In July 1586 the Jesuit priest Father William Weston (1549/50–1615) arrived at the Lancashire gentleman Richard Bold’s house. Weston described how:
[T]he place was most suited to our work and ministrations, not merely for the reason that it was remote and had a congenial household and company, but also because it possessed a chapel, set aside for the celebration of the Church’s offices. The gentleman was also a skilled musician, and had an organ and other musical instruments, and choristers, male and female, members of his household. During those days it was just as if we were celebrating an uninterrupted octave of some great feast. Mr. Byrd, the very famous English musician and organist, was among the company…Father Garnet sometimes sang Mass, and we took it in turns to preach and hear confessions, which were numerous. Nearly the whole of the morning passed in this way.Footnote 1
This account has captured the imaginations of many historians and musicologists, particularly William Byrd scholars, who have tried to identify when and how often such elaborate musical occasions took place between the Catholic clergy and laity. The resulting scholarship is rich, and suggests that Masses were sung frequently within the embassy chapels, and the royal chapels of the Catholic spouses of England’s monarchs.Footnote 2 High Mass within the households of the English Catholic gentry, particularly those of Byrd’s patrons and associates such as the Petre family of Essex and the Pastons in Norfolk, was also not unheard of.Footnote 3 There are a handful of other documented occasions, such as the arrangements made for Lady Magdalene Browne (1538–1608) in her family mansion at Battle in West Sussex where according to her confessor and biographer ‘she built a choir for singers and set up a pulpit for the priests, which perhaps is not to be seen in England besides. Here almost every week was a sermon made, and on solemn feasts the sacrifice of the Mass was celebrated with singing and musical instruments’.Footnote 4 Yet this was not widespread, and the performances should be viewed as remarkable for the fact they were commented on in this way. Weston has not described the occasion at Bold’s house as a usual one; the events in Lancashire were so striking it was ‘as if’ they were celebrating some great feast. This is mirrored by Browne’s biographer, who exclaimed that surely the lavish provision for High Mass in Sussex was ‘not to be seen’ in the rest of the country. It should be assumed, then, that when a Catholic Mass was performed it was nearly always a Low Mass, unsung, with the words simply spoken.
In this essay I will add to our existing understanding of what it meant to be a member of the English Catholic community during the late Elizabeth and early Stuart period by exploring what I contend to be the more ‘usual’ forms of Catholic musical expression through a case study of post-Reformation Lancashire. I focus on the Catholic networks surrounding Little Crosby, which was - like the majority of villages, towns and cities in early modern England - filled with the singing of ballads.Footnote 5 The seigneurial community of around forty households in the parish of Sefton, a few miles north of Liverpool, was distinctive in the midst of Protestant England, because it was almost entirely Catholic. The leading family were the Blundells, well known to historians of post-Reformation Catholicism for their staunch recusancy, and who lived in the manor house ‘Crosby Hall’ that had dominated the village since the mid-fourteenth century.Footnote 6 Richard Blundell died in 1591/2 whilst imprisoned in Lancaster Castle for harbouring a seminary priest, and his sons William (1560–1638) and Richard were educated at Douai, where Richard was later ordained as a secular priest.Footnote 7
The music and ballads discussed in this essay provide important glimpses of the thriving oral and musical traditions of Little Crosby and the Blundell family. ‘Oral’ tradition had a particular resonance with Catholicism, which emphasised the stability of the unwritten tradition of the Church in the face of Protestantism’s privilege of Scripture. By exploring Catholic uses of ballads, I am indebted to the pioneering approach of Alison Shell who in 2007 provided an important contrast to the almost exclusive scholarly treatment of ballads as a ‘Protestant’ phenomenon, where the English Reformation had become associated as the causal factor for a ‘robust tradition of commercial ballads on religious subjects’.Footnote 8 Shell highlighted the significant role that Catholic ballads played in supporting a ‘Catholic oral challenge to the religious status quo’ and explored how oral transmissions provided a forum for debate between Catholics and Protestants.Footnote 9 Despite this, Catholic balladry has remained almost invisible: a 2010 volume on Ballads and Broadsides in Britain 1500–1800, 1500–1800, lacked any reference whatsoever to either ‘Catholic’ ballads or indeed to Shell’s work which had already highlighted the neglect.Footnote 10 The ‘godly ballad’ still seems associated with the very fabric of a distinctively Protestant Elizabethan and Stuart entertainment culture.Footnote 11 Ballads ranged in their subject matter and topics, but in the case of religious politics and polemic, any discussion of ‘Catholicism’ has occurred almost exclusively in the context of ‘anti-Catholicism’ as scholars have argued that polemical ballads were ‘vehicles for nationalistic Protestantism and its corollary, anti-Catholicism’.Footnote 12 If the dominant scholarship is to be accepted, ballads were about Catholics, not by them.
Yet ballads were a distinctly aural phenomenon and circulated in the tunes, hums and whistles of the early modern populace, which included both Catholics and Protestants. The average early modern ballad-consumer learnt the verses by rote and sung them to common and often shared melodies, which were then memorised. They emerge for the historian not only in cheap print, but also in commonplace books and manuscript miscellanies. Whilst the majority of Catholic ballads survive in the collections of the educated, this does not make them any less ‘popular’ or any less a ‘ballad’ for as Shell concluded: ‘[w]hether or not a particular ballad was written for the masses in the first instance, the genre itself would have ensured that it spoke to the masses’.Footnote 13 By investigating the songs and ballads in two manuscript collections from the Catholic network surrounding the Blundells this essay will show how Catholics both composed and ‘converted’ existing ballads to voice social, devotional, and political concerns.
Recent historians, such as James Kelly and Michael Questier, have started to pay attention to the ways in which English Catholics engaged with the political landscape of early modern England.Footnote 14 Both argued how loyalty to the crown and adherence to the Roman creed were not mutually exclusive and that there were various ways Catholics could exert political influence whilst practicing their faith.Footnote 15 Moreover, recent literary critics such as Shell and Gerard Kilroy have demonstrated how oral culture, and manuscript circulation played a vital role in creating solidarity and forging Catholic communal bonds.Footnote 16 This has firmly overturned generalised conceptions of Catholics as inert, and without political or cultural influence. Such developments mean that we can no longer speak of post-Reformation English Catholic culture in monolithic terms, and consequently we have learnt a great deal about the manifold experiences of, and creative responses to, persecution.Footnote 17 Building upon this important work, I consider how this creativity manifested itself in ‘musical’ experience—an extension of, but significantly distinct from, ‘oral’ experience in that I consider the effects of performance, and offer a close analysis of the meanings of melodic choices. I also use the term ‘music’ flexibly, and with a broad definition in mind to include all non-spoken, melodic utterances—rather than restricting consideration to the consciously ‘artistic’ or to ‘skilled’ composers and musicians.
