The Anglican Crisis

The Ecclesiological Society’s campaign to restore the beauty of liturgical practice in appropriate settings, aided by such works as Hierurgia Anglicana, was helped by clerics who began to rise to positions of eminence within the Anglican Church. William Maskell, Oxford-educated liturgical scholar, High Churchman, and mediævalist, was appointed (1842) Rector of Corscombe, Dorset, but shortly afterwards resigned his living to devote himself to detailed research into Anglican ritual. He made major contributions to liturgical studies with The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of England, according to the uses of Sarum, York, Hereford, and Bangor, and the Roman Liturgy arranged in parallel columns, with Preface and Notes (1844), followed by Monumenta ritualia ecclesiæ Anglicanæ; or, Occasional offices of the Church of England according to the ancient use of Salisbury (1846–7). Maskell’s works gave impetus to the revival of Anglican ceremonial based on mediæval precedents, but, perhaps even more importantly, helped the evolution of what became known as Ritualism, in which the Eucharist was placed once again at the centre of Anglican worship. These important, scholarly publications put Maskell in the front rank of English ecclesiastical antiquaries: he was appointed domestic chaplain to Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, and instituted (1847) Vicar of St Mary’s, Torquay, Devon.

One of his first duties was to assist Phillpotts in the celebrated Gorham case.

Preliminary Remarks

It is as well to remind ourselves what is meant by the Victorian Age. It began when Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent (b. 24 May 1819) succeeded to the throne on the death of William IV on 20 June 1837: it was to end on 22 January 1901. Her reign is often perceived as the period when the Industrial Revolution, the railways, urban slums, and much else came into being; yet the Industrial Revolution began some 80 years before 1837, and the first railways were operational in the reigns of her uncles, George IV (1820–30) and William IV (1830–7).

The most spectacular changes to Victorian England involved urbanisation: it was the first truly urbanised modern society, and by 1890 London was a major world metropolis. The 1901 Census showed that more than three-quarters of the population lived in urban areas: towns became magnets for rural labourers, offering opportunities for personal advancement unthinkable in the countryside, and in the course of the Queen’s reign there was a shift from high to low birth and death rates in urban areas. Gross National Product dramatically increased; income per head more than doubled between 1850 and 1900; and the Victorian legacy was one of unparalleled achievement and unimaginable wealth creation by the standards of a century before. Even more remarkable was the civilising of the urban masses through education, sanitary reform, housing provision, and the stabilisation of society. Urban Man became literate and numerate; for the most part was far better housed than was the case in 1801; was less inclined to riot as part of a gin-soaked mob; and paid greater attention to hygiene, in the process becoming, as it were, potty-trained.

When Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (d. 1023), the great Arab philosopher and belle-lettrist, discussed the relative merits of Baghdad and Isfahan in his al-Risala al-Baghdadiyya (The Epistle from Baghdad) he claimed that in the latter city one could not see, as in the former, the best textiles then produced in Islamic countries, for example, the small rugs manufactured in al-Andalus and more specifically, in Cordoba. In his own way, al-Tawhidi, who was writing a piece of ironic and sophisticated prose, acknowledged the high prestige achieved by Andalusi textile productions, sold in places as distant from their origins as was Baghdad, the capital city of the Abbasid Caliphate.

Material remains of these textiles are preserved in considerable number; recent research estimates that there are about 700 pieces extant in Spain, mainly because they were used as shrouds for the medieval Christian kings and their families, and for other religious purposes (as in ecclesiastical vestments, or linings for relic boxes and coffins). Such a treasure trove has naturally attracted the interest of antique dealers and collectors, but also of historians and more specifically art historians. Andalusi textiles have been the object of numerous studies, for the most part focused on their artistic and technical features, and their places of production and role in international trade. More recently, another trend in the study of historical textiles stresses their social and cultural meaning. In Andalusi studies, this approach has explored the fruitful field of shared cultural patterns between the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula and al-Andalus.

