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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2015
This essay adds to our existing understanding of what it meant to be a member of the English Catholic community during the late Elizabeth and early Stuart period by exploring Catholic musical culture in Lancashire. This was a uniquely Catholic village, which, like the majority of villages, towns and cities in early modern England, was filled with the singing of ballads. Ballads have almost exclusively been treated in scholarship as a ‘Protestant’ phenomenon and the ‘godly ballad’ associated with the very fabric of a distinctively Protestant Elizabethan and Stuart entertainment culture. By investigating the songs and ballads in two manuscript collections from the Catholic network surrounding the Blundell family this essay will show how Catholics both composed and ‘converted’ existing ballads to voice social, devotional, and political concerns. The ballads performed in Little Crosby highlight a vibrant Catholic community, where musical expression was fundamental. Performance widened the parochial religious divide, whilst enhancing Catholic integration. This essay uncovers the way Catholics used music to voice religious and exhort protest as much as prayer. Finally, by investigating the tunes and melodies preserved in the manuscripts, I demonstrate how priests serving this network used ballads as part of their missionary strategy.
The author would like to thank the solo-voice ensemble Les Canards Chantants for the recordings that accompany this article.
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18 As distinct from ‘inter-faith’ conversion: there is currently no extant evidence to suggest that Catholics were using ballads to convert Protestants, except for Lewis Owen’s remarks – see n.108.
19 Lancashire Record Office, DDBL, acc 6121, Box 4, Great Hodge Podge. (Hereafter Great Hodge Podge). For a literary analysis of the entirety of the Great Hodge Podge see van Vuuren, Julie, ‘The manuscript culture of an English recusant Catholic community in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: a study of The great hodge podge and the Blundell family of Little Crosby, Lancashire’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Reading, 2011)Google Scholar. This includes a chapter on ‘music and orality’, which explores five of the songs Blundell composed, but offers quite a different analysis and draws largely different conclusions to those presented here.
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24 The two other items in the miscellany are ‘A Sick Man’s Salve’ – a prose recipe and the medieval poem a ’Parliament of Devils’.
25 BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.31–33.
26 Rollins, Hyder ed. Old English Ballads, 1553–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920)Google Scholar.
27 Incorrectly transcribed as ‘F.B.P.’ in Rollins, Old English Ballads, 164.
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30 Great Hodge Podge, f.65v. William Blundell (1620–1698) was related to the Anderton family through his mother Jane Bradshaigh. See transcription of this catalogue in Hawkes, Arthur J., ‘The Birchley Hall Secret Press’, Library 7 (1926): 137–183 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (at 151).
31 Great Hodge Podge, f.65v.
32 BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.36v–37v. After some confusion, ‘I.B’ or ‘I.B.P’ is now known quite comprehensively to have been the pseudonym of James Anderton, as opposed to his cousin, the Jesuit priest Lawrence Anderton. See Michael Mullett, ‘Anderton, James (1557–1613)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, accessed 15 January 2014. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/510 and ‘Anderton, Lawrence (1575–1643)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, accessed 15 January 2014. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/511.
33 [Anon.], The Song of Mary (London, 1601), 30–37.
34 I.B., A looking glass of mortalitie (London, 1599).
35 Lancashire Record Office, DDBL, acc 6212, Box 3. This is almost certainly the ‘Catholic’ version of the psalm 107 from the Douay-Rheims bible. The ‘Protestant’ version is psalm 108 in the King James Bible and begins ‘O god, my heart is fixed’.
36 SP 12/243 f.158. Nicholas Blundell (1667–1737) also owned a bass viol see Nicholas Blundell’s Great Diurnal, ed. Frank Tyrer, 3 vols. (Liverpool: The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1969), 3:204.
37 PC 2/17 f.811; PC 2/19 f.248; Calendar of the MSS of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, Hatfield House ed. R. A. Roberts, vol. 4: 1590–1594 London, 240.
38 SP 12/274 f.37.
39 Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster (hereafter AAW), Series A, vol.4, no.38.