The songs that are uncovered in this essay expose a festive, communal and vibrant Catholic community where musical expression was fundamental. Performance of the musical narratives served to widen the parochial religious divide, whilst enhancing Catholic integration. The music provides a vivid snapshot into the religious lives of the Blundells and their Catholic neighbours. The manuscripts preserve a variety of devotional songs that held particular relevance to the community, which can tell us a great deal about how piety was performed during this period. The music also voiced the religious politics of this community, as several pieces were pointedly subversive, and demonstrates how music enabled Catholics to exhort forms of protest as much as prayers. By investigating the tunes and melodies preserved in the manuscripts, and significantly their ‘conversion’ and adaptation, I also show how priests serving this network used ballads and songs as part of their missionary strategy. Music was a vital form of ‘spiritual’ conversion, used to strengthen the faith of the beleaguered Catholic laity.Footnote 18 Rather than elaborate liturgical music, it is the neglected ballads and songs highlighted in this essay that can tell us most about English Catholic experience and musical practices, what it might have ‘sounded like’ to be Catholic, and how devotional identities were formed and fashioned during this period.
Sources
Around 1580 William Blundell started to write in what later became the Blundell family miscellany, the Great Hodge Podge.Footnote 19 As the title suggests, this contains a random selection of material: songs and ballads both with and without musical notation; brief histories of the Blundell family; accounts; letters; and poems, spread over nearly three hundred pages. The Great Hodge Podge quickly became an important document for the family; Blundell’s hand is found alongside his grandson’s and namesake, William (1620–1698) and their eighteenth-century descendants’.Footnote 20 The elder William’s contributions to the Great Hodge Podge were explored most notably by Margaret Sena who reacted against scholarly characterisations of the Blundell family as introspective and isolated.Footnote 21 Instead Sena demonstrated William’s political activism and highly engaged role in nationwide networks of ‘Catholic dissent’.Footnote 22 This is reflected in the twenty songs that were transcribed by Blundell and his contemporaries, who were possibly other members of his immediate family. As will become clear, the handwriting within the manuscript demonstrates that the musical and textual transcriptions were a contemporaneously collaborative effort.Footnote 23
The second source I draw from in this essay is a manuscript ballad collection preserved in the British Library, Additional MS. 15225, a small (approximately 15cm by 20cm), sixty folio, anonymous miscellany purchased by the British Museum in 1844 from Benjamin Heywood Bright. It contains 33 verses that were almost certainly sung, but unlike the Great Hodge Podge lacks musical notation.Footnote 24 It was presumed to have been compiled by a Catholic with Lancastrian associations due in particular to the presence of a ballad describing the execution of four Catholic priests in the county.Footnote 25 The majority of the ballads and songs in BL. Add. MS. 15225 were printed by Hyder Rollins in 1920.Footnote 26 Rollins grouped the songs together with ballads of similar theme from various other manuscripts, and offered little analysis of the book’s contents. Rollins also reiterated the unsubstantiated suggestion made by John Hungerford Pollen that the compiler of the manuscript might have been ‘John Brerely’ (at the time thought to be the pseudonym for Jesuit priest Lawrence Anderton) due to the preservation of a ballad by ‘I.B.P’.Footnote 27 Rollins did not elaborate on his assertion, as he did ‘not feel competent to judge the probability of this suggestion’.Footnote 28 The manuscript was subsequently neglected by scholars until the turn of the century and the work of Alison Shell. In both Catholicism and Controversy (1999) and Oral Culture (2007) Shell described the manuscript as the ‘most important’ surviving collections of Catholic verse songs.Footnote 29 Yet the manuscript has remained anonymous, and its full context unexplored.
Considering the evidence provided by the contents of the manuscript, it is my contention that it was compiled by James Anderton (1557–1613) and later members of the Anderton family. The handwriting in BL. Add. MS. 15225, hereafter Lancashire MS, is a single cursive secretary hand, it is mature, confident and therefore most likely that of an experienced scribe. James Anderton was a prolific author and religious controversialist, and the eldest son of the lawyer and magistrate Christopher Anderton. The family were wealthy, influential Catholics and ran a clandestine press at their home in Birchley Hall about fifteen miles east of Little Crosby in Billinge. The Blundells’ close relationship with the family may have supported the circulation of music, and it is evident that books and materials were exchanged freely between the families. William Blundell’s grandson, William, preserved in the Great Hodge Podge a copy of a ‘list of the workes my uncle Rog[er] An[derton] which was sent me by his son C[hristopher] Anderton, AD 1647’.Footnote 30 The titles make explicit that a wide variety of Catholic polemical and devotional literature was delivered to Little Crosby. The works have clear links to the themes Blundell preserved in his ballads in the Great Hodge Podge and to those in the Lancashire MS. Titles included ‘Puritanisme the Mother, Sinn the daughter’ [1633] and the ‘Miscellanea’ [1640], which was a treatise conducive ‘to the study of English Controversies in Fayth and Religion’ and dedicated to the ‘yonger sort of Catholike Priests, and other students in the English Seminaries beyond the Seas’.Footnote 31 Moreover, within the Lancashire MS is a copy of a ‘song made by I: B: P: To the tune of Diana’, the song was ‘Jerusalem my happy home’ and it is almost certain that it was composed by James Anderton who regularly used the pseudonym I.B.P in many other publications where it was accepted as standing for James Brerely Priest.Footnote 32
It has been assumed by scholars that the earliest version of this hymn was from an anonymous publication in 1601, The Song of Mary, which contained a nineteen-stanza ‘description of the heavenly Jerusalem’.Footnote 33 However, a search of EEBO has uncovered a hitherto unrealised, earlier, most likely original edition of the hymn in thirteen stanzas in A looking glass of mortalitie from 1599 and which, significantly, was penned by ‘I.B’.Footnote 34 It might tentatively be suggested that the author of the looking glass was also James Anderton. Moreover, it is clear from the contents of the Lancashire MS, and the similarities in genre, purpose and intent, that the compiler was without doubt a member of Blundell’s circle. This essay will therefore consider the neglected contents of the manuscript for the first time with its original context of Little Crosby, and Blundell’s network, in mind.