These common cultural developments provide significant insights into the role of Andalusi textiles in the ‘formative process of the medieval Iberian aesthetic vocabulary’, and the formation of Castilian cultural identities. Although authors interested in this subject usually claim that their vision is one of shared cultural areas between Islamic and Christian medieval Iberian entities, their main aim is the analysis of how the latter incorporated the former’s cultural signs into the mainstream of their own society. The same trend can be identified in studies of a later period, when al-Andalus as a political independent body had disappeared yet the Andalusi legacy was preserved, to some extent, first by the Mudejars and afterwards by the Moriscos.

This book is the first to deal with an aspect of twentieth-century music that is not covered in detail elsewhere: it traces the origins, stimuli and legacies of the modern brass ensemble, celebrates the vitality and diversity of its music-making and brings together information on its performance practice, repertory, reception and cultures. The study ultimately focuses on developments in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, but refers extensively to other periods and loci where events caused interactions, influence and change.

What is currently perceived as a modern ‘brass ensemble’ in Britain and beyond barely existed in the first half of the twentieth century; antecedents in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century and St Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century were largely unknown in Britain at that time. Following World War II, the brass quintet and other orchestral groupings emerged in the United States and in Europe; the practices and repertoires associated with these modern groups came from professional players playing orchestral instruments.

By far the most acclaimed British brass ensemble of the late twentieth century was the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. From its foundation in 1951 it rose from simple beginnings to establish an international reputation by the time it disbanded in 1986. Many consider that this ensemble initiated a wide cultural and social understanding of brass chamber music, eventually earning as similar critical attention as leading string quartets and other branches of art music. Other ensembles in Britain and overseas emulated its musical models, and a nucleus of performers, composers and like-minded parties increased ensembles’ recognition and momentum from the 1960s. The brass quintet, ten-piece ensemble and trombone quartet remain popular formations, and repertoire exists for larger directed ensembles with percussion.

Music-making by small groups of brass instruments in various guises has a long history, and two strands of development can be traced. One stretches back into the art music tradition, including European instrumental music of the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical periods. Transcription for modern brass instruments and ensuing historically informed performance are studied in detail. A second strand of activity materialised in the nineteenth century with the advent of families of chromatic brass; the emergence of both professional and amateur idioms at that time includes the amateur British brass band.

John clare’s hymn to the loss of his beloved heathlands of Northamptonshire, published in 1821, anticipated a fundamental change in perceptions of common land which took place across the nineteenth century. Clare was voicing nostalgia for a countryside rapidly being lost. His appreciation of land clothed ‘in the rude rags of nature’ was to become central to the value placed on commons by modern society. From the 1860s, common land came to be valued for recreation, public access and natural beauty, and later for its ecological character. No longer were commons a reservoir of untamed land waiting to be reclaimed and improved; now those which survived became a precious remnant to be conserved for the benefit of the nation at large. Paradoxically, however, that wider interest led to further loss of common land, as it came to be seen as an appropriate location for public buildings and, at times of crisis in the twentieth century, as a resource which could be drawn upon in the service of national defence. The new perceptions were part of a deep change in conceptions of land. If a wider public interest were accepted, it followed that limits would be placed on the freedom of action of those with property rights. How the common land which had survived the era of enclosure was used – indeed, how it shouldbe used – became matters of public debate. Ye are dear as this heart in my bosom to me.

The shift of discourse from ‘reclamation’ to ‘conservation’ is conventionally placed in the 1860s, with the foundation of the Commons Preservation Society in 1865, but its roots can be traced back to the earlier decades of the century. It sprang from two very different sources – landscape aesthetics and public health. The idea that the public at large had a valid interest in natural beauty was being expressed in relation to the Lake District by the first years of the nineteenth century. After visiting the Lakes in 1802, Richard Warner declared that places deemed to be beautiful were ‘the common property of the people’, and Wordsworth later famously described the Lake District

The Hundred Years’ War loomed large over the first half of the fifteenth century, and its effects and the long continuing hostility between England and France cast their malign shadow far into the sixteenth. Even though the conflict has been pored over by generations of historians, the contemporary record sources which are still extant continue to offer fresh insights and provide evidence that can enhance our understanding of the events: military successes and failures, unexpected twists of fate, and the motivations of participants in the confrontations. Yet such sources may also provide a different picture: one of amicable relationships established with immigrants to England from the Netherlands and other parts of the continent, diplomatic alliances with the rulers of Burgundy, and growing cultural and social links with Italian potentates. Enmity and amity emerge as central themes in six of the essays in the present volume.

