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Music and musicians in Anglo-Norman monastic networks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
Abstract
In the centuries following the Norman Conquest, dependent priories – that is, satellite or daughter houses – of larger abbeys were founded in large numbers in England. Some were dependent on mother houses within England; others were the daughter houses of continental, especially Norman, foundations. Both types have been somewhat neglected in medieval ecclesiastical history, as well as in music history. This article argues that not only did some dependent priories in medieval England support musical life, but also in certain situations they could play host to a remarkably creative culture of musical exchange, production and performance. As a case study, it presents extensive new archival evidence concerning the traffic of people, books and music between the Norman abbey of Lyre and its dependent priories in England, proposing that other musical manuscripts may warrant reconsideration in the light of these findings.
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References
1 Questions of authorship and historiography in relation to medieval English music are considered in depth by Lisa Colton, Angel Song: Medieval English Music in History (Abingdon, 2017).
2 Karen Desmond, ‘W. de Wicumbe’s Rolls and Singing the Alleluya ca. 1250’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 73 (2020), 639–709.
3 This Office for St Margaret may be the one that is found on the reverse of one of the rolls containing polyphonic Alleluias linked to W. of Wycombe; Desmond, ‘W. de Wicumbe’s Rolls’, 659–61; Christopher Hohler, ‘Reflections on Some Manuscripts Containing 13th-Century Polyphony’, Journal of The Plainsong and Mediæval Music Society, 1 (1978), 2–38. It may be of relevance here that Leominster had an altar dedicated to Sts Mary Magdalene, Katherine and Margaret, so the Office may have been composed specifically for use in the priory’s commemorations; Martin Heale, The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries (Woodbridge, 2004), 215.
4 Desmond, ‘W. de Wicumbe’s Rolls’, 642.
5 Hohler, ‘Reflections on Some Manuscripts’, 19–20; Helen Deeming, ‘The Song and the Page: Experiments with Form and Layout in Manuscripts of Medieval Latin Song’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 15 (2006), 1–27; eadem, ‘An English Monastic Miscellany: The Reading Manuscript of Sumer is icumen in’, in Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, ed. Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Cambridge, 2015), 116–40; eadem, ‘Record-Keepers, Preachers and Song-Makers: Revealing the Compilers, Owners and Users of Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Insular Song Manuscripts’, in Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources before 1600, ed. Tim Shephard and Lisa Colton (Turnhout, 2017), 63–76.
6 The manuscripts are Évreux, Bibliothèque patrimoniale, lat. 17 and lat. 2.
7 A full recent history of the Abbey of Lyre is Laurent Ridel and Nigel Wilkins, Notre-Dame de Lyre: histoire d’une abbaye disparue (Rouen, 2019); the links with England are described on 251–2. An earlier important study was that of Charles Guéry, Histoire de l’abbaye de Lyre (Évreux, 1917).
8 These possessions are listed in Ridel and Wilkins, Notre-Dame de Lyre, Annexe III (351–87).
9 The classic study of these so-called ‘alien priories’ is Donald Matthew, The Norman Monasteries and Their English Possessions (Oxford, 1962). A more recent survey of the challenges of administration faced by these priories, both in wartime and during periods of peace, is Benjamin M. Thompson, ‘The Statute of Carlisle, 1307, and the Alien Priories’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 41 (1990), 543–83. The alien priories were regarded by the great historian of English medieval monasticism, Professor Dom David Knowles, as examples of spiritual decay and corruption, a view that has only fairly recently been challenged by historians; David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of Its Development from the Times of St Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 940–1216, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1963), 136. For a recent critique of Knowles, see Heale, Dependent Priories, 3–4.
10 David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (London, 1953), 83 (Carisbrooke), 91 (Wareham), 85 (Hinckley), 86 (Livers Ocle and Llangua).
11 Matthew (who did not mention Llangua) asserted that Livers Ocle ‘was certainly not a priory in a conventual sense: Carisbrooke certainly was; the other two [i.e. Wareham and Hinckley] may have been’, Norman Monasteries, 52. Further evidence considered below, however, makes the case for regarding Wareham and Hinckley as genuinely conventual too. Research by Martin Heale has challenged the earlier view that dependent priories were little more than administrative outposts, or bailiwicks, showing convincingly that many daughter houses were indeed monasteries in miniature, and made specific contributions to religious and intellectual life in the period between the Conquest and the suppression of the dependent priories during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Heale, Dependent Priories; idem, ‘Books and Learning in the Dependent Priories of the Monasteries of Medieval England’, in The Church and Learning in Later Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of R. B. Dobson, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Jenny Stratford (Donington, 2002), 64–79.