The Blundells of Little Crosby
The Blundells were a musical family; this is evident from the Great Hodge Podge and is corroborated in other records they have left behind. For example a book in the Blundell archives containing both medical and edible ‘recipes’, has been bound with what appears to be a late sixteenth-century instrumental setting in score of the psalm ‘O god my harte is readie’.Footnote 35 Whilst unfortunately no inventory for the period of William Blundell’s life is extant, it is likely that the family owned instruments, and almost certainly they had a pair of virginals as a report to the government complained:
Mrs Houghton of Lea hathe kepte sithence the deathe of her husbande one Richarde Blundell brother to Williem Blundell of Crosbie…who is an obstinate papiste well acquainted w[it]h a number of seminaries and he teacheth her children to singe and plaie upon the virginalls.Footnote 36
Alongside his role as music teacher, it is likely that the secular priest Richard provided the family with the sacraments. Little Crosby was a missionary centre, and reports to the government repeatedly complained about the presence of seminary priests in the area.Footnote 37 As the Bishop of Chester complained to Secretary Robert Cecil in 1600:
That part of the country…is full of seminary priests and gentlemen recusants that harbour them, of whom Edw. Ealeston, of Ealeston, Wm. Blundell of Crosby, Hen. Lathom, of Mosborow, and Hen. Travis, of Hardshowe are the chief; they countenance all lewd practices and despise authority; until they be bridled and brought in by strong hand, there is no hope of reformation in these parts.Footnote 38
The most detailed report of Little Crosby came from the apostate Thomas Bell to the government in 1592, and describes a highly social and participatory community, where at a designated estate:
manie tymes by 10: or 12 Priestes, the greater parte being Seminaries have mett togeather in one house on one day, saying many masses wth one longe solemnitye…Footnote 39
Crosby Hall was often the venue for these clandestine gatherings and Bell described William as ‘worse then his Father in everie such respecte & his m[o]ther as culpable as her sonne’ and explained that ‘[a]ll Seminaries have had concourse unto that house in tyme past, & at this present day’. It is quite possible that these clandestine performances involved music to support the liturgy and their devotions, and it is clear that music remained important to the family and their community in Little Crosby throughout the generations. Blundell’s grandson the ‘cavalier’ recorded his favourite ballads into the Great Hodge Podge, as did Nicholas Blundell (1669–1737) who recorded the ‘joyful songe for the birth of Prince Charles’.Footnote 40 Music seems to have been particularly important for Nicholas whose diary is filled with references to musical entertainments and social gatherings.Footnote 41
As well as being a musical family, the Blundells should also be understood as active members of a musical community because it is likely that the performances of the music within the Hodge Podge were heard beyond Blundell’s immediate household. Music by William Blundell can be found at the beginning, middle and end of the Great Hodge Podge, and the collection of songs in the middle of the Hodge Podge have been numbered and compiled with a postscript: ‘These next afore written Ballads or items wear made by William Blundell of little Crosbie Esquyre, and are in all Eighteen’.Footnote 42 It is likely then that this section of the manuscript was a ‘songbook’ used frequently, and the numbers provided easy reference for the pieces to be quickly copied and performed. The collaboration in the songbook is evident from the variety of hands present in the musical and textual transcriptions, and underlines the familial and communal nature of musical culture during this period.
In early modern homes, vocal music provided inclusive entertainment and although the majority of the Blundell songs have not been composed with separate parts indicated, there might have been instrumental accompaniment. Improvisation was a critical feature of musical practice in the period, and some of the music may have had separate groups singing different parts or multiple individuals singing different verses. This can be seen in the song ‘O gasping grieffe’ in the Great Hodge Podge, which is written in the first person and from the perspective of the Virgin Mary lamenting the crucifixion of Jesus.Footnote 43 See supplementary audio file 1 available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/bch.2015.18. ‘O gasping grief’, Lancashire Record Office, DDBL, acc 6121, Box 4, Great Hodge Podge (hereafter Great Hodge Podge), f.129v. Words: William Blundell. Music: Thomas Woodcroft.
The text is written in two distinctive hands; one hand transcribed verses 1–6 and the second transcribed verses 7–11. The song’s narrative almost certainly implies female performance, and accompanying the verses is a repeated ‘ah ha’ melody, which soars up and down the vocal scale (see Fig. 1).
Lancashire Record Office, DDBL acc 6121, Box 4, f.129v. By permission of Lancashire Record Office.
This accompaniment could easily have been performed by a chorus of mixed voices to emphasise Mary’s wails. As a footnote to the piece, Blundell also explained that he had written the words but not the tune. The tune was made ‘long afore (as it was reported), by one Thomas Woodcroft, otherwise called commonly, long Tom, a Lancashire man’. Blundell’s hand ends there.
Of the eight pieces of music with notation extant (correlated to the written text specifically for performance) two of the tunes were composed by others. The first, ‘as it was reported’, was ‘long Tom’, which emphasised how the tune was passed to Blundell despite the passage of time. The composer of the tune was important: it had been ‘reported’. This ‘Tom’ remains unidentifiable, despite the helpful later note in a different hand explaining that Tom was ‘once one of the guards of Queen Elizabeth’. The second named song contributor in the Great Hodge Podge was ‘William Lacie’, who we shall return to later. The remaining six musical compositions were therefore by Blundell, indicated for the most part by his initials, or signing of his name.Footnote 44 In the Great Hodge Podge two clear hands are also present in the transcription of the musical notation. In the majority of pieces the first hand starts, and the second hand later takes over and makes corrections. Such as the ‘Dittie’ below (see Fig. 2) where one hand copied the first stave, before the second took over, and then in the fourth line the first hand returned for the notation above ‘yea & utter’ and continued until end of piece. The presence of multiple scribes and composers within the manuscript underlines the community aspect of the songbook, where tunes were shared and the musical transcription and composition explicitly collaborative.
Lancashire Record Office, DDBL acc 6121, Box 4, f.141. By permission of Lancashire Record Office
The Great Hodge Podge and the Lancashire MS contain a diverse range of music on several subjects, which indicates the variety of different occasions for performance. Some of the ballads may have been performed in large groups, perhaps on feast-days or after the clandestine Masses reported by Bell.Footnote 45 Musical celebrations at Christmas evidently occurred, as five ballads suitable for performance during the season were transcribed into Hodge Podge, and there is one in the Lancashire MS.Footnote 46 The final carol in the Great Hodge Podge, the ‘song (or carrol) in person of ye sheppheards’ was credited to ‘Mr William Lacye’, who may be the ‘Lacie’ from Bell’s report on the activities of the community.Footnote 47 This ‘Lacie lodged many a Seminarian [and] all came thither to masse’. Notably, the priests ‘hath many times brought books from beyond the seas’, and Lacie then sold these ‘for gains in England, namely Breviaries, Missals, etc’ and Bell also cited high demand for the works of William Allen, particularly his ‘execution of justice’.Footnote 48
The textual network of Little Crosby, facilitated by priests and connected by the laity, where books were circulated and sold to the Blundells and beyond, most likely enabled the wider circulation of songs indicated in the Great Hodge Podge and the Lancashire MS. For example, some of the carols were later the inspiration for printed ballads published as broadsides. This indicated both the wider audience for the ballads travelling from and through Little Crosby, and the ballad-genre’s inherent fluidity. The ‘ould Christmas carol’ is clearly related to the broadside ‘A [mos]t Excellent Ballad of Joseph the Carpenter, and the sacred Virgin Mary’:
William Lacie in the Great Hodge Podge:
It was a man of age trulyhe maried a maid w[hi]ch haightFootnote 49 Mary
A purer virgin did never man see
than he chose for his deare, his deare
A virgin pure this was no naye
to whom St Gabriel thus did saye
Thou shalt conceave a Babbie this day
the w[hi]ch shalbe o[u]r deare, o[u]r deare
Printed Broadside c.1678:
Joseph an aged man truly
Did marry a Virgin fair and free
A purer Virgin did no man see
then he chose for his dear his dear.
This Virgin was pure, there was no nay,
The Angel Gabriel to her did say.
