and being composed and being swapped in by musicians.
So it could have satiate the carnal form sort of our aristocratic circles and not just, you know, minstrel musicians, as it used to be argued.
And yes, this would again fit with the whole Edmund Lacy thing. It would basically emanates basically at heart, courtly life.
He was very close to Henry, the fifth and was with him.
And we actually have one of their most famous carols in this book, ActionScript Carol, which celebrates that victory.
So it would again be a celebration of Henry the fifth and Edmund Lacy of Edmund Lacy was tied to this this particular book.
To move on to copying, which is our purpose today. The Sultan Kovac is actually copied relatively well.
There are limited errors. There are some, but where they occur, it's often sort of erased and then written over again and corrected.
So it's copied quite well in general, which I can't say of all Carle manuscripts.
So if we turn to Folio 11 Rector, we can see a part where the Stav say where the lines of music have actually been rubbed out.
So just let Andrew tender. You can really see as Andrew's turning the sort of beauty of this manuscript of the bright initials, the declaration.
These all carols that I'm understanding now,
so as you can see on this failure and pointed out the lines of music, so having music would normally occur,
what we call the states have been rubbed out and then described as gone and filled it back in again and drawn the lines back on.
Say, that's just an example of a little bit of correction that's taken place in this manuscript.
As you can see it, some quite neat and quite well.
But you know, that's not always the case, and we do have some instances a notable exception being Ontario.
Twenty nine B.C., where the last line of that of that carol on that page gets rubbed out but not filled in again.
That is the notable exception in this manuscript that is on Friday 29 B.C.
But as Andrew turns to that to that Friday, I want to ask, basically, what can this tell us apart from that scribes?
We tried really hard to actually copy things accurately.
Well, it tells us, but the scribes mismanaged it, but actually taking a level of care with it.
They were trying to make things work. They were trying to make sure the errors were fixed most of the time.
And David Fallows has argued that this manuscript can't belong to any grand establishment because it has rough parchment.
There's a couple of holes here and there. It doesn't look all too fancy.
But obviously, this manuscript is something of care.
It is a manuscript that was looked after in a sense,
the manuscript prescribed specifically went back to correct whether it made mistakes and to make it look neat and tidy.
These suggest that the pieces in this book were valued, and the potential of these songs being performed was considered.
Essentially, if you write things down, after all and we get things wrong, we end up with the case.
Like I outlined at the beginning of this talk of misunderstanding a text, completely misunderstanding a song,
completely saying completely different words, or having a complete variant of the initial piece.
So what I'd like to do now if we don't have any questions on this album PowerBook yet is to actually compare some of this.
I do have a number of questions actually general and specific. So if that's okay, we will take this moment to do that.
So firstly, a general question about carols, and we have a question saying that I've always associated carols with religious holidays.
Did I understand correctly that they are more musical coming together as a group of people, regardless of setting?
Yes. So that's one way of thinking about it. Carols were essentially for a number of different contexts.
They weren't necessarily for the tivity or Easter or anything like that.
We have examples of carols which just tell a love story, you know, tells of tales of a girl liking a boy.
And we have examples of carols which are for drinking, which are for feasting on any day at any time.
They're not necessarily associated with any particular feast.
I would say that towards the end of the 15th century, the sort of the mid-century to the end of the 15th century,
carols start to take on that more clear association with sort of the nativity,
and we tend to see more and more carols popping up connected with Christ Child and with the birth of Jesus.
With nativity settings, we see more lullaby carols and then we have carols popping up for sort of religious days as well.
I mean, the written manuscript, which is the the latest entry you'll see at the bazaar headings for some of the carols,
which indicate what these days they should be performed on or reference to.
So that is sort of a later 15th century thing,
but the cowt or extents and purposes was something that could be adapted to any sort of day time an occasion.
Lovely, thank you. Do we know where the word Carol comes from? We do, indeed.
We think it comes from the word carol, which was a French word, and it initially indicated a dance.
So the carol was originally a stockholder.
So you join hands and you go in a circle and the button would be sung and you turn one way and the bassist would be sung by soloist.