12 The Carisbrooke cartulary was edited by Stanley F. Hockey, The Cartulary of Carisbrooke Priory (Newport, Isle of Wight, 1981). It was Hockey’s view that only Carisbrooke and Wareham ‘have any substantial claim to have been conventual’; Cartulary, xxiv.
13 This evidence is examined in Anthony G. Wallis, ‘The Medieval Priory at Hinckley’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, 86 (2012), 139–48.
14 Ridel and Wilkins, Notre-Dame de Lyre, 252; Hockey, Cartulary, 189; Wallis, ‘Medieval Priory’, 144–6.
15 Ridel and Wilkins, Notre-Dame de Lyre, 334; David M. Smith and Vera C. M. London, The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales. II: 1216–377 (Cambridge, 2001), 149–50. The list of procurators generated by Hockey (Cartulary, 189) does not mention Raoul de Romilly, but cites one ‘Ralph de Komelay’ as procurator in a document of 1273; it seems likely that this is a misspelling of the surname ‘de Romuleyo / de Romileyo’, in which form Raoul is mentioned as procurator in documents from 1260 and 1275 (Smith and London, Heads of Religious Houses, 149–50). Additionally, a Carisbrooke charter from 1257 mentions one Radulfus (with no surname given) as procurator; it is possible that this too may refer to Raoul de Romilly (Hockey, Cartulary, 184, charter 251).
16 Wallis, ‘Medieval Priory’, 140; Guéry, Histoire de Lyre, 85, 88 and 113.
17 On the circulation of books between mother houses and daughter priories in general, see Heale, ‘Books and Learning’; Richard Sharpe, ed. James Willoughby, Libraries and Books in Medieval England: The Role of Libraries in a Changing Book Economy (Oxford, 2023), 50 and 77.
18 Nigel Wilkins, Notre-Dame de Lyre: la bibliothèque de l’ancienne abbaye (La Neuve-Lyre, 2018), 6.
19 Sharpe, Libraries and Books, 50.
20 Évreux, Bibliothèque patrimoniale, lat. 68; the Lyre ex libris is on fol. 2r, the note concerning Blacwylle on fol. 140r; see Wilkins, Bibliothèque, 66.
21 Rouen, Bibliothèque patrimoniale Villon, 493–5. The full colophon in verse is spread between volume I, fol. 144r and volume III, fol. 108r; see Wilkins, Bibliothèque, 33.
22 Ridel and Wilkins, Notre-Dame de Lyre, 175–84. A recent catalogue of the manuscripts from Lyre may be found in Wilkins, Bibliothèque.
23 This is the basis for Samaran and Marichal’s dating of the manuscript to ‘vers 1173’; Charles Samaran and Robert Marichal, Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, de lieu, ou de copiste, vol. 7 (Paris, 1984), 145.
24 ‘ad usum monasterii Waremensis’ was the judgement of Samaran and Marichal, Catalogue, 7:145. I am very grateful to John Harper, who carried out an analysis of these portions of Évreux 17 and compared them with other calendars and martyrologies, both insular and Continental. The following observations on the martyrology and calendar derive substantially from this unpublished research.
25 Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books (Cambridge, 2003), plate 9, shows an excerpt from one of these incorporations on fol. 70r, pointing out the use of the insular letter-forms þ (thorn) and ð (eth) in the name Eþeldryða. It should be noted that Anglo-Saxon saints were also commemorated in Norman churches, and that some of the English saints in the Évreux 17 martyrology are found in other calendars from the diocese of Évreux, in which Lyre was situated; Veronica Ortenberg, The English Church and the Continent in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Cultural, Spiritual, and Artistic Exchanges (Oxford, 1992), 258. However, the almost exclusive focus on English saints and the absence of Norman ones from this layer of the martyrology would suggest an English exemplar.
26 Alan Thacker, ‘St Wærburh: The Multiple Identities of a Regional Saint’, in The Land of the English Kin: Studies in Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England in Honour of Professor Barbara Yorke, ed. Alexander Langlands and Ryan Lavelle (Leiden, 2020), 443–66.