Thou shalt conceive a boy this day
the which shall be our dear our dear.Footnote 50
This particular broadside publication contained two ballads, and the second ‘even in the Twinkling of an Eye’ included text that appears inspired from William Lacie’s carol transcribed in the Great Hodge Podge. This underlines the way that Catholic manuscript publication influenced mainstream publications.
William Lacie:
In Bethelem field while all alone
with a sadd full harte with manie a [illegible] grone
In which night in dreadfull shade
about my flocke my round I made
Behoulding twinkling of an eye
what did I hear? What did I spye?
Alle-ulla-luia – alleluia alleluia alleuila.
Broadside:
As I lay musing all alone,
I heard a voice that did loud cry
Come give account now every one
even in the twinkling of an eye.Footnote 51
Although the five carols in the Great Hodge Podge were not transcribed with any indication of the tune to which they were sung, they are in ballad-metre and were most likely sung to ballad tunes that the verses inherently suggested. This is one of the problems of oral sources for the modern historian - what was presumably obvious to the early modern ballad-consumer is nearly impossible to know today. Often all that we have left are clues such as William Lacie’s repetitive ‘Alleluia’ refrain at the end of each stanza and the rhetorical questions in the verse. The Lancashire MS and the Great Hodge Podge also contains material of a more broadly moralising and secular nature. That thirteen out of the thirty-three songs preserved in the Lancashire MS were some of the most immensely popular ballads of the age underlines the network’s connection with popular culture, and their engagement with wider current affairs. This, and what follows, further rejects any lingering temptation to view Catholics in a solely separatist context.Footnote 52
Piety
The devotional stance of Catholics in England is a contentious topic; whether the English Catholic community should be viewed as something ‘new’ and ‘Tridentine’ as advocated by Bossy, or inextricably tied with the pre-Reformation church as furthered by Christopher Haigh, continues to divide historians.Footnote 53 The music in the Great Hodge Podge and the Lancashire MS demonstrates a piety profoundly influenced by Tridentine spiritual practice, but simultaneously nostalgic for the medieval, Catholic past.Footnote 54 This nostalgia is explicit in Blundell’s ditty in the Great Hodge Podge, ‘The tyme hath been’:Footnote 55
The tyme hath been wee hadd one faith
and trode aright one ancient path
The thym is now that each man may
See new Religions coynd eich day
The end of each heartfelt plea to a bygone age ended with the prayer and refrain:
Sweet jesu wth thy mother myld
Sweet virgin mother with thy child
Angells and saints of each degree
Redresse our contryes miserie
This nostalgic prayer was preserved alongside songs that conveyed the influence of the Ignatian ‘Spiritual Exercises’ that were conducted by Jesuits - both for themselves and for the laity. This, as Louis Martz has demonstrated in his analysis of early modern devotional poetry, required the ‘vivid imagination of a scene by means of memory and the senses’, ‘methodological analysis of the subject by reason; and colloquy with God’.Footnote 56
This is evident in the first ballad in the ‘songbook’ of the Great Hodge Podge, and ‘In meditation as I sate’ (see supplementary audio file 2, ‘In meditation as I sat’, Great Hodge Podge, f.125v.) conveys an individual meditation in which the singer’s reflection facilitates a dialogue with Christ. On the surface, this ballad would have been acceptable in the context of both Protestant and Catholic performances and contained nothing inherently confessional. It was certainly popular; whilst the first verse and the accompanying music were written by Blundell, the subsequent verses have been added later, along with the indication that the ballad should be sung to the tune ‘oh hone’.Footnote 57 Blundell’s ballad also circulated within wider Catholic networks around the country, and later versions of the song appeared in other seventeenth-century Catholic miscellanies from communities in Staffordshire and Warwickshire. Both of these manuscripts are now known to be associated with the Jesuit William Southern, alias Smith, thanks to very recent scholarship from Helen Hackett and Cedric Brown.Footnote 58 Their research provides further evidence of the ways that ballads and songs were circulating via priests among the laity.
What makes ‘In meditation as I sat’ ‘Catholic’, I suggest, is not merely its composition by a Catholic but the song’s intention and ability to engage the senses, which was fundamental to Ignatian spirituality. The Jesuit activation of this form of devotion within Blundell is evident in the stanza where the vision of Christ’s picture prompts the imagination and the singer’s ‘inward ear’ to hear the voice of Christ. Simultaneously their ‘outward ear’ and those of any listeners would have been delighted by the song’s gentle melody.Footnote 59
Similar invocations of Christ are found in another song in the Lancashire MS that contained no explicitly confessional markers; the ‘Jolie Sheppard’ could have easily been read as an allegory for either the Catholic or Protestant Church.Footnote 60 It may also have been similar to the ‘jollie sheppard’ that was entered into the Stationers Register on 15 August 1586, as Hyder Rollins has suggested.Footnote 61 The ballad uses the metaphor of Christ as shepherd, and the listeners are repeatedly called as ‘witnesses’ to Christ’s crucifixion. The phrase ‘to witnes’ is repeated sixteen times in the space of four verses, 13–16, which enhanced the oral memorability of the ballad:
To witnes cale his goeinge downe
to hell, through great his might
To witnes calle his assendinge up
to heaven in glorie bright
The final two verses also repeat the same four lines at the beginning of the stanza, which underlined their importance:
O come away, O come away
this shepard cales and cryes
Take up your crosse and follow me
and doe this worled dispise.
Despite the largely neutral religious message of the majority of the ballad, the repeated call to ‘take up your crosse and follow me’ had particular relevance to the Catholics in Little Crosby, as variations of the command occur frequently throughout both of the manuscripts. During this period, to take up the cross and follow Christ was understood as Christ’s command to die for the faith. The increasing presence of Jesuits and seminary priests in the area during the early decades of the seventeenth century, some of whom subsequently suffered imprisonment and execution, would certainly have served to underline this particular commandment.
Devotion to the Passion of Christ as an imaginative locus where the soul meditated on the mysteries of sin and forgiveness, the meaning of redemption, and God’s love, had become the predominant focus for piety since the late medieval period, as Eamon Duffy has shown.Footnote 62 Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this devotion continued to flourish and for post-Reformation English Catholics, Passion piety provided a site for individual communion with and imitation of Christ. Scholars such as Louis Martz and Sarah Covington have explored how poetry and literature could encourage affective response to Christ, and it is clear that such imaginative representations extended to music and ballad-singing.Footnote 63 In the Lancashire MS similar exhortations to follow the cross were coupled with Ignatian modes of imaginative and meditative devotion, such as, ‘Behold our saviour crucified’, where the opening stanza advised the singers and listeners:
Behould our saviour crucifide
and beare it well in mynd
Which will suppresse all sinfull pryde
and make us groe more kynd
O let us strive to flee from sinne
and righteous courses hould
And take our crosse and followe hime
as he hath said we should.Footnote 64
The visible witness of Christ was also vividly expressed in ‘Oh gasping grief’ from the Great Hodge Podge, an explicitly Catholic song with the focus upon the Virgin Mary and specifically her lament at the crucifixion.Footnote 65 The Virgin Mary’s Compassion was the most prevalent cultural symbol of mourning prior to the Reformation when every church in England had a figure of the Pietà, or ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’. This figure later became the focus of the most vitriolic assaults by reformers after the eradication of the doctrine of Purgatory.Footnote 66 Recreation of the crucifixion scene in the female voice was a popular form of devotion amongst Catholic women during this period, and was present in other contemporary female-compiled miscellanies.Footnote 67 Blundell’s song conveys the vindictive persecution that Christ suffered and the first stanza, combined with the ‘ahha, ahha’ accompaniment, is loaded with oral expression. See supplementary audio file 1.