40 Great Hodge Podge, f.179.
41 Great Diurnal, ed. Tyrer, Vol.1, 153, 182, 228, 240.
42 Great Hodge Podge, f.144.
43 The following recordings are not intended to imitate, recreate or reconstruct past sounds, but are imaginative interpretations by Robin and Graham Bier of Les Canards Chantants. All music and words composed by William Blundell (1560–1638) except where indicated. Spelling for titles have been modernised.
44 Musical notation: Great Hodge Podge, ff.126v, 130, 135v, 136, 140, 141, 142, 144v.
45 Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster (hereafter AAW), Series A, vol.4, no.38.
46 Great Hodge Podge, ff.126v, 129, 155v, 156, 275. BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.47v.
47 Great Hodge Podge, ff.275–6.
48 AAW, A 4 no.38, 446–7.
49 ‘Hight’ is from the Middle English ‘to be named, be called’.
50 ‘A [mos]t Excellent Ballad of Joseph the Carpenter’, EBBA, accessed 30 January 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20650/xml.
51 Ibid.
52 BL. Add. MS. 15225, ‘Against Nigardie and riches’, ff.7v–8v; ‘Duke of Buckingham’, ff.13–15; ‘A doleful daunce’, ff.15–16; ‘Give place ye leadies & begone’, f.16v; ‘A pleasant ballad of the just man Job’, ff.16v–17; ‘I might have lived merrily’, ff.18–18v; ‘Ould Tobie, cald his loving sonne’, ff.19–20; ‘The thoughts of man doe daylie change’, f.38; ‘Seek wisdome cheefly to obtain’, ff.38v–39; ‘O man that runneth here thy race’, ff.43v–44v; ‘A dittie most excelent for everie man to reade’, ff.56–58; ‘All you that with good ale doe hould’, ff.58v–60v. Great Hodge Podge, ‘The worldlings farewell’, ff.160–161v.
53 See Bossy, English Catholic Community and resulting debate with Haigh, Christopher, ‘The Fall of a Church or the Rise of a Sect?’, Historical Journal 2 (1978):181–186 Google Scholar; Haigh, , ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, Past and Present 93 (1981): 37–69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haigh, , ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1981): 129–147 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Haigh, , ‘Revisionism, the Reformation, and the History of English Catholicism’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26 (1985): 394–405 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
54 I have chosen to use the term ‘Tridentine’ to describe the religious practices affected by the spiritual renewal of Catholicism after the meetings of the Council of Trent from 1545–1563. The term should be understood ‘less as an abstract noun…but rather as a concrete verb’. See Ditchfield, Simon, ‘Tridentine Catholicism’ in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, eds. Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 15–31 Google Scholar (at 19).
55 Great Hodge Podge, f. 137v. Also see Sena, , ‘William Blundell’, 63 Google Scholar. Sena also makes the suggestion that traces of this ballad are visible in ‘A Proper New Ballad Intitled the Faeryes Farewell’ written by Bishop Richard Corbett.
56 Martz, Louis L., The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 25 Google Scholar. See also On giving the Spiritual Exercises: The early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599, trans. Martin E. Palmer (Saint Louis, Missouri: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996).
57 Great Hodge Podge, f.144.
58 Huntington MS. 904 and Bodl. MS. Eng. poet. b.5. See Brown, Cedric C., ‘Recusant Community and Jesuit Mission in Parliament Days: Bodleian MS Eng. poet. b.5’, The Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 290–315 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hackett, Helen, ‘Women and Catholic Manuscript Networks in Seventeenth-Century England: New Research on Constance Aston Fowler’s Miscellany of Sacred and Secular Verse’, Renaissance Quarterly 65 (2012): 1094–1124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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68 See family tree compiled by the Who Were the Nuns? Project, accessed 22 January 2014. http://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ftrees/Blundellcro.pdf.