And again, you'd go round. So they think the word carol basically embodies the circle of movement,
which form sort of takes of the bad and best bad and best bad and best structure.
There have been other arguments. Some try and connect it to the material.
But the one that's generally accepted is that the cat that carol comes from, the carol, which is French.
Simply, do we know where the word burden comes from? So unfortunately, I'm not, I'm not great with etymology, but a burden in gen.
I'm not quite sure where the word comes from itself. But it's just generally take it to me refrain.
Sometimes it gets called a vote in certain manuscripts, you actually have it written next to it.
So what comes to mind is burial mystery three five four.
Next to some carols, you just have about two written instead of bad and or instead of profane.
So yes, we did have a clear idea of where the word bad comes from.
Thank you. We've got a couple of questions specifically about the sales of manuscripts.
I lost those now and then the other general questions I'll come back to later. But firstly, what?
This might be one for Andrew, actually. Do we know what's caused the staining on the manuscript?
It doesn't look like a simple water stain, so some of the earlier folios had staining on the.
So we we have we have, in fact been.
Michael and I were looking at this the other day, and we were assuming that it certainly.
It looks like something has been slush on those pages, doesn't it?
Yeah. I mean, just to chime in, David, I think.
And other scholars mention that it's watermark. Mm-Hmm.
Yeah. Yes. So we have been assuming that's what it was. And it also it doesn't leave any residue there, either.
So it's I mean, it doesn't appear to be wax, for example.
So it's an interesting it's an interesting comment that it doesn't look like water and we'd certainly be interested in other ideas.
Also answer the question about the binding of the manuscript, which let me just show you quickly.
This is actually this is actually not the original binding.
Unfortunately, most mediaeval manuscripts have been rebound at some point in their life.
And so this is. So this manuscript came into the world then from the collection of John Selden.
You can see that this is this is a binding that this is probably put on.
The will be a library. This bit of red ink on the back there.
And so this is this is very much an early modern binding.
You can actually see that the this is the old spine from the manuscript because this is this has actually been the spine was replaced, probably.
And I would guess and perhaps the 1950s as repairs in bookbinding terminology, we call that re backing.
You can see also what we can tell from the from the bindings that you can see these two little staple holes right there.
That means that this was once part of this.
It was once a change book set that was probably the in the southern end of the of the building.
So it tells us a bit about the history of the book within the body in itself,
but it doesn't tell us anything about the earlier history of the book, unfortunately.
And this is, as I say, this is really common for mediaeval manuscripts.
It's very rare for for pre-modern books to survive in their original binding.
Thank you, and I think that that's great. I think I'm conscious of time,
so I think we'll move on to our second manuscript and I'll pick up the other questions at the end because
see us now Andre is going to hopefully get out a little collection of carols that we have in the bud,
which I'm going to use to sort of compare to the and carols. I'm going to look at one in particular, which is called Make me joy.
It's quite a famous carol.
There's a there's an addition of it that's recently, I think the last three months been recorded by the 16, and you can find that on the cheap.
So yes, this little manuscript is really quite something.
As you can see this little velvet box, it's a 15th century manuscript as the top of that box outlines,
and it's a really small little collection of carols, most of which don't have any music with them.
Most of them are just written out without any music.
And so it's a non-native book.
There are a few with just sort of one line of music with one voice, but it's very, very simple in comparison to the South and book.
It's written on paper rather than parchment, and it's got this lovely sort of green and gold binding.
It's been rebound, so it's not in its initial binding.
And if we open the first failure? You can see a sort of form these cards take.
So as you can see here, we've got a little bit of decoration with the little initial at the top and played some red filling in.
But yeah, this is the form the carols in this book take in general that the bed and at the top.
And then they've got the best is written out.
And then they've got this bracketing next to the verses showing where the rhyme occurs and where the best structure is.
And then the bad and sometimes indicated to the right of the brackets, basically telling you to repeat after the best.
So that's the general form that these cows in this little book take.
But if we turn to foliar 32 birthday, you will see the carol that I'm going to compare to the same variant.