O gaspinge grieffe, for me to see,
Myne owne sonne Jesus, nail’d to a tree,
ahha ahha ahha ahha, O Simeon, Simeon, ahha, ahha,
Now do I think on the sworde of grieffe
thou didst for show, should pierce my hart
Alack for woe, O Jesu Kinge of blisse,
What kyndnes moved thee to this,
To dye for those that did amisse.
The singer imagines herself as Mary and it is through her eyes that the crucifixion scene is vividly echoed. Both the vocal experience and the visual imagination are frequently evoked with the repetitive use of ‘O’ alongside the emphasis placed on the sight and witness of Christ’s passion:
O garden of Gethsemanee,
My hart was breaketh to thinke on thee,
Ahha, ahha, ahha, that bloodie sweatinge
Ahha, ahha, ahha, of my dear darlinge,
there saw’st, when Peter, James & Jhon,
Opprest with grieffe, did sleepe eche one,
My my mynde runnes most on thee,
Next to the mount of Calvarie,
Whearas I saw my dear sonne dye.
Mary’s narrative in this song strongly suggests female vocal performance and this would have held particular relevance for William Blundell’s daughter Margaret, who later became a nun. It is not unlikely that the next three generations of nuns from the Blundell family also performed the song.Footnote 68
The devotional instruction of children through music was a pedagogic method used by Blundell. In the Great Hodge Podge, the ‘Ballad of the benefit God hath bestowed upon us’ was a memorable song in defence of the seven sacraments, and ended with a catechism listing them.Footnote 69 Later in the manuscript there is also a versification of the Ten Commandments, and both would have been ideal resources to use in teaching children some of the central tenets of the Catholic faith.Footnote 70 Another didactic song from the Great Hodge Podge is ‘O good god thou art my creator’, which would have served as a memorable song with which to instruct children in Catholic prayer.Footnote 71 See supplementary audio file 3. ‘O good god thou art my creator’, Great Hodge Podge, f.135v.
Seven stanzas have been set to a pleasant and easily memorable tune, and invoked the Virgin Mary, the orders of Angels and the saints to ‘helpe a wretche that longes to come to you’. In a final emulation of Christ the singers proclaimed:
I believe as you have believed
I desyre to live as you lived
since I loath which also you loathed,
make mee please that lorde whom youe loved.
Similar simple verses suitable for children’s devotional education are also present in the Lancashire MS, such as ‘A word once said, Adam was made’. The song summarised the life of Christ and each short stanza ended with the question to engage the young listeners: ‘but who can tell me how?’Footnote 72
The importance of making the sign of the cross, which was a topic of contention between Catholics and reformers in England, was also manifested musically in another example of an educational song in the Lancashire MS. Footnote 73 The ‘song of the cross’ justified the use of the gesture within verses calling on the Church fathers, and exclaimed that the whole of Christendom ‘alsoe doth vs charge/and warne both more and lesse/And teach our Children with this signe/them daylie for to blesse’. The ballad rejected contemporary criticisms of both the gesture and the symbol:
Yet some will say, to have the crosse
at all it is not fit
Because therewith Idolatrie
the people doe commit.
The presence of songs for children, combined with the collaboration in all of the music in the Great Hodge Podge, from carols and devotional music, to didactic ballads and polemical music, firmly underscores the shared compilation and use of the manuscripts within Catholic families.
Protest
The most popular genre of devotional song for the Blundell network was one that voiced protest as much as prayer. This is exemplified in ‘O blessed god o saviour sweet’ from the Lancashire MS, which on the surface appears a simple prayer:
O blesed god o saviour sweet
O jesu look on mee
O Christ my kinge refuse me not
though late I come to thee.Footnote 74
Yet it continues with a more confessionally explicit invocation of the saints and martyrs:
O come Angelles; come Archangelles;
come saintes and soules divine;
Come, marters and Confessors eike
your aide to me assigne.
It ends with a spirited assertion of the Catholic faith, which underlines that the singer would do anything for Christ; in an example of the lengths man should go to ‘take up the cross’:
Then I would bouldlie dare to say
that neither racke nor Coard
Nor any tormentes in the world
debarre me from my lord.
The explicitly Catholic association with devotion to Christ’s cross was also used as a means to attack Protestantism, as can be seen in a verse from one of the two unambiguous attacks on Luther preserved in the Great Hodge Podge. Footnote 75 In ‘Luther w[i]th his Bonnie Las’, Blundell has composed a militant, almost march-like melody in order to chastise Luther. See supplementary audio file 4. ‘Luther with his Bonnie Lass’, Great Hodge Podge, f.140.
The seven verses ring with criticisms, often in a mocking personification of Luther’s followers, ‘wee neede no more to fast and praye/our almes deeds wee may leave awaye’, and focused on the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, whilst making slights on Luther’s character and his alleged indiscretions with ‘Bonnie Katie’.Footnote 76 The last line of the stanza also made plain that Luther and his followers were ‘not with Christs crosse well bleste’.
The political songs within the Great Hodge Podge and the Lancashire MS demonstrate that music was fundamental as a form of pious protest. The ‘songe of the puritan’ in the Lancashire MS is a sarcastic rhyme over eight stanzas and includes an attack on the Puritan religious household.Footnote 77 Such a household was synonymous with certain unseemly and hypocritical Puritan women, such as ‘mistris mince-pepin with her mumpinge face’ and ‘Peg that hates musique, yet she loves prick songe’.Footnote 78 Within anti-Catholic polemic, women were repeatedly utilised as a focus of attack by opponents. As Frances Dolan and Arthur Marotti have demonstrated, Catholic women were often associated with deviances such as sexual promiscuity, and portrayed as vulnerable to the influence of wily priests.Footnote 79 This was mirrored in ‘the songe of the puritan’, where the author has used the female radical Protestant as means to criticise the dangers of the reformed faith in general. This trait also featured in the song ‘Alacke Walladay’ in the Great Hodge Podge, which we shall return to shortly, in which Blundell attacked women singing during the services of the Church of England, providing the marginal annotation for the biblical verse that ordered women to remain silent in church: 1 Corinthians 14: 34–35.Footnote 80
The ‘songe of the puritan’ also included reference to the Protestant attack on Christ’s cross, a theme which provided the community with comfort as much as complaint.Footnote 81 As these songs demonstrate, musical expression was an effective way for Catholics across the social spectrum to challenge polemical foes. The other of Blundell’s two explicit attacks on Luther in the Great Hodge Podge, ‘The Invention of the New Gospell’ was to be sung to the extremely popular ballad-tune ‘Shall I wrastle in despayre’.Footnote 82 Blundell adopted the metre of the original ballad from c.1618 ‘A new song for a Young mans opinion, of the difference between good and bad women’, a comical love song that highlighted the foolishness of unrequited love, by using rhyming couplets and a rhetorical question in the second line:
Good and bad women:
Shall I wrestling in dispaire
Dye because a womens faire?
