Two ancient traditions about how to respond to the suffering of the world unexpectedly intersect in fifteenth-century England. The life of Buddha is the ultimate source of Barlam and Iosaphat, a popular saint's life, which in the late fifteenth century was translated into Middle English, somewhere around London or the southern Midlands. It resembles the ascetic Christianity displayed in Sir Thomas Malory's version of the Grail quest, translated nearby at about the same time. Both texts emphasize the sorrows that spring from the unstableness of the world and humans’ wavering will. In particular, Malory suggests Launcelot's adultery is a symptom of the more fundamental problem of his unstableness. When explaining why Launcelot will not achieve the Grail, the hermit Nacien says:

Gervase of Canterbury and Roger of Wendover shared certain similarities. Both were Benedictine monks and chroniclers. Their social backgrounds were probably quite similar. Historically, Christ Church and St Albans maintained certain connections such as Lanfranc's Monastic Constitutions, which Lanfranc composed for both Canterbury and St Albans. Nevertheless, the views of Roger and Gervase on the papacy and its legates stood worlds apart. English criticism of the papacy was not novel, but Roger took it to a new level. The world had changed since Gervase wrote his Chronica: King John had offered up England as a fief to the pope.

In 1213, King John had found himself in deep trouble. Excommunicated by the pope for his stance on the Stephen Langton affair, facing rebellion, and expecting a French invasion, John had capitulated to Pope Innocent III to curry favour and offered England as a fief to the pope. Roger found this manoeuvre outrageous. He accused the king of selling his country and his people into slavery. The pope, in the same vein, was a traitor in Roger's eyes because he had accepted the offer. Innocent became the feudal lord of England, John, receiving England as a fief, his vassal. Roger viewed this arrangement as a momentous shift in Anglo-Papal relations. It greatly affected his outlook on the legatine adventus. While he, like Gervase, viewed the legatine adventus as the ceremonial affirmation of papal-legatine authority, he interpreted the implications in a radically different way.

Warriors and wise women were celebrated – as we learn mainly from their burials – primarily the men in the early seventh century and, around the mid-seventh, the women. The farmers and foot-soldiers left less of a footprint, but there is one cadre of early English society who earn our respect and whom we yearn to meet and learn from: they left their mark in every cemetery and settlement and enriched no small part of the splendour of the greatest of them. These are the artisans, those that made and assembled the regalia, stitched and dyed the apparel and built the burial chambers and halls. The great and the good did not do these things. Our artisans earn admiration at every turn; they not only designed and manufactured the artefacts that defned their society, but in every object they bequeathed something of their own expertise and personality. We will know them through their art. If we need to see their idea of perfection, and something of the way they saw the world – it is the things themselves that relate them. Through their artefacts we will meet makers of precious metalwork, creators of vivid clothing, and, most importantly, the carpenters. Of all the active artisans of the early seventh century, it is the creators of buildings who were most closely associated with those building its ships. We will see that the time of Sutton Hoo was a peak of productive creativity, with all the crafts contributing to an age of advanced invention.

Introduction

In 1868, planning began on the northern estates of the Duke of Sutherland for one of the largest land reclamation schemes in nineteenth-century Britain. Underpinned by Victorian confdence in the wonder innovation of the age – steam power – the 3rd Duke invested heavily for ffteen years in his attempt to create productive arable land and farms to support commercial sheep farming, the dominant enterprise on the estate. Agricultural experts had long pointed out that the total acreage of arable land in Sutherland was the smallest of any Scottish county; out of a total 1,207,188 acres in the county, only 28,711 were under cultivation and this meant that large sheep farmers were obliged to send their focks into Caithness and Ross-shire for winter feeding, as sufcient foodstufs could not be grown locally. Land reclamation in Sutherland, using the most modern agricultural technology and theory, aimed to create neat and productive felds from land lying in a ‘state of nature’, by removing all stones and other obstacles, ploughing it over, fertilising it and cropping it, so that Sutherland sheep farmers would no longer have to line the pockets of farmers and suppliers from outside the county.