Carol Carol in the Southern Catholic says I said that cow is called Make Rejoice, and again,
you can see that's all but an element of encouraging people together in that one line to make we joy.
And it's a really lovely carol is quite so the fast paced.
It's quite nice to listen to. But is Andrew just put the snake that held it so this carol begins at the bottom of the page?
It's marked out by that little sort of squiggle in the margins on the left hand side and the bad and written there and then the first verse.
So the first verse is written underneath the burden, and in this first is where we get our first mistake.
So the scribe has written a partridge in a genesis and then sing We and say, welcome Benny.
Read them to see him. But when it comes to the Neve Adaptogens, him the Latin line of this verse,
the scribe has written V and then it seems as if they've almost looked away or they've done something.
Then they've come back to it and written. Then you were told next to it.
So we get the very redemptive gymnasium, so we get a little sort of mistake and that might indicate some sort of tracking the scribe looking away,
perhaps at the manuscript they were copying from and then looking back and writing out the whole word again by accident.
But if we look further on it, the main mistake in this carol? We might actually see something a little bit different here.
So the third verse of this, Carol. We know what it's supposed to read because we have it in Seldin and we've got another
copy of it in the written account book as well as a post read a soulless Ortiz Cordani.
So my dear lord was known as Hey. Known as he has given Grace, Adam Temperance quite follow it.
But as you see here, that line just ends. There is nothing say we have half grace and then absolutely nothing.
Whereas in the seldom book, we have Adam Karen's quote, part of it, we have the Latin line, so why do we have a missing line here?
Why is there another mistake in the Latin? Why is described as left it blank?
Again, this could be explained by breaking, copying, described, looking away or stopping, going and doing something, coming back and writing.
But it would be a very odd place to stop.
It would be very odd indeed, stuck in the middle of a vast rather than completing about us and taking a step away.
This also comes at a period of what Daniel Weixin calls continuous flow in the Spanish script,
where a number of parallels are written in the same ink and seems to be written fairly close together.
So it would break that sort of sort of flow. Another idea is memory.
So the scribe could have been recalling word by word the carol and potentially struggling when it came to the Latin words.
But we have to remember here that the mediaeval culture was a highly oral culture and highly reliant on memorisation and ideas of memory.
And Latin phrases in cars are often ones that were very familiar to the laity.
Words they would hear in everyday liturgical services. Words that would be easily memorised.
So it is perhaps unlikely that they would have forgotten this.
So there's any sort of a third explanation that we can really tanti.
And that is that the exemplar that the scribe was copying from, say,
the manuscript that the scribe copied this carol from was perhaps unclear and unclear.
Exemplars do occur. How many scripts Geoffrey Jeremy Griffiths actually highlights that those are critical.
There is no race which is popular is quite popular today.
Still an admission by you? There is often sung at Carol Services, but he Jeremy Griffiths,
except there is no race and that exists in the Trinity Carol, which is not a 15th century carol manuscript.
And in a Holkham Hall manuscript, the Holkham Hall one doesn't have musical notation.
Griffiths looks at best and notices the errors take place at the start and end of each line.
When the scribes should now and Griffiths sort of assumes from this and obsessed by
this that the scribe may have been sort of dividing verses up as they went along,
dividing the lines up. And this could be because the manuscript they were copying from had really unclear line division.
So why might that line division have been unclear?
Why might nine division and so of the exemplar have been unclear in this case that we see here in any poet?
Well, I would suggest that the manuscript that best scribes using was actually a music manuscript and copying from music manuscript.
This would make sense in terms of how the scribe has copied this particular carol.
They've copied it in sort of two long lines, which we sort of we call the opening line.
The copy it with two lines, and then Andrew will show you a document now which will demonstrate this hopefully say,
let's wait for him to get that up then. Say, I say I have tried to transcribe it here as it's copied in both manuscripts,
so you can see in inchoate you have that verse under the Leon and Line Box Apache and Genesis through a has come to us to we here and say welcome,
then read them Trojans. And so you can see the two long lines and the Leonen refers to the rhyme scheme here.
So genital shining with us. Welcome rhyme against you.