27 Nigel Morgan, who examined the Évreux 17 calendar in the course of preparing his edition of English Benedictine calendars for the Henry Bradshaw Society, shared these observations with me by private communication, 21 August 2020.
28 John Harper, private communication, 13 June 2024.
29 On ‘libri capituli’, see J.-L. Lemaître, ‘Liber Capituli: Le livre du chapître, des origines au XVIe siècle – l’exemple français’, in Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, ed. Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch (Munich, 1984), 625–48.
30 Jean-Loup Lemaître, Répertoire des documents nécrologiques français, vol. 1 (Paris, 1980), 297–8. The overlap between the various documents based around the Roman calendar is apparent in this item, which is described by Samaran and Marichal as an ‘obituaire’ (Catalogue, 7:145) and by Lemaître as a ‘nécrologe’ (Répertoire, 297). The terminology of this group of documents is discussed by Lemaître, Répertoire, 5–35.
31 ‘Wareham Lady St. Mary’, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Dorset. Volume 2: South East (London, 1970), 303–26; available at British History Online, www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/dorset/vol2/pp303-326.
32 This note was mis-transcribed by Max Lütolf – in his Die mehrstimmigen Ordinarium Missae-Sätze, 2 vols. (Bern, 1970), 1:109–10 – who did not identify the reference to Abbotsbury and went on to make the case that these portions of Évreux 17 did not originate in England. The fuller evidence considered in the present article reaches the opposite conclusion.
33 On the connections between the ‘Dorset rotulus’ and Abbotsbury, see Margaret Bent, Jared C. Hartt and Peter M. Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus: Contextualizing and Reconstructing the Early English Motet (Woodbridge, 2021), 15–16, 21–4 and the references given there.
34 Fol. 1v in the first gathering records the obits of ‘frater Johannes’ and ‘frater Ricardus’. Lütolf (Die mehrstimmigen Ordinarium Missae-Sätze, 1:110) read the first of these names as ‘frater Philippus’, and connected this person with the monk of Abbotsbury mentioned in the agreement on fol. 12r; I disagree with this transcription.
35 Images of the musical leaves of the manuscript may be found on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music at www.diamm.ac.uk/sources/276/#/.
36 This evidence contradicts the assertion of Samaran and Marichal that fols. 1r–4v and 156r–159v were added to the manuscript after it had arrived in Lyre, a claim for which there seems to be no secure evidence; Catalogue, 7:145.
37 Detailed notes on the notation of the Évreux 17 songs may be found on the Sources of British Song webpages: www.diamm.ac.uk/resources/sbs/. These notes are designed to be referred to in conjunction with the images of the sources available on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music.
38 Deeming, ‘The Song and the Page’, 16–22.
39 See the Salisbury liturgical sources analysed in Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary According to the Use of Salisbury, Early English Church Music 59–60, ed. John Harper, with Sally Harper and Matthew Cheung Salisbury (London, 2019), 59:liii and n. 115.
40 The four thirteenth-century noted missals drawn on for the edition of Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary According to the Use of Salisbury all contain such an anthology of Marian sequences; 59: liii. Another very substantial collection is found in the fourteenth-century Dublin Troper, Cambridge, University Library, Add. MS 710; see Helen Deeming and Samantha Blickhan, ‘Songs in Circulation, Texts in Transmission: English Sources and the Dublin Troper’, Early Music, 45/1 (2017), 11–25.
41 The prior of Wareham was rector of the parish of St Mary; by 1329 he was paying a chaplain to celebrate mass in the church for the souls of the faithful departed; ‘Alien Houses: The Priory of Wareham’, A History of the County of Dorset: Volume 2 (London, 1908), 121–2. British History Online, www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/dorset/vol2/pp121-122. This kind of shared arrangement of priory churches was not uncommon; Janet Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1300 (Cambridge, 1994), 137.
42 The description in the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England report (www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/dorset/vol2/pp303-326) provides plans of the church in its present state and in its form prior to its substantial rebuilding in 1840; the two thirteenth-century tombs (currently positioned in the chancel) are visible in the earlier plan within St Edward’s Chapel.
43 The original construction of the chamber dates to around 1100, and therefore probably pre-dates the arrival of the monks from Lyre, belonging instead to the community of canons who occupied the church before its donation to Lyre. However, the monks made modifications to the chamber during the thirteenth century, adding vaulting and an upper storey (which might have connected directly to the monks’ dormitory). None of the priory buildings apart from this two-storey chamber on the side of the church remain; www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/dorset/vol2/pp303-326.