Shall my cheekes looke rale with care,
Cause anothers rosie are.Footnote 83
Invention of the New Gospell
Shall I tell yow by what slighte
the new ghospell came to lighte?
w[hi]ch before nowe did appear
in o[u]r world & wyde hemispheere
By converting the ballad, whilst utilising the same tune, Blundell was adding to the satire of the song. As Christopher Marsh shows, music had a significant impact on verbal effect, and ballad tunes developed associations with particular themes.Footnote 84 By denoting the tune, balladeers were able to provide immediately recognisable markers to how a verse should be received if the text was purposefully satirical, sarcastic or ambiguous. As well as reinforcing the meaning, music might also subvert it and could apply satirical nuances when laid inappropriately over conflicting lyrics.Footnote 85 Blundell embraced this technique by utilising the tune of ‘Shall I wrastle’, the tune for a bawdy love song, and applied this tune to the libel against Luther.
Blundell’s use of melody to manipulate the response of his intended audience is also visible in ‘Alacke Walladay’, which had a mournful tune to complement the lamenting lyrics (see Fig. 3).Footnote 86 It was a sorrowful complaint against the growth of Puritanism in, and its direct impact on, the community of Little Crosby and the wider Catholic Church. ‘Alacke Walladay’ was almost certainly performed within the local community and its lyrics are full of signals that suggested group performance. See supplementary audio file 5. ‘Alacke, Walladay’, Great Hodge Podge, f.135.
Alacke walladay, walladay, walladay,
Alacke & walladay, Lord for thy pitie,
Alacke & walladay, lay wee our mirth away,
Let us go watche & pray in towne & citie!Footnote 87
Lancashire Record Office, DDBL acc 6121, Box 4, f.136. By permission of Lancashire Record Office
Blundell was adopting popular ballad techniques; ‘alacke’ and ‘walladay’ are onomatopoeic words, and were often found in execution-ballads.Footnote 88 The words imitated the act of crying and wailing, and written in plural the song implicitly suggests the chorus of sorrowful voices. The song invited those in earshot to perform by starting with the sound of wailing, ‘alacke, walladay’, and the collective voice pleaded with the implicit sympathetic listeners, who in turn were instructed by the song to participate.
This participation is indicated by the extreme simplicity of the song: ‘Walladay walladay’ is repeated at the end of the opening line of each stanza, and structurally each verse is identical. The first three lines of each of the fifteen stanzas starts with the same repetitive lyrical arrangement, the second line of each verse always ends with the prayer ‘Lord for thy pitie’, and the last line always returns to the location of the attack: ‘in towne & citie’. This allowed those listening to join in easily with the repetitive elements of the song, even if they were unfamiliar with the verse sequence. Moreover, the audience for this song was explicitly rural, not from ‘towne & citie’, as the song geographically mapped the religious and political landscape of Lancashire.Footnote 89 The rhyming structure and the accessible lyrics indicate the wide social appeal of the song. When this was coupled with the tune’s melody, this song would have been transmitted easily between, and understood by, all members of the local community and beyond.
The plural pronoun was also purposefully utilised in ‘You that present take of us some pitie’ in the Great Hodge Podge (see Fig. 2), providing further oral indicators of group performance. The local element in this song was also explicit, as this ‘dittie was made upon the persecution made in Sefton parish especially by Vahon Bishop of Chester, & Nutter parson of Sefton & Deane of Chester’. See supplementary audio file 6. ‘You that present are take of us some pity’, Great Hodge Podge, f.141. Composed c.1597-c.1602.
You that present are take of us some pitie
Who in doleful wyse show our grieffe in songe,
Mourne with us a whyle
You that hear this dittie…
The singers purposefully engaged the audience; ‘You that are present’ emphasised the physical proximity between the singers and listeners and gave them a specific role: to take ‘pitie’ and then to ‘mourne with us’ once they have heard the ‘dittie’.
After the first verse united the singers with the audience, the song then listed the sufferings of the individuals within the community:
Husbands and their wives parted are a sunder
Parents severed are from their children deare
Servants men and mayds forced are a number
Service newe to seeke, God, not they know wheare…
Suckinge babes to crye
Which at home do lye
In the cradle for the pappe
Mothers do bewayle
Lyinge fast in jayle…
This list, as Margaret Sena has highlighted, ‘conveyed a distinct sense of the shared experience’ of the community as the verse was representative of the entire community of Catholics where ‘in Sefton we endure’.Footnote 90 It also provides a description of the social make up and implied performers of the song, which included ‘servants men and mayds’ and indicates potential performance by all members of the household. Moreover, the song itself was an expression against actual events, and a response to specific incidents of persecution in the parish. Between 1597 and 1604 the bishopric of Chester was held by Richard Vaughan (c.1553–1607) who in these years became ‘preoccupied with the suppression of Catholicism’ and wrote repeatedly to Cecil and the government about the problems of recusancy in Lancashire.Footnote 91 John Nutter was dean of Chester from 1589 until his death until 1602, which means that the song was composed in response to events that had occurred between 1597 and 1602. It was a time-bound complaint that reminded future performers of the sufferings previously endured, and added to the historical memory of the community. An indication of the community’s complaints of loss of lands and persecution can be found in the third verse: ‘Houses with our growndes wee must sett to others/And in other roosts seeke our dwellinge place’. The verse ends with a more positive inversion of their suffering: ‘Happie are those losses/Welcome are those crosses/Where us save from endles woes’.
The final stanza, in marked contrast to the other three, was composed in the form of a prayer and leads on from the sentiments ending the previous verse: ‘Jesu by thy grace sweeten so our crosses/That we never faint, falle or cast them downe/Make us well content to sustaine our losses/Whearby thowe dost worke us a blissful crowne’. This stanza employs many of the similar appeals in Blundell’s songs, with an invocation of Jesus for strength in adversity, it also used the language of the cross of Christ which, thus far, seems to be a hallmark of Blundell’s lyrical style. Moreover, whilst the tune itself is mournfully melodic, the message from the community is that they will bear these hardships gladly as the melody soars optimistically with the plea to ‘good Lord Jesus, lay reward on us’.
The tune to ‘Wee Catholikes tormented sore’ in the Great Hodge Podge, is another example of the way Blundell used melody to emphasise lyrics (see Fig. 4).Footnote 92 Unlike the previous two songs, the melody to this ballad is buoyant, almost triumphant, and rather than a lament, the song should be viewed as an outright assault on the Protestant status quo. See supplementary audio file 7. ‘We Catholics tormented sore’, Great Hodge Podge, f.142v.
