Introduction

The Dumfries Midsteeple minute book records information about events and processes carried out by the committee appointed to oversee the construction of a new ‘Council house and steeple’ for the town. Initially intended as a complete replacement to the town's late ffteenth-century tolbooth, once complete, it only took on some of those functions. The name ‘Midsteeple’ by which the building is now known emerged in the mid-eighteenth century on completion of the town's ‘New Church’ on the site of the present-day Greyfriars Church at the northwest end of the High Street. This placed the ‘Midsteeple’ between the steeple of the new church and the steeple of the old church of St Michael's at the opposite end of the town.

In addition to the minute book, there is a complementary survival in Dumfries Archives, now held at the Ewart Library, of numerous individual documents consisting of letters, contracts, accounts, notes and bills that supplement the information in the volume. Indeed, many of these items detail specifcs of some of the actions and monetary amounts referred to in the minute book.

Editorial introduction

In this concluding essay William Cain explores the political history of the Isle of Man through the perspectives and insights of a constitutional lawyer. Contemporary interest in the Island's evolving constitutional and political relationship with the United Kingdom and, through the British government, with the wider world is evidenced in recent contributions by commentators such as Peter Edge and Augur Pearce, who are cited in this essay, and in popular debate, a debate which today has a special resonance with the constitutional uncertainties of the popular drive for Scottish independence and significant shifts in perceptions and aspirations about the place of Northern Ireland – political, constitutional, economic, demographic and cultural – in the United Kingdom.

William Cain's account traces the Island's constitutional story from its early beginnings in the Norse kingdom through the period of this volume and offers a striking view of the dynamic nature of the principles and instruments by which the Isle of Man is still governed today.

Introduction

‘My Lords, may I say that I believe there is reason to rejoice that the historic and unusual constitution of the Isle of Man will be unaffected by this measure’. So commented Lord Renton in the House of Lords on the second reading of the Statute Law Revision (Isle of Man) Bill on 17 May 1991. The lord chancellor replied, ‘My Lords, I join in the rejoicing …’. In this chapter the evolution of the Island's ‘historic and unusual’ constitution over a millennium will be examined. Of course, what made the lord chancellor rejoice is the Island's historic legislature, Tynwald, reputably the oldest legislature in the world.

This volume sets out the current state of knowledge in a range of areas that were significant to the development of the society and economy of the Isle of Man during the late medieval and early modern periods. The contributions in this volume make a valuable addition to the history of the Isle of Man and its relationship to its closest neighbours. However, our knowledge is limited by both the sources available and the research that has been undertaken to date. Importantly, the chapters in this volume highlight areas where further research would be fruitful.

There are a number of documentary sources that have yet to be fully explored and evaluated. For example, there has been no complete or systematic analysis undertaken of the Island's probate inventories or ecclesiastical court records, both of which would enhance our understanding of daily life and belief, as well as the role of the church in Manx society. Probate inventories from the seventeenth century onwards help to illuminate the material aspects of rural and urban domestic life, although only those with goods to bequeath are represented here. The lives of broader sections of Manx society are represented in the ecclesiastical court records, which are a significant source of information about life on the Isle of Man in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. In addition to providing insight into religious and folk beliefs, they are also a reliable source of evidence of social activities and relationships within communities. In particular, the records elucidate beliefs and practices relating to witchcraft, charming, and cursing.

The present work is intended as a history of choral singing in Britain, in both sacred and secular spheres, rather than a study of its choral music. There have been several general surveys of the latter over the past century, from Edmund Fellowes's English Cathedral Music (1941) to John Caldwell's The Oxford History of English Music (1991–9), and most recently, Andrew Gant's O Sing unto the Lord (2015). Although the music will naturally come into discussion of choir repertoire, there will be no detailed analysis of compositions or musical style.

Its origins date back to the last exhibition I organized at the Bodleian Library, Oxford in the winter of 2008/9, Hallelujah! The British Choral Tradition, which partly commemorated the 2009 anniversaries of Purcell, Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn, all of whom had close connexions with British choral life. Its exhibits ranged from a 10th-century Winchester troper to the manuscript of Howard Goodall's theme music for The Vicar of Dibley, taking in the Eton Choirbook, Tallis's 40-part motet, Handel's conducting score of Messiah, Elgar's The Kingdom, and Britten's War Requiem, among the highlights. I had hoped to produce something for publication to coincide with the exhibition, but time constraints prevented it, and the ability to proceed with it at a more leisurely pace in my retirement has hopefully resulted in a better volume than would otherwise have been the case.

There has been much published material to draw on, including studies of the music at individual cathedrals, histories of choral societies and festivals, and musicians’ biographies, as well as such fundamental works as Frank Harrison's Music in Medieval Britain, or, more recently, Timothy Day's investigation of changes in English singing style over the past century or so, I Saw Eternity the Other Night.

Choral Music Resumes

With the Restoration of the monarchy following Charles II's return to England in May 1660, it is surprising how quickly choral establishments began to be revived. The former structure of the church was reinstated with its bishops, deans and cathedral chapters, together with the reintroduction of the Book of Common Prayer. A definitive, revised edition appeared in 1662, in which for the first time the rubric appears after the collects at Matins and Evensong, ‘in quires and places where they sing, here followeth the anthem’. This of course was merely giving official sanction to what had actually been happening ever since the early days of the Reformation. ‘Quires’ here refers to the area of the cathedral, and other ‘places where they sing’ would have mainly applied to collegiate chapels. In practice, the anthem could be placed elsewhere; according to Samuel Pepys's diary entries, it came after the sermon at the Chapel Royal, while at St Paul’s, on sermon days there were anthems both after the collects and after the sermon, when a metrical psalm would have been the norm.