Works on the same principles had been undertaken elsewhere in England, lowland Scotland and in other Highland counties. But the Sutherland works were on the largest scale ever attempted in Britain, in terms of acreage, technology and fnancial investment.

Native Landscape and Family Relations

There is nothing particularly romantic or exciting—at least in the conventional sense—about the countryside in which young Bedřich Smetana spent his earliest years. It is a gracious, fertile land, stretching between the border mountains of northeastern Bohemia and the gently tapering plains of the river Labe (Elbe). The landscape is a patchwork of fields and meadows, occasionally interrupted by apple, pear, or cherry orchards, their trees either in full blossom or heavy with ripening fruit.

Here and there, darker shades of green signal pinewoods, which grow wider and denser as they approach the mountain ridges. Scattered across the slopes, valleys, and riverbanks are typical Bohemian villages. Every now and then, small but thriving towns, centuries old, dominate the landscape with their ancient church towers, castles, and modern schools. The Orlické Mountains stretch from the north to the southeast, gracing the horizon. On clear days, the mightier peaks of the Krkonoše range can be glimpsed in the distance. To the west, where the land opens into a broad plain, lie the ruins of Kunětická Hora castle and the majestic Renaissance steeples of Hradec Králové (Königgrätz), a bishopric and county seat. The rivulets and streams feeding into the Labe teem with fish, while the dense forests provide shelter for pheasants and partridges. Along the Metuje river, near the Bohemian frontier and Prussian Silesia, beneath the imposing Wallenstein's castle, lies Náchod, now known as the Czech Manchester. Not far away, past a low pass called “Branka” (Gateway), the charming town of Nové Město nad Metují sits perched on a rocky promontory.

Nobody much likes the Reeve, it seems. And with good reason. From the first, he is singled out from the pilgrim group not because of boisterous (but apparently affable) revelry like the Miller, or divine justice made manifest by providential election like the Knight, but because of his querulous, personal complaints. In our first real encounter with him, the Reeve objects to the Miller's declaration that he will tell a disordered tale, both because of his station (and condition) among the pilgrims and his choice of content. “Lat be thy lewed dronken harlotrye,” he cries out, before the Miller has said much at all (I.3145). The Reeve's protest might be premature, but his assumptions about the Miller's story are not exactly inaccurate. After all, the narrator also breaks in several lines later with his well-known (if possibly feigned) reluctance to repeat the “cherles tale” (I.3169). Nevertheless, the Reeve's initial exchange with the Miller is so emphatic that his objection colors how the pilgrims (or at least the Host) see him from that point on: he is a sermonizer for the narrator (I.3899) and an improper and unwelcome preacher for the Host (I.3903). First impressions matter, and the Reeve is now solidly defined by his contest with his churlish counterpart.

In 1885 Henry Banks of York, the proprietor of the music shop later known as ‘Banks & Son’, asserted that he had the ‘Largest stock [of music] in England’. A pedigree traces the origin of Banks’ music shop in York back to 1756, when Thomas Haxby established a business there that aimed to sell everything that musicians, both amateur and professional, might require. Haxby and Banks were both inheritors of a long tradition of traders supplying music-related goods in York, which can be traced to Anthony Foster, who provided paper for York Minster's partbooks in the 1580s, and John Foster, a seller of music books who died in 1616. The probate inventory of Foster's bookshop lists c.750 titles and 3373 identifiable items, including 25 music books. The majority of these volumes are of English secular songs or psalms, but Foster's collection also indicates the early trade in both continental publications and second-hand music books in this city. Following Foster, evidence for the sale of music goods in York is scant until the late seventeenth century and it is the purpose of this chapter to outline the trade in musical goods and services within York between the time of John Foster and the turn of the nineteenth century.

Francis and John Hildyard

The first individual we encounter in this study of York music sellers is Francis Hildyard (d.1731) who, from 1682, kept a shop at the ‘Sign of the Bible’ on Stonegate. Hildyard traded in a variety of musical goods and services, including the sale of newly published music books such as William Croft's Musica Sacra (1724) and Peter Fraser's The Delightfull Musical Companion (1726).