And those are separated by caesura, so a little a little full stop, indicating that a break in between.
So describe it and put this written out in these two long lines.
And if we look at the cell phone book, we see again that describe that has written out in these two long lines as well.
So it may be that the scribe in Poe is looking at a sort of musical manuscript with a similar layout to
Sheldon and finding line division to be quite unclear and finding the exemplar general to be quite unclear.
And we know that the poet describes what all of that comfortable musical notation.
We didn't see much of it. There are two scribes. One news's name is connotation at all.
The other uses a few bits here and there, but not very well.
So we can perhaps say that the scribe might have been copying from the musical manuscript.
He might have been making mistakes as they go along,
particularly these Latin bits find it difficult to decipher a finding it difficult to know how to lay out this carol,
in particular where the break should occur. To have it in a normal sort of best full song exemplars can cause quite a real issue with copying them,
with mistakes being made and with different variants of carols occurring because of them.
It's interesting in the Ritson, Carroll book in particular that there is quite a lot of going wrong with this particular account as well.
So Ritson has make joint and in written there's sort of the same structure.
Seldom it's got music with it. So you've got the bad in the past best with the accompanying music.
But unlike Selden, which has each of the verses laid out, then underneath that music written only has four lines,
has agnostic or no secular Brit star three kings made come so nice or discordant.
A symmetry is known as hey, so it's known as the lions, and modern transcribers have looked at this and been like This must be the next best.
I would argue, no, I argue, looking at Selden and looking at it, we see that agnostic on this column,
a great star that he Kingsmead is actually the first two lines of first to as as artist coordinator makes.
The Lord is not as hate is actually the first to first two lines of best three.
So I would argue that these actually prompt in that manuscript.
Prompts for the buses described didn't need to write it all out because the written manuscript was perhaps a
manuscript that was more used for actual performance than Selden or Ang Poet or Edgerton or the Trinity Carol role.
So yes, I think Ritson, if you look at it, it's got a lot of errors and corrections as well,
but it looks like a manuscript that was more used for performance and it's larger than Seldon as well, which is a fact.
So you get quite large choir books like the Eton Choir book,
which were easy for performers to see, especially if there were different voiced parts going on.
And they could sort of gather round and they could sing from it. But is not like that.
Selden is small, it's compact. It's copied quite well.
But again, there's no no real marks of performance. No, so no sort of prompting.
Nothing like that that tells us that it was actually performed. So what was it useful?
I would suggest that it was actually more of a reference guide in a way,
a sort of way of musicians being like, Oh, I I know this Carol or I know this piece.
I don't perform it. So it's being performed in this day. Let me just check something and say it was a sort of recorder, a document, if you will,
a working document showing the sort of tastes of the time and the music that was particularly relevant to a certain institution.
So I think in the sense, we have to treat Seldon as a reference guide rather than a performance manuscript
where we can treat Ritson as more of a performance manuscript in itself,
which is quite exciting, really, because we don't often get marks of performance.
And it's interesting just to have this sort of two little prompts for musicians, and it shows a lot about memory as well.
It shows that musicians who have been so skilled that they would have known these pieces by heart,
they would have needed much to sort of prompted the recollection of them when they were performing.
They would have known the verses. And if you read a lot about sort of how choral choral music works in that time,
you'll hear about how some musicians have to memorise whole previous day's total liturgical services had to have absolutely committed to memory.
Mediaeval period was absolutely a culture that relied on ideas of memory, and that was key to performance.
You can't really separate memory from performance time. There were so well combined.
So, yes, I think Ritson really shows us that the use of these prompts and the Sound and Carroll book should be treated as more of an aid memoir.
Seldom, they does have marks that show us that it was used over time, as shown earlier.
There was that sort of late hand that's the best, but hand also gives names to some of the carols.
So Miller's Christy Clarissa liturgical piece in this work, but Layton comes back and actually adds the title to it.
So we see that sound and still being used over a period of time, and it remains sort of relevant to whatever institution it was used in.
And it remains sort of important for a little bit of time. It's not just written down and forgotten about by any means.