At court, the Chapel Royal was certainly functioning again by the summer of 1660, and was to attain a post-Restoration establishment of 12 boys and around 20–26 Gentlemen (posts were sometimes left vacant). Although not many of the pre-war Gentlemen returned, competent new voices were not hard to find, given the financial rewards and conditions of service; they included three who had been organists before the war at Winchester, Windsor and Christ Church, Oxford.

Wagner was working on the score of Act Two of Siegfried when he started having second thoughts. He had begun Das Rheingold in 1853, but now, in 1857, he was ready to give up his “headstrong design of completing the Nibelungen.” He put Siegfried aside, picked it up again to complete the second act, and then stopped work on it altogether. He could see no way for the Ring to be produced, and so he decided to write something more commercially viable, a drama on a smaller scale that would be within the capacities of lesser opera houses.

The result was Tristan und Isolde, which does have a small cast but which grew to be so demanding and avant-garde that after seventy rehearsals the Vienna Court Opera, one of the greatest of European theaters, gave up trying to mount the premiere. His next project was Die Meistersinger, the longest piece in the operatic repertory, which he was working on when, in 1864, Ludwig II was crowned king of Bavaria. The young king was obsessed with Wagner, and he sent his idol an emissary— whom Wagner turned away at first, thinking he was a hoaxer—and promised to settle the composer's debts and see to the production of all of his works, the Ring included. By the time Wagner had finished Die Meistersinger and returned to the cycle eleven years had passed, but everything went well, and at the end of February 1869 he could write to his wife and King Ludwig that “Siegfried is divine. It is my greatest work!” He expected that it would become the most popular drama in the cycle.

That never happened. Die Walküre is usually the audience favorite and many musicians and scholars prefer Götterdämmerung.3 Siegfried is often the least liked of the four, in fact. Too many male voices, people say; too much fairy tale and not enough human drama.

The physical city of Caen rose up rapidly in the middle of the eleventh century as Mathilda and William constructed its primary elements. These included the ducal castle, the abbey of Holy Trinity and, lastly, St Stephen's Abbey. The merchant community of Caen grew alongside it, encouraged by the ducal presence and the navigable waterways of the Orne and the Odon which fed Caen. The previous chapter provides evidence for the expansion of a bustling city with neighborhoods of tenants and workers developing in the boroughs of the abbess, the abbot, and those dependent directly on the ducal couple. As the contours of Caen emerged in the physical world, Mathilda was also building a parallel city; spiritual, ephemeral, liturgical. This spiritual city was governed by the presence of holy bodies: saints whose remains shaped the religious observance of Caen as it developed. Caen's liturgical city was organized around temporal observance of feast days. The assemblage of holy bodies also shifed the spiritual center of Normandy towards Caen.

In 1706, Anthony Collins observed that the ‘nature of God question’ was esteemed already by the greatest among the ancient philosophers ‘as one of the most abstruse and difficult questions in all philosophy’. However, ‘the light of the Gospel, together with that clear and distinct method of reasoning introduced by the new philosophy’ concurred to establish that only his attributes were knowledgeable. In the opinion ‘of the generality of Christians, and particularly of our modern divines and philosophers’, God possessed the attributes of perfection (he is a ‘wise, good, powerful and eternal being’), so he could not coincide with the universe and must be separated from it. ‘But this age, fruitful in disputes of all kinds, and that suffers no question to lie unexamin’d […] has given a new turn to the question about the nature of God.’ The ‘turn’, to Collins, was a sceptical one, and it consisted in a recovery of the ancient notion of the ‘obscurity’ of ‘the nature of God question’. Collins aimed to explain to an English readership the historical reason for such a recovery of a sceptical attitude towards understanding God. For this purpose, he introduced the question by concisely illustrating different points of view confronting each other in a debate opposing Bayle (whose doctrine consisted in ‘captivating the understanding to the obedience of faith’), to the rationaux Isaac Jacquelot and Le Clerc, the Calvinist ‘Mr. Naudé’ and ‘Mr Placette’ and, last but not least, the prime target of his pamphlet, Archbishop King's sermon The Origine Mali, written in response to Bayle, which sought to accommodate God's ‘foreknowledge’ with the justification of evil.

Bath, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, had all the appearances of a quiet market town. With a population of c.2000, it was heavily reliant on its natural springs for producing bottled water and for supplying its famous baths. Though its origins as a spa date from Roman times, the city's fortunes began to improve in the sixteenth century with the visit of Mary of Moderna, Queen to James II; she attributed her success in producing the Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766), to Bath's thermal waters. Queen Anne then visited in 1692, 1702 and 1703 to relieve her persistent gout. What made Bath special for the Romans, Queens Mary and Anne, and the eighteenth- century ‘company’ (i.e., the well-healed visitors who stayed in Bath for health and leisure) were the ‘chalybeate’ waters, believed beneficial for health. The quotidian drinking of the waters and bathing in the hot baths was known as ‘the cure’, and had long incorporated a good degree of entertainment and social interaction among the well-healed visitors that constituted ‘the company’, in which music played a prominent role.

The decades that followed the 1705 appointment of Richard ‘Beau’ Nash (1674–1762) as Master of Ceremonies saw Bath's advancement as a centre of leisure and gambling. Bath's spa ‘season’ gradually evolved into an autumn and spring period that extended from the end of September until mid-May. The months out of season were initially described as ‘desolate as a Wilderness’ but, as the eighteenth century progressed, the summer developed its own programme of entertainments.