The Cornish port of Fowey and its inhabitants’ engagement in warfare at sea are the focus of Samuel Drake’s essay. The early years of the century witnessed the supersession of fragile truces by a full-scale invasion of Normandy under Henry V, and ultimately, in 1453, the expulsion of the English from all but a fraction of their territory both there and in Gascony. Fowey’s vessels and mariners were impressed for service by governments needing to convey sizeable armies overseas, and in the 1420s the transportation of troops and supplies predominated in the port’s contribution to the war-effort. But over the next two decades reversals of English fortunes in France turned the Channel into a frontier zone, and the safe-keeping of the seas and defence of south-coast harbours became a pressing concern; piracy, here termed ‘salt-water larceny’, became ubiquitous. Nevertheless, the recorded cases of such violent engagements provide little or no evidence of the attacks launched by the English against enemy French vessels, for they nearly always only tell of assaults on neutral, allied or denizen shipping, based on the victims’ appeals for restitution.

Exploration of a wide range of documents filed in the exchequer enable Anne Curry and David Cleverly to examine closely the army which Henry V assembled to invade France in 1417, and study in depth its personnel, organisation and structure, thereby increasing our knowledge about the successful conquest of Normandy.

Introduction

This chapter analyses references to silk in medieval Iberian Jewish literature, variously in biblical and Mishnaic commentary, poetry, philosophical works, rabbinic responsa, and halakhic (Jewish legal) literature. These reflect the authors’ familiarity with the production and use of silk, and assumption that their readers share that awareness.

Those who generally study the works cited here have no specialist knowledge of textiles in general, and particularly of silk. The recognition and discussion of allusions, metaphors, and identifications expands our appreciation of these authors. Conversely, these genres of Jewish literature as sources for information on silk, will be presented to textile scholars and historians, as a rule unfamiliar with this material.

Ḥasday Ibn Shaprut, Menaḥem Ibn Saruq and the ‘Khazar Correspondence’

Ḥasdai Ibn Shaprut (c. 905 Jaen – 975 Cordoba) a Jewish scholar, served as private physician and subsequently as trusted advisor to the court of Umayyad caliph Abd al-Raḥmān III (912–961) in Cordoba. Ibn Shaprut was considered the ‘Nasi’ (prince) of Andalusian Jewry. His personal secretary/scribe, Menaḥem Ibn Saruq (c. 910 Tortosa – 970) was a lexicographer and poet. Ibn Shaprut commissioned Ibn Saruq to compose what is known as the ‘Khazar Correspondence’. Today, this correspondence – written in biblical style Hebrew – is generally considered authentic, especially the section which concerns our topic. Praising his homeland, ‘Sepharad’ (the common Hebrew appellation for the Iberian Peninsula), he states:

Get out, English, of our lands; Get out faster than at an amble.

The words are those of Laurent Desmoulins, a priest from the diocese of Chartres, who wrote them, in anger, in a long poem entitled La Folye des Angloys, in reaction to the English invasion of France in June 1513. The context was the renewed English aggression after nearly forty years of peace between the two countries, lasting since the truce of Piquigny had been signed between Louis XI and Edward IV on 29 August 1475.