Wee Catholikes tormented sore
With heresies fowl wailinge tonge
With prisons, tortures, loss of goodes,
Of lande, yea lives, even theeves amonge,
do crave with haste purchased with grieffe,
of thee (sweet Jesu) some relieffe.
Lancashire Record Office, DDBL acc 6121, Box 4, f.142. By permission of Lancashire Record Office
The second stanza was full of determined consolation, and an assertion of Catholic righteousness in the midst of the heresies of Protestantism: ‘We crave Relieffe in this distresse/We seeke some ease of this annoye/yet are wee well content with all…’ The song was a clear recognition of social upheaval and religious fracture, but the melody and the lyrics presented the strength of Catholicism.
The protest songs within the commonplace books are evidence of a politicised community, using music to express complaint and enhance their faith.
Martyrdom
Protest ballads are evidence of the creative ways that English Catholics, and recusants such as Blundell, represented their suffering as members of a persecuted community. Moreover, as Anne Dillon has shown, this was a community where ‘martyrdom and the act of recusancy became reflections of the same image’.Footnote 93 This is particularly explicit in several ballads in the collections that make repeated reference to torture and martyrdom such as ‘Calvary mount is my delight’ in the Lancashire MS.Footnote 94 This song is in the first person and the singer proclaims a fervent desire to witness the place of Christ’s martyrdom:
O that I might a pilgrime go
that sacred mount to see
O that I might some service doe
where Christ died once for me.
The ballad used meditation upon Christ’s crucifixion to make a Protestant attack, this time on Calvin, and made a pointed statement against the pursuivants in England who he believed were hunting Catholic recusants and priests:
Nor all the helpe that they would have
from Calvin’s cursed crue
There would I make my tombe and grave
and never wish for new
Noe pursuiant I would esteeme
nor craftie catchpole feare;
Of gaile nor gailer nothinge deeme,
if I might harboure there.
The ballad’s most haunting political statement, however, is in the fervent desire for martyrdom, as the penultimate verse exemplified:
O London, let my quarters stand
upon thy gates to drye
And let them beare the world in hand
I did for treason dye
Let cro[w]es and kytes my carkas eate
let ravens their portion hau[e],
Least afterwards my frendes intreate
to lay my corpes in grave.
The vivid image evoked here alluded to Psalm 78: 2, ‘Posuerunt morticinia servorum tuourm’, which was exceptionally popular amongst English Catholics during this period: ‘They have given the dead bodies of thy servants to be meat for the fowls of the air: the flesh of thy saints for the beasts of the earth’. As Craig Monson has argued, William Allen must have had this text in mind when he described the executions in his martyrdom narrative, A briefe historie of the glorious martyrdome of xii. reverend priests (1582): ‘yea even their bodies…though hanging on ports, pinnnacles, poles & gibbets, though torne of beasts and birdes: yet rest in peace’.Footnote 95
Print and manuscript martyr narratives such as Allen’s were circulating widely among the laity in England, and certainly in Lancashire, as Thomas Bell testified, the community was particularly fond of Allen’s writing. The networks of countless itinerant priests that Little Crosby played host to over the years also facilitated the transmission of the music, like the songs within the Great Hodge Podge and the Lancashire MS. Blundell was a leading figure in the area and his house became a site for devotion. At Crosby Hall he allocated a plot of land, which became known as the ‘Harkirke’; it served as a consecrated burial ground for the local Catholic laity refused interment in their own parish.Footnote 96 During his lifetime, Blundell arranged the burials there of five priests, seculars and Jesuits, including graduates from the seminaries at Valladolid, Rome and Douai.Footnote 97 James Anderton too was closely associated with Jesuit priests, notably through his cousin Lawrence Anderton who graduated from the English College in Seville in late 1602 or early in 1603.Footnote 98
The ballads attributed to priests and martyrs, preserved in the Lancashire MS and the Great Hodge Podge, further the evidence of musical networks of song exchange and collaboration that surrounded Little Crosby. In the Lancashire MS is a ballad ‘True Christian hart cease to lament’, and on the page is the attribution: ‘Mr Thewlis writ him self to the tune of <blank>’.Footnote 99 ‘Mr Thewlis’ was the Lancashire priest and martyr John Thewlis (c.1568–1616). Blundell also preserved a martyr-ballad in the Great Hodge Podge ‘made by a virtuous & learned priest called Mr Malton…in honour & memorie of one Mr Robert Anderton, preeste & marter’.Footnote 100 Robert Anderton (1560–1586) was a member of the same Anderton family, noted above, who had close associations with the Blundells and the Lancashire MS. Priests were often the only point of contact for Catholics desiring news of their co-religionists and, in line with the popular genre of news-ballads, the ballad proved an appropriate way to spread the news of Anderton’s plight.Footnote 101
Martyr-ballads were written on the deaths of numerous English Catholic priests during this period and were vital expressions of faith. After Thewlis’ execution in 1616, one such was composed in his honour and there is a copy of it in the Lancashire MS.Footnote 102 The ballad contained the standard description of events and his important last words:
thanke you for your loves –
your good will all I see –
But I must take this Cross
that Christ hath lefte for me
It emphasised how he too had died the perfect death:
O christ that suffered death
thy spouse for to defend
lyke constancie till death
and in heaven be our end.
The Lancashire MS contained one final martyr-ballad, ‘the songe of foure preistes that suffered death in Lancaster’. It provided a triumphant account of Catholic defiance in the face of persecution:
In measure of our feight,
reward we beare a-way
Then let vs stand vpright
stronglie in our aray
And never be dismaide
with anie adversitie
Sith Christ, our lord, hath said:
take my Crosse followe mee.
Both of these martyr-ballads used simple rhyming couplets, with four lines to a verse, and significantly, the manuscript indicates that they were sung to the same tune of ‘Daintie come thou to me’, to which we will return shortly. The four priests of Lancaster had been executed between 1600 and 1601 but as John Thewlis was executed in 1616, three years after the death of James Anderton, it seems unlikely that James composed either of the two stylistically similar ballads. Both emphasised the way that the priests had followed the cross of Christ, and it is my contention that these may well have been composed by William Blundell due to the links between the families, and Blundell’s obvious talent for ballad composition as evidenced in the Hodge Podge. Blundell may have composed the ballads as a means of advertising the plight of the executions that he had witnessed personally.Footnote 103 The martyr-ballads circulating within the Blundell network would have functioned as sacred texts for use in the personal and communal devotions of his community. They were bearers of history and continuity, and served as emblems of religious identity and allegiance. Both Blundell and the missionary priests used ballads to broadcast Catholic devotion across the social spectrum, and this mutual strategy demonstrated how Catholics identified closely with the seminarians’ evangelising efforts.
