Music

Of all the arts, it is music which best conveys nostalgia and the fleeting nature of time. Thomas of Walsingham, at St Albans, besides writing on history, composed musical treatises in which he discussed such matters as the duration of notes and rhythmic modes. Archbishop Arundel, chief hammer of heretics, offered a passionate defence of music in the liturgy, arguing, against the Lollards, that singers and pipers kept up the spirits of pilgrims and that more pious insight could be obtained from listening to organs and good singers than from many sermons. The great stained glass windows of the Beauchamp chapel at Warwick, built in the 1440s, are cluttered not just with objects that display the luxury and consumerism of the fifteenth-century gentry but with such novel musical instruments as clavichords and harpsichords. After Agincourt, Henry V, whose father was himself a composer of religious music, commanded that no songs be made of his victories. Even so, such songs survive, commemorating his siege of Harfleur and Agincourt itself, this latter (‘Our King went forth to Normandy, with grace and might of chivalry’) being perhaps the first English ‘pop’ song, or rather the first English football ‘chant’ still known to us.

England by the 1420s had a music, a history and a sense of destiny that were distinctively her own. Time itself seemed no longer to march to a divine but to a human rhythm, measured by clocks, in musical notation, by regnal years, even by the rise and fall of English dynasties. In 1399, England could boast one of the oldest established royal dynasties, only the fifth (or the third if one allows that kings Cnut and Stephen were mere offshoots of the dynasties that they usurped) to have ruled England in the 600 years since King Alfred. By 1485, three further dynasties had come, and in two cases gone. Time itself was being cluttered up with names, dates and events. Amidst such a landscape, past certainties were to be treasured, no longer to be discarded as so much junk.