In November 1511 Henry VIII joined the Holy League, a European alliance directed against France and comprising Spain (King Ferdinand II), Venice and the papacy (Pope Julius II), which had been formed at the pope’s instigation in the previous month, on 9 October. The Swiss joined it in May 1512, while Emperor Maximilian sat on the fence for a whole year before following suit in April 1513 as part of the League of Malines which was signed on 5 April, and after Venice had left the Holy League to join France in accordance with an agreement concluded at Blois on 23 March. The Holy League was the outcome of the complex and quickly shifting political situation in Italy since the late fifteenth century. In December 1508 Julius II had convinced Maximilian, Ferdinand II and Louis XII to join him in an alliance (the League of Cambrai), officially against the Turks, but secretly against the republic of Venice which was not only occupying papal territories and those of the duchy of Milan that Louis XII wanted to regain (Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona), but was also at war with Maximilian over territories in northern Italy to which the emperor laid claim. But after Louis XII’s victory against the Venetian armies at Agnadel on 14 May 1509, the pope, fearing the growing power of the French in northern Italy, decided to make peace with Venice and turn against France’s allies and interests in the peninsula. In response, in the spring of 1511, the king of France declared war on the pope and proceeded to capture Bologna (a papal stronghold) in May and summoned a schismatic General Council of the Church to be held in Pisa in November to depose Julius II.

In the fullest and most stimulating recent review of Magna Carta’s role in the legal and political life of late medieval England, Anthony Musson has argued powerfully for the continued importance of the Charter as a source of protection for the individual in the two-and-a-half centuries from 1215. In the late Middle Ages, Professor Musson argues, the Charter attained the status of pre-eminent statute of the realm, regularly proclaimed in the county courts, repeatedly cited by litigants claiming redress on the tenor of its clauses, and symbolically placed at the head of the legislative canon in the books of statutes which lawyers compiled to aid them in their work. For any litigant drawn into actions for which its clauses provided either legal support or rhetorical justification, Professor Musson continues, Magna Carta had an immediate significance both as a source of law and as evidence of historic authority. At the same time, he adds, the Charter’s continuing relevance was affirmed by a series of statutes passed in Edward III’s reign – the so-called six statutes – which both glossed the Charter’s meaning and, in some cases, significantly extended its provisions and enlarged the constituency to which those provisions applied. An altogether different view of the Charter’s late medieval significance has been taken by some other recent writers, notably Ralph Turner and Christine Carpenter, who both see it as becoming an anachronism by the fifteenth century, made obsolete by changes in society and overtaken by new priorities in disputes between kings and subjects. According to Professor Turner, Magna Carta ‘had slipped into the shadows of high politics by the mid-fifteenth century [and was] to remain [there] until the seventeenth century’. In his estimation, while the lawyers and landowning class looked to its clauses for vindication of their property rights, most people were more concerned with confronting economic change and curbing endemic lawlessness than with preserving constraints on royal power. According to Professor Carpenter, who takes a similar line, albeit one less rhetorically expressed, once the Charter’s limits on royal power were accepted by kings, the Charter itself ‘largely disappeared as an active element in English politics’, in 1399 cited only as part of the condemnation of such kings as Richard II ‘who bucked the trend by abusing or overriding the law’.

Everyone knows that the Hundred Years’ War was fought chiefly in France. After all, it was the king of England’s claim to the French throne that formed one of the defining features of the long conflict. Yet despite this truism, there can be equally little doubt that the war exercised great influence on England, with the ports of the south coast in particular holding a place on the frontline. Since contemporaries characterised fighting at sea as ‘bloody and murderous’, however, it is perhaps unsurprising that the naval aspects of the conflict have received comparatively little attention from contemporaries and historians alike. Efforts by James Sherborne and Colin Richmond to redress this state of affairs have more recently been bolstered by Maryanne Kowaleski, Ian Friel, Nicholas Rodger, Susan Rose, and others. In his monograph, Craig Lambert has given us a particularly full account of naval logistics in this period. While the naval service of several English port towns has also been studied, it is fair to say that the fourteenth century, with its richer records, forms the focus of most of this scholarship.