At the end of the book, there's actually a drinking song that is added much later,
and it is without any sort of illuminations or initials or decoration.
It's very much written in black ink all the way through, and it's quite a different style, I suppose, to the previous carols and musical works.
But yes, just around there's talk of as I'm conscious about time, I just want to say something quick about the Trinity Carol.
That is the final sort of multi voice Carroll book that we have.
It's kept at Trinity College Cambridge, and it's this really long roll containing a number of carols at its heart.
Is this ashen cool carol which you also have an seldon Democrats? Yes, uglier.
And this kind of role. She has six carols with Selden.
So a lot of people have suggested that there's a relationship between the two manuscripts if we take Seldon as being perfect.
We then note that the Trinity Carol of all have our best guess that Trinity Carol is from the sort of Norfolk area.
Helen deeming suggests it might have travelled some way, might have been a travelling document with a scribe or musician that was at the
Ashram Course celebrations that were held in London when Henry the fifth or 10.
So that might have provided the opportunity for the musicians that were associated with the
Selden Carol book to sort of interact with the musicians associated with the Trinity Carol.
And that could explain that sort of cross-pollination of carols and the use of Carol,
some one document from the other side of the country to another manuscript on this side of the country.
So it's shows that sort of circulation that could be happening with these carols and shows how
musicians could interact and how these cows could sort of travel between areas of the country,
Carol. Culture was not stationary. It was very much on the move.
It was being transmitted orally. It was being transmitted by exemplar.
Its publication was in both senses on the page and by by vocalisation.
So we rarely see carols travelling here and being a real highlight of musical exchange.
And on that note, I hope you've sort of had a feel of what caricature was today,
and I've been able to make a few suggestions about what Page may be able to tell us about performance, culture, generality, late mediaeval England.
Selden is a very fine and very rich collection,
but we must be sort of hesitant about playing our modern expectations of things like memory or performance to it.
We can sort of give our best guesses, as I said before, we can give our suggestions,
but we have to be so careful about it because we cannot go back 500 years, as sad as that may be.
But we can by looking at what's in the page, pieced together slowly an idea or a sense, an echo of what might have been.
So we cannot say what certainly was, but we can suggest what may have been.
By doing that, we can appreciate the talent, the recall, the performance culture of this genre and this time long before the first few
nights of once in Royal David's city reverberated around King's College Chapel.
So I thank you very much for being here today, and I thank you very much for listening to me speak about these wonderful manuscripts.
I hope I've really shown you a little bit about the wonderful collection the Polly and House of Carols non notated and musically annotated,
and that you go away with a sort of new idea of what Carolyn was and what counterculture was mediaeval Britain.
Thank you so much, Mika, that was absolutely fascinating,
and I think you've shown us a great deal about where these cameras come from and the kind of complexity of looking at them.
We have come to the end of all scheduled time, but we do have a lot of questions,
so I'm hoping that you would be happy to answer them for the next few minutes.
And as I said, Eddie, we don't get through. We will share in the follow up email.
So if you do have to leave, please do. And we will be sharing information later.
But if you have able to stay on everyone, then please do and it will come to the questions.
So I'm going to start with one about the second manuscript missing poet.
One attendee has commented that the bracketed sections remind him of his limited knowledge of middle English poetic manuscripts.
Is there an obvious way to differentiate between poetic manuscripts and musical manuscripts when there is no notation?
This is a difficult one, I think, for a lot of scholars, so sometimes I think a lot of cars have been overlooked because they've just
been taken to be middle English verse because they take such a similar form.
Obviously, it helps when the burden is written to the right hand side of these things because then we say, Oh, that must be repeated.
Sometimes we do have the scribe just writing underneath the button in full,
which helps because we see that refrain element even if it's not next to the brackets.
But yes, it was a very common thing to use bracketing to distinguish rhyme, particularly aimed at English verse.
And really, when we're studying all of this, we have to make that decision of what kind of lyric is this?
Is this a musical lyric? Was this was this sort of something that we could compare to other carols?
Or is it just is it just verse itself?
