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The Gresley Dance Collection, c.1500

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Fallows
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Extract

It is a slightly embarrassing story. In 1984 Mr Adrian Bassett sent me xeroxes of four pages of monophonic English dance melodies that he had received from the Derbyshire Record Office. Quite why they made so little impact on me at the time is long forgotten. But the information that came with them suggested that they were Elizabethan; I passed on some details to a few scholars concerned with such matters and effectively forgot them. In any case, Derbyshire may stretch to within ten miles of my home in Manchester, but the accident of both roads and public transport means that the County Record Office in Matlock is easier to reach from London. So it was a full eleven years later that I mentioned them in passing to another colleague, who showed an active interest. I pulled out the old xeroxes and realised with a shock that they must be from nearer 1500 and therefore far closer to my own urgent concerns.

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Articles
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Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle , Volume 29 , 1996, pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1996

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References

1 Detailed information on both appears in Daniel Heartz, ‘The Basse Dance: its Evolution circa 1450 to 1550‘, Annates Musicologiques, 6 (1958–63), 287–340; excellent summaries appear in Frederick Crane, Materials for the Study of the Fifteenth Century Basse Danse (Brooklyn, 1968), 24 and 18.Google Scholar

2 Derbyshire Record Office, D77 box 38, pp. 51–79, from the Gresley of Drakelow papers in Derbyshire Record Office and reproduced by permission of the County and Diocesan Archivist. For generous and informed help I am most grateful to the staff of the Derbyshire Record Office, particularly Mrs Miriam Wood and Mrs Judith Phillips.Google Scholar

3 These are the approximate dimensions of the parchment leaves; the paper ones are heavily corroded and now mounted on other material so they are much harder to measure confidently.Google Scholar

4 There is no original numbering, but there are two modern library paginations: the earlier, encircled in the middle of each page, begins on the verso of the front cover and has two successive pages numbered ‘84‘; the more recent, used here, is at the outside bottom corner but begins only at the first page of the first treatise, p. 4 of the earlier numbering.Google Scholar

5 As noted in the transcription below, the next gathering shows a slightly different orthographical style and layout of the dances. It may have been written later, but there is nothing to suggest it was a different copyist.Google Scholar

6 See Crane, Frederick, Materials for the Study of the Fifteenth Century Basse Danse (Brooklyn, 1968), no. 94.Google Scholar

7 A dance with this title is discussed at length in Daniel Heartz, ‘A 15th-century Ballo: Rôti bouilli joyeux’, in J. LaRue, ed., Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese (New York, 1966), 359–75. To his references must be added the choreography in German written down by Johannes Cochlaeus and printed in Christian Meyer, ‘Musique et danse à Nuremberg au début du XVIe siècle’, Revue de Musicologie, 67 (1981), 61–8, on pp. 64–5. But I cannot see anything in common between the previously known choreographies and that in Matlock.Google Scholar

8 Robert Mullally kindly draws my attention to three dances mentioned in Thomas Nashe, Have with You to Saffron Walden (London, 1596), fol. Tl: ‘Basileno’ (possibly the Matlock ‘Basell'), ‘All the flowers of the broom’ and ‘Greenesleeves’.Google Scholar

9 The Oxford English Dictionary gives ‘scabble’ and its earlier form ‘scapple’ only as a verb, meaning to rough-hew stone.Google Scholar

10 See in particular Susan M. Wright, The Derbyshire Gentry in the Fifteenth Century, Derbyshire Record Society, 8 (Gloucester, 1983).Google Scholar

11 I owe this observation to my colleage Dr Carole Weinberg, who drew my attention to Angus McIntosh, et al., A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (Aberdeen, 1986). Dr Weinberg stresses that her conclusions are very tentative, given the scattered nature of the available information; and she adds that even such a conclusion is pertinent only for the first group of dances (section B below).Google Scholar

12 I am deeply grateful to several scholars who have offered preliminary views on these brief comments, among them Véronique Daniels (Basle), Robert Mullally (London), Jennifer Nevile (Sydney), Barbara Sparti (Rome) and Jennifer Thorp (Didcot). None of them can be blamed for my errors, and all regretted that I have chosen to say so little; but I insist that the urgent task was to make these materials available as quickly as possible. Further study is best left to those with many kinds of expertise foreign to me and with plenty of time to mull over the possibilities.Google Scholar