As technological limitations resulted in naval squadrons only enjoying ‘a measure of local control for the limited time and limited area of their operation’, confining our attention to the king’s fleets presents a by no means complete picture of the war at sea. The maritime lands of the realm were often left on the frontline, with the result that portside defences were of paramount importance to both the inhabitants of these areas and the crown itself. At the same time as local and national efforts sought to raise formal fleets and secure coastal defences, a great many ‘pirates’ were to be found roving the Channel in search of their prey. Although scholars from Charles Kingsford through to C.J. Ford have considered maritime predation, the degree to which direct action at sea formed part of the war effort remains debated. A detailed study of one port, Fowey, in Cornwall, can serve as an entrée to all these aspects of maritime warfare. Fowey’s experience of the fourteenth-century phase of the war has been considered elsewhere; the present study examines the effects of the conflict through the half-century from 1400.

In the early 1960s, the global record industry experienced a boom that was caused by the rapid growth of popular music. In Britain and the United States, the gramophone companies essentially generated a new commercial market that was supplementary to live music-making, and the record outstripped the radio broadcast. The ‘album’ (LP, long playing record) became the dominant means of expression of popular music, exemplified by the early records of The Beatles and those of Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones. Imaginative record covers, such as the notable Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), designed by Peter Blake, made albums highly desirable possessions. An additional benefit of the record industry’s commercial buoyancy was an increased commitment to classical music and the viability of ambitious musical projects: Decca’s 1966 issue of a first complete Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted by George Solti, preceded many ventures into ‘early music’ (initially, music predating J. S. Bach), contemporary music and chamber music.

In the United States, a record of brass music from this period, The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli (LP, 1969), recorded in one day by the brass of the Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago orchestras, was a phenomenon; it received a 1970 Grammy award for chamber performance, chosen from a number of outstanding nominees. In Britain, the judgement of this record was on occasion reserved: from Gramophone magazine for example: ‘more than ever convinced that the music was conceived in different emotional terms’. Nevertheless, this remarkable record, delivered by orchestral players who would intuitively feel at one in a performance of Copland’s Third Symphony, marked a watershed moment for brass music on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, British brass chamber music developed rapidly. But its performance practice differed subtly from prevailing styles of orchestral playing and was increasingly influenced by separate branches of music-making. The Philip Jones Brass Ensemble (PJBE) was the most prominent British group at this time, and its national profile was brought about substantially through regular collaborations with established choirs and their conductors: it was the ensemble of choice for David Willcocks and the Bach Choir; of John Eliot Gardiner in 1970 for his own edition of Monteverdi’s Vespers which marked the quatercentenary of the composer’s birth in 1567; and the choice of Roger Norrington for his concerts of ‘Schütz in the Round’.

At the beginning of Act V of Shakespeare’s King Henry V, Chorus invites his audience to ‘brook abridgement’, in other words to tolerate omission of ‘all the occurrences, whatever chanced’ between the victory at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 and the agreement of the treaty of Troyes on 21 May 1420. Much is indeed omitted. Save for a passing reference by Chorus to the visit to England of the Emperor Sigismund which took place in the spring of 1416, there is no mention at all in the play of events between 1416 and 1419. Yet for the English and their king these years witnessed further substantial achievements in France. In the summer of 1416, an army of at least 7,300 men was raised which was initially intended to be led to France by the king in person but was re-directed, successfully, under the duke of Bedford, to end the French naval blockade of Harfleur. In the summer of 1417 an even larger army was recruited, with which Henry invaded Normandy with conquest his intention. By the summer of 1419 virtually all of the duchy was in his hands, allowing him to begin an advance towards Paris. Instead of the French uniting to resist him, their internal divisions intensified, culminating on 10 September 1419 in the assassination of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, by the supporters of the Armagnac faction led by the Dauphin Charles. Nine months later Henry was recognised as heir to the French throne.

The road from Agincourt to Troyes was undoubtedly less direct than Shakespeare implied. While the victory made the French reluctant to face the English in battle again, it was Henry’s systematic conquest of Normandy which gave the French little choice but to negotiate both before and after Duke John’s assassination. It is important, therefore, to examine more closely the army with which Henry invaded in 1417. While this army has not been completely ignored by historians in the past, research linked to the project ‘The Soldier in Later Medieval England’ makes it possible to study the organisation, structure and personnel of the army in much greater depth.