69 Great Hodge Podge, ff.131–131v.
70 Great Hodge Podge, ff.138v–139.
71 Great Hodge Podge, ff.135v–136.
72 BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.10–10v.
73 BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.27v–29v.
74 BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.11v–13.
75 Great Hodge Podge, ff.3v and 140–140v.
76 Katherine von Bora was a nun who later became Martin Luther’s wife after she contacted him, along with other nuns dissatisfied with the monastic life, and was interested in the emerging reform movement.
77 BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.29v–30v.
78 BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.30.
79 See Marotti, Arthur ed. Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (London: Macmillan, 1999), esp. 1–34 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Dolan, Frances, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (London: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 1–44 Google Scholar.
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81 BL. Add. MS. 15225, ff.29v–30v.
82 Great Hodge Podge, f.3v. For tune of ‘Shall I wrastle’ see EBBA, accessed 22 January 2014. Also used in a multitude of comic, moralising ballads against various other vices such as: ‘The unfortunate Gallant gull’d at London’ c.1623, EBBA, accessed 22 January 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20089/image.
83 ‘A new song for a Young mans opinion’, EBBA, accessed 22 January 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20104/xml.
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85 Ibid.
86 Great Hodge Podge, ff.136–137, see also and ‘You that present are take of us some pitie’, ff.141–141v.
87 Great Hodge Podge, f.136.
88 See for example ‘A Lamentable dittie composed upon the death of Robert Lord Devereux late Earle of Essex’, EBBA, accessed 29 January 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/32221/image; and ‘Sir Walter Raleigh his lamentation’, EBBA, accessed 9 March 2014. http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20046/image.
89 For more on the religio-politic landscape of Lancashire see Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire.
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92 Great Hodge Podge, f.142v.
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94 BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.2v.
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96 Lancashire Record Office, DDBL, acc 6121, Box 1, Catholic Burial Register.
97 John Birtwisle - Catholic Burial Register, no. 40 see Anstruther, Seminary Priests, 1:36; John Layton - Catholic Burial Register, no. 69 see Anstruther, Godfrey, The Seminary Priests, 2: Early Stuarts, 1603–1659 (Great Wakering: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1975), 186 Google Scholar and Richard Holme, alias Lawrence Smith – Catholic Burial Register, no. 106 see Anstruther, Seminary Priests, 2:160.
98 Mullett, ‘Anderton, Lawrence (1575–1643).
99 BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.22v.
100 Great Hodge Podge, ff.145–145v.
101 The desire for news was fervent in this period, and there is no reason to believe that Catholics did not share in this enthusiasm. See Fox, Adam, ‘Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Historical Journal 40 (1997): 597–620 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
102 BL. Add. MS. 15225, f.25v.
103 Public executions were well attended during this period, with crowds for the London executions often numbering into the thousands.
104 T. Frank Kennedy, S.J., ‘Some Unusual Genres of Sacred Music in the Early Modern Period: The Catechism as a Musical Event in the Late Renaissance – Jesuits and ‘Our Way of Proceeding’ in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., eds. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (London: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
105 Blake Wilson, ‘Lauda (lt. ‘praise’; pl, laude [laudi]’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed 24 January 2013. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/43313.
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117 Cf. Watt, Cheap Print, 104–5. Watt cited Rollins (see n.124) but mistakenly asserted that ‘Jesu come thou to me’ was an example of a Protestant ‘godly’ adaptation. Indeed, unlike the Catholic songs explored here, Watt explains how for Protestants, ‘love songs and dialogues with Christ did not endure.’ This was, Watt claims, because the ‘invention of non-scriptural speeches for God or Christ was a dubious exercise for Protestants, with their emphasis on biblical authority and the clearing away of superfluous apocrypha’.
118 My emphasis.
119 See ‘Adoramus te Christe: Music and Post-Reformation English Catholic Domestic Piety’ in Religion and the Household, eds. John Doran, Charlotte Methuen, and Alexandra Walsham (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014) 240–253.
120 My monograph, The Reformation of the Soundscape: Music and Piety in Early Modern England, is in preparation.
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