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).

Poetry is rarely a first choice for linguists investigating language phenomena. The genre can certainly be indispensable in studies of sound, including metrics and phonology. But because of its highly structured and sometimes atypical diction and grammar, it is often treated as a highly marked register. In my early studies as a graduate student, a linguist once recommended to me that, if at all possible, poetry be excluded from historical studies since it presents grammatically “weird” constructions that are unlikely to reflect everyday language use. When I discussed this comment with Karla Taylor, we agreed that part of why we study medieval poetry is because it's weird – but also because it has important things to tell us about language, culture, and thought in earlier historical periods.

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.