44 Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders, 142.
46 Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary According to the Use of Salisbury, ed. Harper et al., 59:118. An edition of the chant of Gloria IX (with which the trope Spiritus et alme was most often linked) may be found in the same volume, 142–5.
48 It is noteworthy that one of the motets in the ‘Dorset rotulus’ from Abbotsbury (just along the Dorset coast from Wareham) is dedicated to St Nicholas; see Bent et al., The Dorset Rotulus, 21.
49 Smith and London, Heads of Religious Houses, 168; Wallis, ‘Medieval Priory’, 145–6.
50 Hockey, Cartulary, 189.
51 Smith and London, Heads of Religious Houses, 207.
52 Smith and London, Heads of Religious Houses, 150.
53 The manuscript is reproduced in Ridel and Wilkins, Notre-Dame de Lyre, 166. Editions may be found in Michel Le Pesant, ‘La bibliothèque d’un prieuré normand d’Angleterre’, Annales de Normandie, 3ᵉ année, n°1 (1953), 87–90; Richard Sharpe, English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 4 (1996), list B17, 98–101; and Wilkins, Bibliothèque, 82–4.
54 Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives is a village and abbey in the Calvados department of Normandy, around 65 km from Lyre.
55 Prior André’s seal is preserved on a document in the National Archives, online at https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/2f09e7c37b88488a833ebae9579748c6.
56 Archival references to Priors Robert, André and Richard are listed in Smith and London, Heads of Religious Houses, 150.
57 Item numbering given here follows Sharpe, English Benedictine Libraries, 98–101.
58 The surname following is hard to make out, and Sharpe transcribes it as ‘[.]afort’ (English Benedictine Libraries, 100). Le Pesant read it as ‘Clafort’ (‘La bibliothèque’, 88), a reading with which I tentatively concur. If correct, this name may suggest a link to Lyre’s possessions at Clatford in Hampshire (a church, three virgates of land and the tithe of the village), which were administered by Carisbrooke; Clatford appears in the list in Ridel and Wilkins, Notre-Dame de Lyre, 373.
59 Although a brother Richard de Caen was present at Carisbrooke in c.1240; Hockey, Cartulary, charter 166.
60 Le Pesant was of the view that this inscription applied to the priory itself; ‘La bibliothèque’, 88.
61 Reading somewhat uncertain; Sharpe gives ‘[*]yciz’; English Benedictine Libraries, 99.
62 B.R. Kemp, ed., English Episcopal Acta, 37: Salisbury, 1263–1297 (Oxford, 2010), 290 (no. 239, dated 30 November 1264). I am grateful to John Harper for this reference. Note that this mention of Richard de Audreia (‘de Andreyo’ here) as procurator in 1264 interrupts the procuratorship of Raoul de Romilly outlined earlier; evidently either Raoul held the office in two distinct spells, or alternatively, the office may have been flexible, and assumed as necessary by whichever senior monk of Lyre was present for the negotiation concerned.
63 Smith and London, Heads of Religious Houses, 168.
64 Ibid.
65 No surname is given in the charter, but it seems likely that this ‘Radulfus procuratore’ was the same person as Procurator Raoul de Romilly, who was at Carisbrooke in 1260.
66 Hockey, Cartulary, 184, charter 251.
67 These references to multiple books are ‘caternos minutos plurimos invenies, in quibus bona et utilia poteris invenire’ and ‘alios quaternos dedit ipse Henricus’.
68 ‘In quorum meditatione assiduus lector videre potest quam perniciosum sit vitam viciosam ducere et periculosum in viciis per modicum temporis spacium permanere’.
69 ‘quendam librum in quo multa bona continentur tam in latino quam in gallico’.
70 ‘alium scriptum in Anglico’.
71 This concords with other evidence uncovered by Sharpe concerning the creation of compilations of excerpts at dependent priories; Libraries and Books, 69.
72 ‘Pastoralem beati Gregorii. In uno volumine in quo multa bona invenies qualiter vitam tuam et mores, si bene studueris, et singula capitula diligenter perspexeris, in melius proculdubio commutabis. In eodem libro seu volumine habes octo questiones sancti Augustini doctoris ad [Dulcitium] et disputationem ipsius Augustini contra Felicianum hereticum et libellum compoti.’
