The fourteenth-century background

The late thirteenth century saw a period of lively contact between English and French music, both repertorial and theoretical. Franco of Cologne represents not only a common point of reference for articulating a more or less international notational practice c. 1300, but also a point of departure for what was to split into three separate mensural traditions during the fourteenth century. After Franco, French, Italian and English musicians each developed their own systems of how values shorter than the breve should be notated and evaluated. The resulting rhythms were fundamental to the sharply different musical styles of each of these broadly defined groups. Their ways of extending ambiguous Franconian notational precepts (both in practice, and in commentaries on Franco's treatise) formed the foundation of three musical and rhythmic style groupings which for a while showed virtually no signs of mutual contact.

It was thus soon after 1300, but certainly by the time of Handlo's treatise (the colophon is dated 1326) and the English repertory which it complements and to which it attests, that English music developed distinctive notational strategies, with the default reading of stemless semibreve pairs as trochaic, the longer note first, giving much of the repertory a gently lilting quality. Italian notation gave precedence to iambic patterns, the longer note last. French notation applied Franco's iambic priority to the breve-semibreve level. At first (for example, in the Roman de Fauvel), French music favoured a trochaic reading of unstemmed semibreve pairs at what came to be called the semibreve–minim level, but it soon extended iambic interpretation hierarchically also to that relationship. All three systems at first avoided the use of stemmed semibreves and relied on (different) default readings, but in time all three began to add stems of various kinds to semibreves, as they increasingly sought to notate a wider range of rhythms than a default interpretation of stemless groups permitted. English notation occasionally used the cauda hirundinis (swallowtail) to mark the longer of a pair of semibreves, sometimes to confirm the trochaic interpretation, and less often to lengthen the second of two semibreves, in circumstances independent of the criteria for Italian via naturae or for French alteration.