Further thoughts on the Lambeth Choirbook and Jena 9

Further thoughts on the Lambeth Choirbook and Jena 9

I was pleased to see a favourable review of Early English Church Music, 43 (Robert Fayrfax 1:O bone Iesu, ed. Roger Bray) by Roger Bowers in EM, xxxii/3 (Aug 2004), pp.471-3, but would like to offer comment on his views on the provenance of the Lambeth Choirbook (final paragraph):

The evidence available for the provenance of the Lambeth Choirbook, a source of both Mass and Magnificat ['O bone Iesu'], points all but conclusively not to the collegiate church of Arundel but to a totally different organization, the household chapel of the Earl of Arundel; the manuscript account-roll on the back of which the Lambeth scribe also worked (entering the bass part of a Ludford antiphon) relates to properties which belonged not among the endowments of the college but among the estates of the earldom, so that the place in which he would have encountered this archive was not the college but the earl's household.

I established the scribal connection between the Lambeth (and Caius) Choirbooks and the music on the Arundel account roll back in 1993, and provided evidence supporting the provenance of both choirbooks as being Arundel College; the Lambeth book is thought to have been a choirbook of the college, while Caius, probably assembled in Arundel, was a presentation manuscript from Edward Higgons to St Stephen's, Westminster, where Ludford was employed for much of his adult life. From these premises I traced the progress of Lambeth Ms.1 from Arundel College through the library at Nonsuch Palace to, ultimately, Lambeth Palace itself. All was rehearsed in my doctoral thesis (Oxford, 1995), in the pages of this journal (May 1997), and, most recently, in The Arundel Choirbook: London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1 : a facsimile and introduction (Duke of Norfolk: Roxburghe Club, 2003).

I do not wish to repeat the arguments here, but would welcome some words from Dr Bowers in support of his claim that the provenance of Lambeth is 'all but conclusively ... the household chapel of the Earl of Arundel'—a claim for which he offers not a shred of hard evidence. There is no surviving documentation whatsoever that has come down to us about this chapel, nor even any suggestion in contemporary sources that it was a thriving institution in the early 16th century (nor indeed at any other time). I am, however, able to add one further piece of evidence for consideration. The pivotal figure in the Lambeth/Arundel hypothesis is the Master of Arundel College, Edward Higgons (1521-37), whose name appears as the donor of the Caius book. Edward's brother, Humphrey, was at this time a singing-man of Arundel College. While this information does appear in my Early music article, additional information about Humphrey can be found in The Arundel Choirbook (p.16). Humphrey seems to have been a scribe of some distinction; while there is no evidence in the Arundel College account rolls that he copied music (though this might be assumed by the nature of his employ), a book, which still survives in the West Sussex County Record Office, was prepared by him in 1539 for the Arundel town council. The title-page of this book includes Humphrey's inscription 'Ex dono Humffridi Hyggons', in a script not dissimilar to that in the Caius Choirbook 'Ex dono et opere Edwardi Higgons' (showing that Edward Higgons was the patron of that manuscript).

While the 15th-century Arundel account roll was indeed from the estate of the earls of Arundel, it was, nonetheless, considered dispensable enough decades later for its verso to be used to copy out the bass part of one of Ludford's antiphons. It is not difficult to imagine how such a piece of 'waste' might have made its way into the hands of one of the earl's singing-men from his own collegiate chapel at Arundel, whether it originated from Arundel House in London or Arundel Castle (a stone's throw from the college...