73 For example, the texts by classical authors (e.g., Ovid, Horace, Juvenal) in the section fols. 79–91 are written in two columns, as opposed to the single column used elsewhere in the manuscript.
74 The quire numbers, highlighted in red ink, are found on the final versos of each of the last seven gatherings: nos. I–V are in the hand of the text-scribe, VI and VII have been added in another hand.
75 Samaran and Marichal, Catalogue, 7:462; Wilkins, Bibliothèque, 43. Catalogue entries for this manuscript may be found in Wilkins, ibid., and the Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France (online at https://ccfr.bnf.fr/portailccfr/jsp/index_view_direct_anonymous.jsp?record=eadcgm:EADC:D08140012).
76 The table covers the years from 1235 to 1303; this, combined with the scribal note from 1246, is the evidence used to support Samaran and Marichal’s dating of 1235–1246; Catalogue, 7:462.
77 Fols. 1–2 are a separate bifolium, but the musical items continue in the same hand from fol. 2v into the first full gathering, fols. 3–12. Images of the musical leaves of the manuscript may be found on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music at www.diamm.ac.uk/sources/3868/#/ and notes on their notation at www.diamm.ac.uk/resources/sbs/.
78 John Stevens included this song in his discussion of the lai, calling it a ‘Latin lai, or lai-like sequence’; Words and Music in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1986), 130–8, at 130.
79 Janthia Yearley, ‘A Bibliography of Planctus’, Journal of the Plainsong and Mediæval Music Society, 4 (1981), 12–52, no. L123; Eric J. Dobson and F. Ll. Harrison, eds., Medieval English Songs (London, 1979), 116–17 and 238–40.
80 Helen Deeming, ed., Songs in British Sources, c.1150–1300, Musica Britannica 95 (London, 2013), nos. 92a–b; images from the manuscript are at www.diamm.ac.uk/sources/3883/#/.
81 Hohler, ‘Reflections on Some Manuscripts’, 11–12. Hohler, who had not had the opportunity to examine the Évreux manuscript in person, suggested that the music in it may ultimately have originated in Oxford, a view with which I do not concur, given the extensive evidence of travel to and around England by monks of Lyre explored in the present article.
82 John Stevens, ed., The Later Cambridge Songs: An English Song Collection of the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 2005); see 35–9 for his discussion of the manuscript’s possible place of origin.
83 Ibid., 86–91; on the Codex Buranus, see most recently Revisiting the Codex Buranus: Contents, Contexts, Compositions, ed. Tristan E. Franklinos and Henry Hope (Woodbridge, 2020); Licet eger cum egrotis is discussed in the chapter by David A. Traill, 70–4. The editors of the songs from the Codex Buranus have usually ascribed the song to Walter of Châtillon on stylistic grounds.
84 This is the same Reading manuscript in which the list of lost polyphony, including works by W. of Wycombe, is found; see Deeming, ‘An English Monastic Miscellany’, and Desmond, ‘W. de Wicumbe’s Rolls’.
85 Walter Howard Frere and Langton E.G. Brown, The Hereford Breviary Edited from the Rouen Edition of 1505 with Collation of Manuscripts, 3 vols. (London, 1904–13), 3:xlix–liii. The Hereford manuscript is described by R.A.B. Mynors and R.M. Thomson, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Hereford Cathedral Library (Cambridge, 1993), 124–5 and plate 51, where it is dated to between 1262 and 1268.
86 Sherry L. Reames, ‘Origins and Affiliations of the Pre-Sarum Office for Anne in the Stowe Breviary’, in Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Palaeography and Performance, ed. John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld (Aldershot, 2004), 349–68.
87 This grant was confirmed by Peter, Bishop of Hereford, in 1265, but had probably been in place for some time by then; Guéry, Histoire de Lyre, 164.
88 Guéry, Histoire de Lyre, 164: ‘A la mort de l’abbé ou d’un de ses religieux le nom de défunt sera mis au martyrologe de l’église d’Hereford et on fera les mêmes prières que pour les chanoines et vice versa dans l’abbaye de Lyre. Etienne, archevêque de Canterbéry, approuva cette union de prières’. The ‘Etienne’ referred to by Guéry is presumably Stephen Langton, since no other Stephen or Etienne was archbishop between 1066 and 1540: Joan Greatrex, Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories of the Province of Canterbury c.1066–1540 (Oxford, 1997), 902–3.