And normally we tend to refer to other carols with sort of structural elements that are similar and then make a decision based on that.
Thank you. That's that's really interesting. Thank you. We've had a comment on the word,
but someone has suggested it might come from the French poodle and which means the drain or lowest part of instrumental music.
So that's that's a interesting suggestion. Thank you very much.
That's interesting to me. Some people have been voting for questions.
That's a good way to make sure that we get them. So I've had a question about with the majority of these carols being mediaeval.
What language are they predominantly written in? And if you have a myriad of manuscripts from several different locations,
can you notice cultural or area specific alterations in the production of the carols?
Yes. So that's really interesting. So carols, I think in terms of area where they come from, you can sort of look at them and notice dialect features.
And then sometimes that gives an indication of where the scribes and from.
But obviously and scribes need about, they may come from Norfolk, but actually be working in London.
So it's not as not necessarily an indication that this manuscript was from Norfolk or
this manuscript was from this area because some musicians did me a move about a lot.
And so what was the first part of that question again? I go on to the second part of the first part that with me was.
About. Yes, what language are they?
Yes, say most accounts are written in middle English. We do have what's called macaroni carrots, which make use of both middle English and Latin.
So I think we can do we have one here, the on rushing thing to say.
But yes, I say actually no. We any return. Redemptive attention is on the right hand side,
and you see this combines Latin and then middle English verse, so you can see it's at the bottom there.
And which pointing out to that, and that's called a macaroni carol. We do have some elements of French appearing at times.
I'm just showing what I'm sort of multilingual culture these cows are lacking in.
Thank you. And another question about the music,
so we've known notated carols are the tunes mentioned or is it assumed the reader will know how it's meant to be sung?
Well, this is a really nice thing to bring up with any poet, actually, because in ENCODE,
there is a carol tydings tree that become new and it is written with its music.
So one voice very simply, but at the bottom ascribe has written This is supposed to be performed to the tune I have set.
I'm sort of repeating that they might know a little bit about music or they
both scribes in and poets don't seem to have all that much musical knowledge.
But the scribe then goes, But if you want to, you can set it to any other tune that you choose to,
which is quite a nice way of showing that showing that there is this sort of culture where different carol lyrics could be applied to different tunes,
so there was some indication of what tunes may have been used for it. There is a manuscript, I think.
I think it's gambling keys three, eight four.
I might get the number wrong, but a lot of manuscripts to remember.
But where the scribe is sitting next to Carl, that it can be performed to the tune of a French song.
And yeah, we do sometimes have those indications, but they are very rare and it's nice when we do find them.
I love the idea that, you know, they were very sharing of the music and the words, whereas Natsu,
they are quite loyal to particular to get a lot more arguments today about what's the right words,
what's the right teams in Karel culture, mediaeval Britain who seems very much a thing of, you know,
one scribe, one tribe might write one version of the carol with verses in a certain order.
Another scribe might write the second version of that carol with swapped verses because they feel that that delivers the message better.
Or there might be different settings of the carols written.
For example, the written manuscript has much more florid musical writing than Selden or some of the earlier manuscripts.
So you sort of see elaboration going on with the musical settings of these things and thinking of the music.
We've been asked if any carols are written in ancient manuscripts.
Sorry, have any carols written in ancient manuscripts being adapted for most music?
And if so, could you share examples? I think you've mentioned a couple that are still sung today.
Yeah, so that's a beautiful setting of There Is No Race,
a carol that is featured in 20 Carol and Hokum Whole Legal Manuscript I believe in alcohol and John your that South African composer,
I believe, writes. There is no reason sets it to sort of modern notation.
So that's a really lovely carol. Adam Baumann has some really lovely, modern sort of editions that I would have to go to listen to it.
A really lovely carol again, trying to think of the top of my head, some of the others.
So, yeah, we do have some settings of things like Make Joy,
which have been sort of looked at from a historical lens and people have tried to restore them to sort of what they were.
But obviously, it's always difficult to tell what things actually were in the mediaeval period.
But yeah, definitely in my top two choices would be Adam label and there is no race key, and I'm sticking to the idea of music.
