The Venerable Bede, England's frst historian, lived and wrote in the early eighth century in Northumbria, a long way from the River Deben and a century later than the events I am about relate. But he was by no means ill-informed, taking evidence, as he tells us, from learned persons and the descendants of some of the main players. He was a champion of Christianity writing about pagans, and while he considered them to be wrong about the moral purpose of life and whatever was to follow it, he still gave them a history. His book would hardly have lasted if it had spoken inaccurately of the ancestors of his contemporaries. So he is at least a reliable purveyor of some of the widely held memories of his time. His History of the English Church and People was presented in thematic rather than consecutive sections (like a modern museum) and is reworked here into a plain narrative with an emphasis on places, people, travel and ships. The dramas are played out within and between British- and English-speaking communities, especially in the areas of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent and Wessex (FIG 1.1).

The chief characters are kings and monks, queens and abbesses – since the making of Christian England (Bede's theme) was considered to be in their hands. The names of the players present a considerable obstacle to an easy read since they often seem unfamiliar, unpronounceable, or even too like each other to tell apart. Most names of ordinary folk were acquired in early England based on what they did or where they were from: Cooper, Shipman, Baker, French, Dane, Moor.

Melibee is framed in complex ways by its inclusion in fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales, where the formal limits of reading and storytelling are overtly thematized, even strictly policed. Showing a concern for proportion and narrative scale, Chaucer tells us to expect something suitably manageable in size, yet goes on to deliver a lengthy prose treatise, held together – just barely, some would say – by numerous proverbial sayings and quotations from the auctores. Drawn mostly from familiar classical and biblical sources, these authoritative references share the concentrated moral force and selfenclosed singularity of medieval proverbia more generally, and their function in Melibee is comparable to that of learned sayings and quotations in a wide range of compilatory texts from the period, including Chaucer's immediate source, Renaud de Louens's Livre de Melibée et de Dame Prudence, a French version of Albertanus of Brescia's Liber consolationis et consilii.

Acentral focus of Mathilda of Flanders’ energy was her construction of a Benedictine abbey for women, Holy Trinity in Caen, dedicated in 1066. Mathilda's choice to establish her new monastic foundation in honor of the Trinity, as opposed to a saint or the Virgin Mary, was an early indicator of her spiritual preference for the Holy Spirit and, through it, apostolic authority. The mysteries of the Holy Spirit were connected in scripture to prophesy, which would be another fascination for her. Historians have long argued that Holy Trinity was founded as a penance for Mathilda's marriage in the face of a papal ban. Yet her creation of Holy Trinity eventually swept over the past to embrace a breathtakingly uncertain venture: the Norman invasion of England. In what follows, I consider Holy Trinity in light of the Norman conquest. Holy Trinity was Mathilda's frst contribution to Norman victory. Mathilda established the monastery's connections to the military ofensive from the beginning, despite the uncertainty of its success, and the conquest remained a central element of its character long afer her death. The second contribution was the Mora, the ship she had constructed for the invasion, that carried William to England. Tus, through the work of her hands, she placed herself at the heart of the Norman Conquest. To these two conquest gifs, one must add the most notable – her daughter, Cecelia. Given as an oblate on the day of Holy Trinity's dedication, Cecelia's role in the family's success was a critical one. Her career as the second abbess of Mathilda's new foundation was surely planned from the start.

Introduction

Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713) was one of the most signifcant Scottish intellectuals of his age. He was an innovative and infuential physician, a talented writer in Latin and Scots, and an accomplished mathematician. In his medical career, he rose rapidly after graduation from the University of Rheims in 1680, becoming a founder member of Edinburgh's Royal College of Physicians in 1681, and being appointed as one of three professors of medicine in Edinburgh's town college in 1685. He served as professor of the practice of medicine at Leiden University in 1692–3. His publications developed an iatro-mathematical theory of medicine, winning him international acclaim but dividing Edinburgh's community of physicians. Pitcairne had a parallel literary life, writing elegant Latin verse and hilarious vernacular satires. Moreover, he studied mathematics in the company of David Gregory (1659–1708), professor of maths at Edinburgh's town college, with whom he was among the frst promoters of Isaac Newton's Principia. After the revolution of 1688–90, Pitcairne was a bibulous Jacobite and critic of the presbyterians in control of the Church of Scotland; as a result, he had many detractors as well as admirers.

Two fundamental questions arise when considering the topic of British choral life: what exactly constitutes a choir and where do the boundaries of choral music lie? How many people do you need before you call a group of singers a choir rather than a vocal ensemble? Asked to define a ‘choir’ and a ‘choral sound’, many would say that its essence lay in the doubling of voices on the individual parts, so that eight voices might be considered a minimum for a group singing in four parts. That said, church choirs may be found with fewer numbers, either from the lack of recruits, or as a deliberate choice by those churches who perhaps employ a professional quartet of singers – such a group may fulfil the functions of a choir, even though the resulting sound is not one which would necessarily be described as ‘choral’. The doubling of parts, however, is not always a pre-requisite for a ‘choral sound’; it is also partly a question of texture. Although a four-part work sung by single voices may not sound ‘choral’, an eight-part one sung this way comes much closer. And all would agree that Tallis's forty-part motet, ‘Spem in alium’, originally conceived for, and still usually sung by single voices, is certainly a choral work. Nevertheless, however undefined the borderline, there is a generally recognized distinction between what are called vocal ensembles and choirs. While no-one would call the six voices of The King's Singers a choir, by the time you get to the eponymously named The Sixteen, that is undoubtedly one, even if of ‘chamber’ size. The one thing that perhaps defines any sort of choir, as opposed to the singing of a church congregation or a football crowd, is that is pre-supposes a degree of rehearsal, or at least the exercising of already acquired skills.