Conversion
Considering the evangelical strategies of missionary priests on the continent, T. Frank Kennedy has argued that part of the Jesuit missionary success lay in their ‘method of borrowing and redefining in very practical ways the very apostolic initiatives of earlier traditions’.Footnote 104 Most notably, it was in their adaptation of the ‘lauda’ tradition, the principal genre of non-liturgical religious song in late medieval Italy, that ‘assumed a life of its own’ after Trent when the priests used music in the teaching of Christian doctrine.Footnote 105 Extremely influential in this regard was Diego Ledesma’s Modo per insegnar of 1573, the first known work of what later became a long list of catechetical manuals that dealt explicitly with singing the catechism.Footnote 106 Although the way that priests used music to evangelise the laity on the continent and in the New World has recently been widely acknowledged by scholars, how this was manifested in England has so far remained unexplored.Footnote 107
In England, priests recognised that ballads were uniquely suited to their purpose and incorporated them into a musical missionary strategy. They were utilised to spread news of martyrs for the faith and to promote Catholicism. That ballads formed a critical part of Catholic evangelism, perhaps even for inter-faith conversion as well as for strengthening the faith of existing Catholics, drew the attention of some Protestants during this period. Lewis Owen denounced an Augustinian friar in the 1628, for making converts among ‘balladmakers’ and ‘players’.Footnote 108 Yet, by familiarising themselves with the ballad-mongers, the mouthpieces for the ears of the community, the priests were consolidating strategy. The priests were learning the tunes of the most popular songs in order to utilise them and disseminate Catholic adaptations to their melodies.
This was a strategy advocated by Ledesma, who in the Modo per insegnar addressed the issue of borrowing tunes from profane repertory and refashioning them with spiritual texts, as well as collecting sacred tunes.Footnote 109 This technique of recycling melodies with different texts is known as ‘contrafactum’, and was prevalent elsewhere in many different forms during the period.Footnote 110 For example, the French composer Simon Goulart had several ‘contrafacta projects’ and ‘appropriated familiar (and worldly) sounds for special spiritual purposes’.Footnote 111 Goulart explained in the preface to his Thresor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus of 1576 how ‘[i]n removing certain words and accommodating them…to the Music… I have rendered these chansons for the most part honest and Christian…’Footnote 112 Using contrafacture as a religio-politic strategy was also observed by Alexander Fisher in his investigation of the popular musical culture of Augsberg in latter half of the sixteenth-century. Protestants attacked the Pope, Emperor and Catholic elements in the city government through contrafacta of well-known secular tunes and Lutheran chorales.Footnote 113 The ‘godlier’ sorts of Protestants in England had also attempted to refashion secular melodies with sacred texts during the earlier years of Elizabeth’s reign, but this had proved ineffective and the practice was abandoned around 1580.Footnote 114 For Catholics however, the technique was firmly embraced and the ballad ‘Jesu come thou to me’ in both the Great Hodge Podge and the Lancashire MS demonstrates the effectiveness of this strategy.Footnote 115 The ballad had clear relevance to Catholics during this period, where the opening line is suggestive of its composition by a priest:
Jesus my loving spouse
eternall deitie
P[er]fect guide of my soule
Way to eternitie
Strengthen me with thy grace
From thee Ile never flee
Let them all say what they will
Jesu come thou to me
This was a direct adaption of the ballad, or ‘new Northern Jigge, called, Daintie come thou to me’, where the opening stanza echoed:
Wilt thou forsake mee thus,
and leave me in misery?
And I gave my hand to thee
onley with thee to die:
Cast no care to thy heart,
from thee I will not flee,
Let them say what they will,
Dainty come thou to me.Footnote 116
Whilst the tune is now lost, the Catholic composer of ‘Jesu come thou to me’ was purposefully adapting a joyful, secular ballad to enhance Catholic devotion.Footnote 117 It was intended to uplift in times of hardship, which might include exile, or for those like the Blundells travel overseas for education. The ballad prayed to Jesus for their safe passage and to strengthen the singer at home:
Some passe through surginge seas
In Daylie jeopdie
Hazarding & life and limme
To bee inricht thereby
In toyle at home therefore
I by possessing thee
Have all they have & more
Jesu come thou to me
The relevance of this ballad to Catholic women, particularly future nuns who were to become Christ’s ‘spouse’, is evident. One woman from the Blundell household was certainly moved by the song, as the final verse was poignantly adapted: ‘Ffor thee my soul was made / nought else conforteth mee shee longes to come to thee’.Footnote 118
In a country where the presence of seminary priests on English soil was a capital offence, music could evangelise through networks of oral communication in places where missionaries were unable to go. By replacing ‘Dainty come thou to me’ with ‘Jesu come thou to me’, the priests provided Catholics with a covert way to practise their faith and enhance their devotions. As the Catholic listeners heard the tune of ‘Dainty come thou to me’ in the marketplace or on the lips of Protestant ballad-singers, the melody would trigger the new subliminal devotional message. For the compiler of the Lancashire MS, the conversion of this association was so effective they ensured two martyr-ballads should also be sung to the tune of ‘Dainty’.
Conclusion
The music in the Great Hodge Podge and the Lancashire MS demonstrates the way that songs bound groups of people together in musical appreciation and performance. Moreover, while this case study was led by evidence from Lancashire during this period, it is important to stress that the Catholic network involved in compiling these miscellanies was not entirely atypical. As I have argued elsewhere, evidence from a Catholic network in Northamptonshire identifies a similarly innovative approach to adapting music for spiritual needs.Footnote 119 Blundell and his network used music to emphasise social and religious bonds, and to frame polemical attacks. They translated trends in popular music to reinforce, or subvert the lyrical meaning of songs: devotional music and songs on suffering were given tunes that echoed tones of consolation, and polemically charged assaults on Protestantism used music that satirised. I have suggested that melody itself might be viewed as a form of spiritual conversion narrative; the transmission of music by missionary priests, and the ballads they composed, indicate hitherto unrecognised modes of Catholic evangelism in England as highlighted by the adaptation of ‘Jesu come thou to me’ from ‘Dainty come thou to me’. Musical culture was therefore vital to the way the post-Reformation English Catholic community constructed their devotional identities in the midst of persecution.Footnote 120
Audio file 1. ‘O gasping grief’, Lancashire Record Office, DDBL, acc 6121, Box 4, Great Hodge Podge (hereafter Great Hodge Podge), f.129v. Words: William Blundell. Music: Thomas Woodcroft.
Audio file 2. ‘In meditation as I sat’, Great Hodge Podge, f.125v.
Audio file 3. ‘O good god thou art my creator’, Great Hodge Podge, f.135v.
Audio file 4. ‘Luther with his Bonnie Lass’, Great Hodge Podge, f.140.
Audio file 5. ‘Alacke, Walladay’, Great Hodge Podge, f.135.
Audio file 6. ‘You that present are take of us some pity’, Great Hodge Podge, f.141. Composed c.1597-c.1602.
Audio file 7. ‘We Catholics tormented sore’, Great Hodge Podge, f.142v.
Supplementary material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/bch.2015.18