Did the scribes with the scribes have had musical knowledge,
so all of the errors that they're catching purely in terms of the lyrics or the text being wrong?
Or are there things that musically don't make sense?
So it's quite interesting because this sort of makes me think of the idea of underlay, particularly this Seldin Carroll book.
So in this of book, we have a number of scribes.
He write just the lyrics, but don't necessarily write the music.
And it's argued that there are sort of a different set of scribes that writing the music and a different set of scribe that are writing the lyrics.
It's difficult to know if that is true because obviously you can't really compare lyrics to music most of the time.
But we do know that this was the product of what David Fellows would refer to as a
fairly large script for him so that there were multiple people working on this.
And Selden kind of book is quite interesting in the sense that the words are written in such a way that it's
very difficult to tell whether underlay lives so where the words are supposed to correspond to the text.
That makes me again think that it's a reference work that is just something to sort of check by musicians and that they would
have had this sort of knowledge from memory of how the cattle sort of went and where the music pasty correspond to the words.
And that was more just a reminder. And as I said earlier.
So yes, it's quite interesting how the music corresponds,
and there are places where the music is corrected just to give sort of an accurate impression of what.
The tune might have been in Ritson, we see that the words are split up much more clearly,
that the underlay is a little bit more clear in the kind of lives talking about makori joy.
The word words are split and basically describe has gone across and crossed out with underlay hasn't worked
and then rewritten the words to make sure that the music is corresponding to the lyrics accurately.
So we do see some attention to that in written again, showing that it's probably a performance manuscript.
Thank you. And sticking to her idea of copying, I think we'll just do a couple more. And they will to finish.
But is there any suggestion that the carols might have been sort of copied without any physical
copy so they might have been written down when they were heard rather than taking the manuscript?
Yeah, I think it is safest to. Sort of naturally assume, and I'm being very careful here that some corals must have been written down from memory,
as I said to the mediaeval period was a highly oral culture and one very reliant on memory,
so it is unlikely that no carol was ever copied down from memory.
And so some of what we see today, particularly, I want to say and perhaps not notated current collections might have come from memorisation,
from hearing performance and then writing it down. That is a key part of my study and the next phase of my research, actually,
and seeing if we can trace their sort of aspects of memory and access aspects of them.
Performance a see if by looking at non-attached manuscripts next to annotated manuscripts,
we can see if performance and if hearing performance is influencing the way these things are written down.
So watch this space for live, thank you very much. I think we'll have to finish now, but there's one more question.
Do you have any comments about Russell Robinson's arguments about Carol sometimes having being used as processional hymns?
Oh yes, I have. I have a lot of comments, so maybe a brief, very brief summary that I could tell you more in the follow up.
Yesterday, I actually wrote about this relatively recently. I think the carol form was easily adapted to a number of different contexts.
I think it could have been used as Op-Ed columnist dominated substitute in some, some ways.
And I think that often the call is discounted from having been used in the tactical spaces because people see it as a secular form.
I think that is wrong to assume that it was purely used in secular spaces.
I think the mediaeval idea of the secular and sacred is so complex.
I'm so intertwined with each other that things like the carol could have easily been used in both sacred space and secular space,
and possibly as Robin sort of describes being used in a procession.
We know that it was used, for example, in secular processions, mystery plays.
You sit there sort of secular procession around the city, and if it was used in procession in that sense, why not in procession in the cultural space?
The person you ask that question is put a little smiley face, so I can,
but I take the code or the complexity of carols is a perfect way to finish because that's what you've been sharing with us today.
So I think we will have to finish that.
If you have asked a question that hasn't been answered, please be assured we will try and answer it in a follow up email.
But I'd just like to finish by saying thank you again.
So much to become Mickey and Andrew Dunning for sharing and explaining those really fascinating manuscripts and their stories.
And thank you to everyone who's joined us today. It's been great to have attendees from far and wide.
And thank you to our technical team. Do you sign up to our newsletter to find out more about upcoming events?
And we hope to see you again soon. Have a good evening and thanks again.
Thank you.